Review by Christina Hill

Cass Café, August 24 – November 8, 2008

What is the connection between a pretty pink tulip and the international symbol for radiation? An answer is artist Gary Eleinko, now showing work at Cass Café. Here Eleinko is inspired by geopolitical, scientific and environmental concerns, and natural disasters such as tornados and earthquakes. An avid gardener, he depicts hybrid flowers, seed pods and desert landscapes. Yet despite these straight interests, at bottom there is nothing straight about Eleinko or his art. He cares as passionately as Al Gore about the health of the planet, but the ghost of Ricky Ricardo whispers to him while he works and off he goes: Babalou!

Eleinko produces what he calls 3-dimensional paintings. Endlessly inventive, he is not content with oil on canvas, but works with wood, glass, copper, garden hoses or even red twig dogwood, as in “Red Thicket.” Or adds texture with nails as in “Desert Fault,” an earthquake piece. Or rebar in “Core-U.P.” (Existing in a separate category are the modernist assemblages he’s always made.) Eleinko lived in Detroit during the fabled Cass Corridor period of the 1970’s. He was influenced, but as a public school teacher needing to stay in the closet at work, he couldn’t live the dissolute, self-destructive life associated with that era’s art stars. And unlike them he only rarely raided urban garbage piles. Industrious, well-organized and reliably cheerful, Eleinko visits Home Depot and collectibles shops for material. He’s a neat freak, admitting: “I try to be sloppy but I keep cleaning it up.”

The signature X-shapes, which have long structured and stabilized Eleinko’s compositions, reflect his desire to keep his life and work under control. But since retirement he’s allowed more freedom into his work, although pieces representing merging fault lines or wind turbines are still dominated by crossing diagonals. In others, however, something odd happens when structure and freedom vie and rigidity competes with organic growth. “Hemerocallis X #3” and its partner “#1,” done with oil on wood carved with a jigsaw, refer to a type of lily, but Eleinko wrestles with his opposing impulses and the result is mesmerizing. Parts of flowers morph into abstractions of human genitalia, the wood’s edges are sensous, bulb shapes are suggestive and the texture of the wood recalls human skin. There seems a sensation of throbbing and a spark occurring where diagonals meet in the center. Despite all that nothing is overt. That the pieces remain unresolved is what makes them intriguing. Is it really there or just your own dirty thinking?

“Enigma”   2008    108″ x 108″   wood, cassette tapes, vhs tapes, floppy discs, slides, oil, polyurethante, vinyl lettering.

Perhaps the sex comes from Eleinko’s (or the viewer’s) subconscious, but there is no avoiding sexual undertones in his work if one gets intimate with it. His small wall sculpture, “Field,” might represent a greatly magnified patch of grass, but with its triangular shape it is more salaciously a vagina with attached pubic hair of droopy plastic tubing. “Molten Tulip” might be just that, but its swollen shape and pinkish shades suggest the soft, sensitive head of a penis. “Bloom Buds” reads as testicles – maybe. One questions one’s own perversions: why do the central round openings in pieces such as “Cane-Yin/Yang Cat. 69,” made of painted carpet with jaggedly cut edges and representing a double hurricane, suggest bodily orifices? Well, hello! Eleinko has included that “69” in the title. To paraphrase the response of a studio boss, from Preston Sturges’s great 1941 film “Sullivan’s Travels,” to his star director’s plea to forsake profitable comedies and make a serious film: “Ok, but only if there’s a little sex.”

Eleinko no doubt has serious concerns about the planet. But as with the sex, he cannot repress his desire to entertain. Whatever the subject, he livens things up by adding color, rhythm, sensuality, beauty and humor. A piece such as “Fleur Dangereuse,” warning of death by radiation, is made from wooden shims painted red and yellow to mimic the petals of a huge, round flower. “Tropical Hybrid,” obstensively a leaf, riffs like a saxophone. Flowers look like marimbas and drum sticks. All the tropical botanical pieces installed on a single wall would make a fabulous, kitschy backdrop for a Latin band. Plus there is Eleinko’s sentimental side. Corridor artist Gordy Newton, it seems safe to say, would not have placed the mate to a broken, ceramic bird, stuck forelornly within the colorful riot of stuff in “Aftermath 1,” above it in the café’s rafters to keep watch on his beloved.

