The Tour:
One thing that is perhaps the most exciting and under the radar are the amount of local artists willing to share intimate experiences of art making in Detroit. One particular vantage point was a diorama broken down by time period called “Plantation House” by Jother Woods. It’s in the show ‘Homeland’ curated by Rebecca Mazzei at George N’Namdi. Jother was there himself giving tours of the expansive model almost the entire day, never seeming to tire of guiding people over highways through gates and into a fictional mansion of a family of four and near the back towards the home he grew up in in Lousiana. His diagrams behind the reception desk feel like utopian plans similar to Buckminster Fuller, but the total community he has created around this one house consciously includes quite a bit of private security like something out of the book Fordlandia. With over 30 years of work on the piece he says his work is never finished and if given more room in one direction or another we’d see even more of his philosophy of the future or the past. I found many interesting unintentional ties amongst the art-ified recycled objects that made up this piece. There is a non-descript building in the thick of the woods towards the future side with the words ‘Powerhouse’ written on the roof. I can’t help but think of Mitch and Gina’s Powerhouse Project. This ain’t your dad’s train set in the basement, the work has references also to gated communities and corporations. He says it all started with a green semi-truck where he painted onto it a fake company, Joseph Pointer Sackall Corporation. His next plans include getting figures made to bring it alive.

Pouring it all in:
Ian Swanson has brought Re:View Contemporary to a new level. His piece BRB/Total Id Pigs followed a week after an exclusive party celebrating fifteen artists to be represented exclusively by Re:View Contemporary for the next two years. The completely packed space was split between objects waiting to be activated and an area where people were standing. The room glowed of red and blue from like some kind of Arte Povera Dan Flavin. Some of the standing area was taken up by a table (a broken glass mirror door slightly off the ground) littered with objects that he requested people bring with the vague comment that it won’t be returned. I’ll stop there because I actually like Mike Prezzato’s account of the evening better than I could sum it up:

“Last night at the Re:View gallery, i found myself witness to some form of neo-witchcraft that was probably taking place in whatever strange dimension Tron was filmed in. Attendants to Ian Swanson’s one night, site specific performance, BRB/Total Id Pigs, were asked to bring an item of some personal significance to offer up to him. In relieving themselves of said items to the neon altar, the mass of witnesses unknowingly had given the high priest a means to concoct modern day voodoo, hopefully leaving a sense of confusion for the uninitiated. I have a feeling some did a well enough job of confusing themselves the moment they laid their eyes on the hyper-ritualistic dance club-death cult atmosphere.

The lo-fi drum machine clicking along in the cavernous room set a cold tone, as Swanson stirred away at a cauldron of macabre liquids. His two black-clad helper witches pushed the ceremony forward by a reading of words and by magic circle, seemingly created with a mop. Numbers, symbols, rituals and a sense of summoning the unknown are as relevant in magical acts, as well to art. BRB, or Banishing Ritual Beta, was no exception.

A friend standing next to me suggested that perhaps performances like this should be more accessible to newcomers. Well, they shouldn’t. Like the true meaning of the word occult, it may be a great irony to suggest accessibility to such pagan art techniques. If for some reason you don’t know the meaning of that word, go find out yourself because if i told you, then that in itself would be the ultimate irony.”

He spent a good five minutes loudly cracking molds onto the concrete in order to pop out a recently cured and hot plastic object. Each crack made me much more aware of the mess he was making all over the gallery and my thoughts immediately went to Simone DeSousa, the gallery director.

At his gallery talk he was also aware of how successful the process had been. “They look like what they are. Receptacles of collective energy from individual objects. So now they’re like, supercharged.”
His performance was an introduction of sorts to all of the alternative scenes that make Detroit such an interesting place to make art. And all of the best parts of his practice are self taught. Pulling from the raw ingenuity of the noise scene, punk rock’s ability to break down the distance between artist and audience he fashions himself somewhere between a weirdo persona and a philosopher where no object can be without deep personal meaning.

Inaugural Iron Pour:
As much as many people describe Detroit’s art scene as the next Berlin, we might as well also be making comparisons to Burning Man. The camaraderie that was formed over the making of Matthew Barney’s performance KHU has continued and now it’s forming into Carbon Arts. Where the production of art is normally only seen by art students themselves, Carbon Arts has taken the idea of pouring as a performance. The best part may be its model of education where industrial practices become accessible, especially as their fundraiser created a really inexpensive way to get something you carved turned into hard iron for as little as ten dollars! The money raised from this will go into moving the original site of the large cupolas (furnaces) that were used in the KHU performance (the largest modular foundry in existence) to practically anywhere and make cast sculptures on site.

A photo of the small cupola being fired courtesy of Timo Ohler

A sunrise:
Within a 24 hour period there was another performance, except this time it took place at a barn/parking lot in Royal Oak at 5 am. The collaboration between Ed Brown, Kate Levant and Mike Smith was advertised only a day before and a surprisingly large group of people, many CCS students showed up. Two speakers were setup facing the barn and a recording was played of all the sounds exactly 24 hours before, a Friday morning at 5 am. The sound’s waves were inverted so that there was the possibility that it may even cancel out new sounds if they happened to perfectly match from the previous days recording. It became a constant game of ‘Is that you or was that in the recording?’ It was dark but we were all given a cardboard disc holding a mask made from a green light gel and something stretchy like underwear elastic. We were asked to put them on narrowing our sight to something similar to Whistler’s Nocturne paintings. The brightest light was streaming through Butter Project’s windows. Strangely it wasn’t that hard to see around us but we couldn’t actually see each others eyes. The world was completely green and our eyes still tried to make out any other color. Mostly people talked to each other, some sat down and peered into the sky as it lightened into a less dark green, people fanned themselves with the cardboard disc like any other church goer.

