Ian Swanson’s “BRB/Total Id Pigs” : One night only, Saturday July 30th @ Re:View Contemporary

Ian Swanson’s one night site-specific performance, BRB/Total Id Pigs, explores the relationship between ordinary objects and the ideas, people, places and events attached to them. Borrowing elements of various ritual paradigms, the performance is designed to remind us how commerce and ephemera shape our reality, asking us to consider how we define ourselves, and how [...]

“Barely There – MOCAD’s mission accomplished” : by Colin Darke

For a college final exam, I worked with a group of students to conceive of and participate in a performance art piece. We clashed on every idea. Our final idea frustrated me, because I thought it was devoid of any conceptual or artistic merit.
The day of the final we were in the [...]

Memoir of A Rebellious Light : Abstract Photography by Aras Karimi at Northend Studios

Ian Swanson : All Visible Objects – Opening Reception

For his multi-media installation “All Visible Objects”, Ian Swanson presents a collection of works informed by his personal experience of home, memory, solitude, fate, and faith. Borrowing liberally from established tropes, he is candid in his seizure of symbolist tradition and openly concedes with an animistic insight into the life of [...]

Chris McGraw – A War A Rose Opening reception at Northend Studios

A War A Rose, objects connected disconnecting- while ideas dissected destroy the united. Get lost in the exploration of the infinite and you will always find 10,000 beating hearts, blooming outward towards peace.
This is Christopher McGraw’s first solo show in Detroit. The artist is exhibiting work about the beauty of war- [...]

Cynthia Greig: Subverting the (un)Conventional – By Gabrielle Pescador

“Subverting the (un)Conventional”, curated by Dick Goody at Oakland University Art Gallery, is a retrospective exhibit of Michigan artist Cynthia Greig’s photography and video works, in which she explores the notion that the photographic image serves as a surrogate, but never a replacement for the actual person, experience or subject being represented.  The works, though [...]

“Christopher Samuels & Ian Swanson @ PCCA” review by Cedric Tai

Chris Samuels and Ian Swanson are back together again, this time at Paint Creek Center for the Arts. The main gallery has quite a few quirks to its architecture, but these two artists pride themselves on being able to activate challenging spaces, and this show was no exception.  It felt like a church, where most [...]

Andrew Thompson, “From Room to Room” review and interview by Michaela Mosher

In grade-school, the bathroom was a dramatic place. Here you separated men from women and adults from children.  Bathroom stalls are still scrawled with the beginning lawlessness of young minds.  The memories of your grade-school hallways are warped and twisted, visually and mentally.  They seem to close in upon you, the stairways smaller; more dark [...]

“Process and Form” review, by Lindsay Jewell

Process and Form, at Marygrove College, had three entrances or passageways that beckoned the viewer further into the gallery space.  The first entrance is to the Liberal Arts Building.  As we entered the building the clock tower chimed, adding to the sense of anticipation.  The show, curated by Nicole Parker and co-curated by Eric Froh, [...]

Beautiful Creatures: An engaging and playful journey – by Gabrielle Pescador

Beautiful Creatures, curated by Billy Hunter and Jeanne Moore Hunter of Mosaic Productions, features regional artists Sandra Cardew, Mary Fortuna, Gwen Joy, Madeleine Barkey, Glenn Barr, Teresa Petersen and Robert Mirek, showing sculpture in a different vein, portraying the figure and organic form with a playful [...]