“Tropical Hybrid” 2005 80″ x 26″ oil, canvas, wood

Eleinko is also capable of being fully focused and resolutely straightforward. In his ambitiously mammoth piece, “Enigma,” made of cassette tapes, VHS tapes, floppy discs and slides, he includes all outmoded forms of communication. Foregoing whimsy and disregarding his playful inclinations, Eleinko has produced a masterful, tightly-designed abstract work in which he contrasts the “past future” to the “future past.” The shiny metal of the discs provide a repetitive gleam; bold color combinations march in strict geometric order; all is precise and compelling. In “Suichaun 2008,” inspired by the Chinese earthquake, Eleinko is also able to fuse form and subject without distractions. A very complex, colorful work, it allows us to feel the ground cracking, the mountains crumbling, buildings collapsing and fear the fate of fragile children and delicate vegetation. It is beautiful and frightening at the same time.

“Suichaun 2008″ 2008 - 23″ x 30″ inkjet transfer, spray paint, watercolor, gouache, pencil

Eleinko’s strengths are his boundless creativity, his willingness to work hard, his ceaseless curiosity about the world, his genuine interest in human interaction, and his childlike enthusiasm for filling his work with his love of life. Strong color, surprising forms and materials and humorous interpretations of subject matter flow naturally into his art. Art which is refreshing because it is never cynical but genuinely optimistic. And the fact that he has trouble walking a straight line, because he can’t always quiet the competing impulses in his head that point him in different directions, is fortuitous for the viewer. We get the fun of puzzling over the results.

By Nicole Rupersburg

The last weekend of summer brought us the first DIY Street Fair in Ferndale, held in conjunction with the Funky Ferndale Art Show. This Do-It-Yourself-mentality street fair was designed to highlight some of the region’s top talents in art, music, food and brew. Participants from all over the metro Detroit area came out to the fair city of Ferndale and brought their various wares—Michigan-made microbrews, made-on-the-spot art, and indie rock from Detroit’s garage darlings.

I decided to head out to the DIY Street Fair Sunday afternoon, when, conveniently for me, four of my favorite Detroit bands were playing back-to-back. Granted, that would be four out of about 30, but…well, it was still exciting. And it was even more exciting that, as opposed to other (larger) festivals, there was only one music stage—so I didn’t have to play that frantic game of running back and forth between four different stages, never catching more than 15 minutes’ worth of any one band’s set so as to maximize my (free) festival-going experience.

DIY kept it a little simpler for me. One stage, a mere 50 yards from the Go Comedy! Theatre-sponsored beer garden (thank you for that, whoever made that decision), and an onslaught of great bands, thanks to the well-connected festival organizers including the manager of the Hard Lessons and co-partner in the Emory and the WAB, Chris Johnston; co-founder of Handmade Detroit and organizer of the annual Zombie Dance Party, Carey Gustafson; Detroit Derby Girl Tina Iulianelli; Aaron Timlin of the CAID; Marketing and Promotions Manager of the Majestic Theatre Complex, Phil Childers; Heather Carmona, Executive Director of the Woodward Avenue Action Association; and more local business owners and artists.

Between sets from the Pop Project, the Hard Lessons, the Muggs, and Deastro, I checked out the arts vendors and found that many had taken the spirit of “DIY” quite literally. There were the music poster designers (the Silent Giants) who screenprinting new pieces in their tent; the T-shirt designers who offered to silkscreen T’s (or jeans, or knapsacks) for patrons on-the-spot; there was a tent in which a purse designer was making purses out of orange construction-zone plastic; a henna tattoo tent; in addition to artists from Handmade Detroit, the brother/sister team of City Bird, the Detroit Derby Girls, Robert Stanzler’s new T-shirt company Detroit Manufacturing Group, a record store, a record label, and a variety of jewelry, clothing, and other items one would expect to see at an art festival.

