Some exhibitions begin with a residency; this one began with a cold attic full of old fishing lures. Four California-based painters — Wyatt Hersey, Melissa Lakey, Esther Pearl Watson and Anna Valdez — spent five days at Camp Wandawega in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, working through winter in the camp's lodges, kitchens and bunkhouses. For artists from balmy California, it was a first taste of a proper Midwestern winter: frozen lakes, sledding, snowballs and temperatures down to 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

The trip was the third iteration of Winter Camp, a program run by The Jaunt's Jeroen Smeets that sends artists on week-long journeys to far-flung destinations. This edition was co-organized with Joy Machine, the Chicago space presenting the resulting exhibition. The property itself is more than a century old: it first served as a Prohibition-era speakeasy and brothel, was converted into a summer camp by the Latvian Catholic church, and today operates as a retreat steeped in sleepaway-camp Americana.

The artists were quickly drawn to a cozy attic storage room called the Department of Objects — nicknamed The Green Room, or "the warmest space we can reasonably be expected to work" — a lending library of vintage magazines, fishing lures, plaid textiles, dusty books, patches and generations of camp ephemera. That treasure trove gave the exhibition its name and supplied motifs that run through the new work. Hersey contributes "View from Wandawega Lodge," a 2026 gouache on birch panel; Valdez shows "Assorted Vintage Lures"; Lakey offers "Vintage Radios," painted in acrylic on wood panel; Watson's "Girl Scout Graffiti" depicts figures outside a log cabin in winter.

"The Department of Objects" opens at Joy Machine in Chicago with a reception on October 23 from 6 to 8 p.m., plus a collector preview, with all four artists in attendance. The show sits in a long American tradition of art made inside borrowed rooms — here, the borrowed room is a century of other people's summers, condensed into paintings of the objects they left behind.