But aside from the stellar music lineup, the real standout at the DIY Street Fair which sets it apart from the variety of other festivals we see in the metro Detroit area every summer was the beer garden. 14 different Michigan-based producers of classic brews, microbrews, specialty and seasonal brews, and mead from the new B. Nektar Meadery in Ferndale (yes, mead, like what knights used to drink). The majority of other festivals fail to highlight these hand-crafted, indigenous products which are one of the major contributions of Michigan’s rich agricultural traditions. “CityFest” and “Arts, Beats, and Eats” nail all aspects of local food, music, and art…but the beverages are sadly lacking, leaving us with choices between Budweiser, Miller, and Heineken. This is a sad oversight by other festival organizers, and I was thrilled to see how the folks behind DIY paid attention to these very valuable products in Michigan’s increasing homegrown pride.

But back to the bands. They absolutely killed it. This was the Hard Lessons’ final metro Detroit-area show with drummer “The Anvil,” so they were especially energetic. But all the bands I was able to catch put on a high-energy, brew-fueled, fun rock show, and in this somewhat more intimate environment the crowd fed off the energy the bands were pouring out. We weren’t so much at a big corporate-sponsored festival as we were in a small venue to support bands we all know and love.

There are a lot of festivals in this area every summer, and they all have their own positive points. But in my opinion, this festival—the last of its kind for the year held on the last day of summer—beat all. And as a first-time affair, that is beyond impressive. Whatever minor kinks they might have to work out for next year (less congested space by the food vendors, more food vendors), they are nothing in comparison to the monumental accomplishment that was the first-EVER DIY Street Fair. Congratulations on a job well done, and I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Review by Christina Hill

Andrea Eis and Lynn Galbreath
At The Gallery, Marygrove College,
September 14-October 12, 2008

If the recent work of photographer, Andrea Eis, and painter, Lynn Galbreath, exhibits a common attitude it is detachment: Backs are resolutely turned, heads cropped out, disconcerting voids inserted, texts chopped, faces blurred, cryptic comments and glances unexplained. With Galbreath there is absence of language, with Eis a deluge of language – mostly ancient Greek. But mute or loquacious, the work plugs in to the contemporary experience of inundation by streams of visuals. The viewer is in deep, yet still able to catch glimpses of images and snippets of sound.

“I like the idea that you can’t get the whole story,” says Eis of her digitally layered photographs, while Galbreath, listing confusion as one of her goals, reserves the right to rearrange at any time her modular painted panels into different (equally disconcerting) narratives. If you expect meaning tied up as a gift, get over it. Postmodern attitudes –such as incoherence, enigma, appropriation and fragmentation – permeate the artworld’s zeitgeist. While both artists, colleagues at Oakland University, intend for their work to explore the human condition, especially the position of women, the styles they’ve chosen mimic more dispassionate forms of communication, so it takes work (which will be rewarded) to extract meaningful messages.

Certainly the women differ. Eis contentedly mines an interest in the Classics, while Galbreath prefers charging into new territory. For Eis the photographic medium is merely a tool to use in what she considers “the act of translating,” or reinterpreting icons of ancient history; they fascinate her because they’ve transcended time and place. Galbreath lives and (literally) breathes paint application, calling herself “an advocate of medium.” She has created portraits of her students and mixed them with abstract imagery and interpretations of Old Masters. Newly excited about using oil paint and glazes, her love of painting and her subject matter are impossibly intertwined. The artists have in common thinking big: some of Eis’s archival ink-jet prints are 4 x 6 feet, while Galbreath has connected panels to reach 50 feet in length.

It was one-hundred year old books in ancient Greek, discovered in an Athens library, that inspired Eis’s sabbatical work. Her “Marginalia” pieces highlight penciled notes made in the books’ margins. Eis thoughtfully layers portions of these pages, with their English comments – such as “where do the depths come in?” and “yearn after” – over or under photos of ancient Greek sculpture to create her own poetic genre. Some photos she’s printed on sheer fabric. The heightened texture of the paper when superimposed against the smooth marble creates painterly effects; the velvety-black, visually-arresting Greek letters animate the surfaces. The compositions can be frenetic with visual effects. In “Questioning the Classics,” Eis zooms in on parts of imperfect sculptures, close up on missing noses, gouges and blemishes, and thereby frustrates our desire to experience traditional beauty. Hers is a new translation.

Eis places us somewhere between a durably material yesterday and a digitally immaterial present; texts crawl, reading as temporal. While Eis has warmed the tones in some pieces, because the ancient language doesn’t communicate to most of us, they retain a Marshall McLuhan cool. “When you are on the phone or the air, you have no body,” he said. Like images on iPhones and texts on Blackberrys, Eis’ creations appear fleeting. But her conundrums linger: Greek text is placed over the muscular bicep of a god, as is connected English comment: “often used of getting what one wants,” the title of the piece. Eis submits it’s an archaic phrase, difficult to translate. And she leaves it at that for us to ponder over.

Lynn Galbreath creates narrative portraiture using modular components ranging in number. “I can’t keep them keep from growing,” she says. The multiples reference Nam June Paik’s video installations (they don’t blink on and off, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they did). Her subjects are caught off-guard, in mid-sentence and mid-task, wearing inscrutable facial expressions – total blurriness at times – and body postures suggesting imminent movements. Combined at Galbreath’s will, these components seem like stacks of out-of-order film stills or randomized computer slide shows. They are contemporary anti-narratives. Like Jean Luc Godard in his postmodern films, Galbreath sporadically adds elements of eye-catching consumer design: specifically Pop target shapes which connect the characters but also radiate their psychological energy out into the ether.

Galbreath’s monumental “Don’t I Care” always includes three separate panels for the words of its title, but otherwise its components are changeable in order and number. “Don’t” incorporates scenes from iconic versions of “Rape of the Sabine Women,” including moving details of hands laid imploringly on the foreheads of young female victims to provide life. Another panel portrays the hands of a busy modern woman clutching her purse and cell phone. Hair styles also figure prominently, from an elderly man in a powdered wig, to a young woman’s messy braid, to the bowl-cut of a young boy, to a replica of the slick black hair of Goya’s famous “3rd of May” figure. We see only the backs of many of them. A scene from early modernism also barges in – a group of distorted heads (one pig-like) with Edvard Munch-flavored alienation. Galbreath’s muscular brushwork with its vibrant baroque energy comes close to unifying this disparate subject matter, but in the end, the title, with its odd inversion of words, sums it up: What exactly? You decide.

The exhibition has an abundance of ambiguity and also irony: Carefully thought-through compositional elements appear random; warm, appealing colors, meant to convey human emotion and timeless life lessons do that, but also function as more of the cool, unemotional (over)flow of contemporary visual information. Visitors foreheads furrow. The ironies, though, are what give Eis’s and Galbreath’s artwork, particularly when shown together, greater strength and more impact. The ambiguities keep you off balance and interested.

Russell Industrial Center

Centrifugal Force, a show by recent Cranbrook Academy graduates centered around the relationship of physics and art, is open to the public for one more Saturday at the Russell Industrial Center. The show is curated by fellow Cranbrook graduate Madeline Stillwell and explores the various ways in which physics and art intersect.

Each work of art involves the use of different forces in some way, from the deflated “Haikusarus” of Emily Lyman’s intricate ballpoint pen renderings to the counterbalanced structures in Abbie Miller’s “Odd Sympathy”. The use of forces adds something to the narration of the works of art; for example, Lyman’s drawings use the form of the deflated cartoon dinosaur character to elicit pity, while her tedious, elegant cross-hatching elevates the character. The codependent support system in Miller’s sculptures almost looks umbilical— if the mother and child were entirely zipped up in black vinyl, that is.

Photographs from Masa Yukimoto’s outdoor cantilever bridge installation, “The Revenge of Tubism”, flank the walls of the space, offering two very different views of the structure. One side of the room shows the whole large, solid concrete bridge, made of a rigid geometry of modular cement cubes, while magnified detail shots of its soft, hand-sewn cushioning are shown on the other— seemingly one object is alchemically divided into two.

The interior of the Russell affords the works of art the space to sprawl and interact with their surroundings in surprising ways. Mara Baker’s “Even The Kitchen Sink”, for instance, uses siphons to draw neon yellow and green liquids through a looping series of tubes along the ceiling, slowly trickling onto the floor, which is paint-stained from previous shows. Baker’s creation is based off of similar machines she made that make their own artwork by splattering on paper, except in this instance the machine makes the floor of the room its canvas.

Last is Katie Hinton’s “Heinrich Heine Strasse, Berlin”, an installation piece that was started in her studio but modified to integrate more wholly with its new space at the Russell. It is at once disorienting, yet places the viewer firmly by reacting to the peculiarities of the space. A tube protruding from the wall entangles in a conglomeration that spans both two and three-dimensions, and includes a strange plastic ball, strips of vinyl tape, a glass panel, photographs of other artwork, and a painted stripe that leads the viewer around a corner, across the floor and up a beam where it dwindles off and mixes with the ceiling pipes of the building.

Centrifugal Force is open this Saturday from 1-5 PM and by appointment until June 21st at the Detroit Industrial Projects gallery at the Russell Industrial Center. The gallery is loacated on the 3rd floor of the second building. For more information, call (248) 250-0330.

Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center
Through May 30, 2008
Review by Marvin Anderson

In the collection of Wayne State University’s Administration Building is a large color drawing that is eloquent in line; radiant in color; and a dynamic burst of form. It is a powerful experience when encountered. It is the work of the artist Georg Vihos.

Presently, a retrospective showing of Vihos’s art can be viewed in a Michigan Masters Series exhibit at the BBAC. His work has always expressed its time, and so history suits it well. A selection of early drawings, circa 1960s and 1970s, present the art of a master draughtsman. A small but spatially expansive image of the Uffizi Gallery in Italy has a beautiful, articulate line quality that is basic to his art. In a group of studies of expressive heads titled “Anthropy I,” charcoal is handled with great sensibility. Importantly they show the existential angst of post-World War II fear of nuclear warfare, McCarthyism, and later tragedies of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Vietnam.

The 1970 portrait “Archangel” breaks away from this psychological stress with both a more abstract linear rendering and a more distant reference to spirituality and emotion. Spiritual Flesh™, the title of the exhibit, is about a deep humanity however and Vihos’s pieces from the eighties forward take on a new direction, related to the archangel, but a more spirited use of line and color and symbolic imagery.

In a myth cited in the exhibit brochure, there is a tale of an illuminated feather and bird that, in short, symbolize the search for the spiritual through art. This symbolic feather and bird readily fit Vihos’ ardent use of line and color and the spiritually symbolic archangel. The feather and bird are found in many forms in recent works, and the gestural quality of his abstractions find more dramatic use in creating meaning. Witness the power of line in the painting “Blue Jay,” and the agitated gestural markings that trace the perilous winged flight of the floundering figure in “Icarus.”

Photographic images and collage become major components of more current works. “Spirit Wings,” 2004, uses dense panels of linear wings collaged on each side of a photo of a female figure to create a spiritual aura. Writhing lines surround a collaged dead bird in “War Bird Killed in Action,” a timely reference to the pain of warfare.

Unique technical methods of vacuum-mounting archival photographs have allowed Vihos to create large wall murals. Plates of about 11”x 14” size hang side by side to make 8’x 10’ and larger pieces. Two such murals dominate the exhibition. They do so not just in size but also in creative complexity and visual power.

“Lovers” is depicted by a large archival photograph of two winged figures that soar through a clearing in a threatening sky. They are accompanied by birds and butterflies, but surrounded by treacherous slashes of blue and grey; some of which are muted by golden washes. This is truly the mythic and empathetic expression of the spirituality of flesh…the beauty of human love.

The other mural, titled “Captain Art and Lady Muse in the Rose Garden Touching a Feather,” contains its title in a line of handwritten text at its bottom edge. A large photo image of two winged figures float horizontally amidst a dynamic array of vigorously drawn wing forms, feather-lines and sky-blue areas. Words found within all this visual activity read “YOU CANNOT OBSERVE SOMETHING WITHOUT CHANGING IN THE PROCESS”.

The exhibition is indeed a transforming experience. Vihos and the BBAC have done the community a great service in providing it.

Contributor Marvin Anderson is Professor Emeritus, Eastern Michigan University, where he taught art since 1963. He also served on the Board of Directors and Exhibition Committee, of Detroit Focus Gallery, from 1994-1998. With a bachelor of fine arts from Wayne State and an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Anderson has exhibited extensively around the region, including at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

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