All of a sudden the piece became a collective moment. Some saw the plane first, most heard it in the recording, someone bursted out “You’ve got to be kidding me!” What had started as an experience of almost still frames accompanied by a disconnected soundtrack our eyes and ears locked onto a low flying small commercial plane in the sky, perfectly on cue, roaring from a distance. What makes all three of these artists so brilliant is the way that they make ordinary objects and interactions sincere and profound. The piece was titled Reverse Monk Sunrise Service and we found ourselves more keenly present. This piece however seemed to be their most romantic as we were held in an hour and forty-five minutes of pure anticipation, especially when the world revealed itself as a pink nostalgic photograph once we took the green filters off of our faces.

Other Performances:
There have been much more noteworthy performances around Detroit that should be mentioned too, God Club’s ‘Everything We Always Wanted’ that was on July 8th & 9th was a tribute/farce/fantasy that had titles to their lectures such as: “Archiving Lesbian Failure”, “2010 Still Banging!” and “How to be a Conceptual Artist”. What makes them all so interesting at this point is that many of the people doing these performances are either in a stage of beginning or leaving, there is a precedence that these acts will mark this time and place, and none of them feel remotely contrived.

Drawings by Vagner Whitehead

Until July 16, 2011, the Detroit Artists Market presents Unmentionables: The Underwear Show.
Jack Summers and Gary Eleinko curated the show, and they used this platform to challenge established artists. They asked artists to create work based on this theme, so it was not a traditional call for entry process. Jack told me that because they “asked very established artists, [they] knew [the artists] would step up to the plate and ‘deliver’…which they did.”

Deborah Kashdan’s series of works

The show’s theme creates a specific risk: artists would deliver immature work. It’s a theme that can inspire imagery that ranges from the erotic to the hamper. But the majority of the artists used the theme to challenge themselves as artists to create mature work.

My favorite piece is Topher Crowder’s Yelo Kiteh. In this piece, Crowder creates a strong, stylized image of an erotic, provocative African American woman etched on orange Plexiglas. He created the woman with belt buckles, wires, telephones, and other objects. She is seductive, and she conjures references of blaxploitation film and R. Crumb illustrations. Yet the medium and execution is purely original and purely Crowder.

I also enjoyed Claudia Shepard’s contribution to the show, Longing. It is a beautifully executed oil painting of negligee hung in a closet. The image initially strikes you as simply an attractive and delicate silk negligee. You then notice that the negligee appears torn. Then you notice that the silk imagery is contrasted harshly with a background stained with a dark blood red. The execution, composition, and titling of this work intrigues me.

There was one piece that I found in poor taste because the artist used the theme to create a piece about sexualizing adolescents. The piece is by Julie Lambert and titled My Little Pony L.H.O.O.Q. The piece consists of several panties (which appear to range in size from an adult to a child) repeated over a toy “my little pony” doll. To dispel any question about the artist’s intent, she titles her work with “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which is a reference to a work by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp titled one of his ready-mades, a postcard image of Mona Lisa with a mustache, “L.H.O.O.Q.” as a pun based on it sounding like “she has a hot ass” when read aloud in French.

That piece aside, this is a strong show that brings together an eclectic group of artists that work in various media and with widely different and intriguing points of view.

“Twisted” made out of lead by Mark Esse

The Detroit Artists Market is open from 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays. It is located at 4719 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201, just down from The Detroit Institute of Arts. Its website is www.detroitartistsmarket.org.

(Photos courtesy of Cedric Tai)

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 fine arts building’s basement. I only remember one other performance. One group displayed a very detailed, beautiful drawing. Then each group member took a turn and erased the drawing (I only later discovered this concept mirrored a conceptual piece by Robert Rauschenberg where he erased a William de Kooning drawing). I remember vaguely the other groups who had elaborate videos and performances.

My group turned the lights off, and then we took turns and walked across the floor- – the floor was dirty with sand and the room was cavernous. We all had different cadences—someone kicked a plastic ball – and at the end we all walked together in a muffled shifting through the room. In his class critique, the professor described our work as monotonous, frustrating, and borderline pointless. This, in his viewpoint, showed that we understood contemporary art and we received an A.

We deserved a D. Actually, in this professor’s contemporary art philosophy, we deserved an A. In my view, we deserved a D — maybe a C.

I believe that there are two sides to conceptual art (at least for me to write about the subject, it is easier if I can simplify conceptual art into two categories ). On one side, there are artists that demand that you contemplate deep issues through an unfamiliar, creative new language – their language to tell, or better yet, open up a dialogue of questions about difficult concepts. On the other side, there are artists that demand that you acquiesce to them knowing better. They are smarter than you. They think deeper than you. They are Artists, and you are not. This group irritates me since they often rehash ideas that other artists explored at the conceptual art’s birth. An idea can only be original once. So these artists bask in self-importance while they skim the top of substantive issues, which results in an insult to the viewer and to their predecessors in this field.

In my view, Barely There is great because you get to see both sides. In fact, I believe that you can get an immersive education in conceptual art if you attend Barely There.

My review of the show breaks down the pieces showcased by Barely There into three categories. First, I discuss one of the important historical pieces. Second, I discuss one piece that frustrates me, and which adds to the discussion regarding the purpose of conceptual art and the duty of the artist who puts forward conceptual art. Third and finally, I discuss two pieces that inspire me and sparked a conversation in my head about what is good about conceptual art. Because this show hits all three of these categories, I think it is a brilliant example of MOCAD’s mission to educate the public.

Art History

The show’s cornerstone piece is a pivotal video in conceptual art, the World Question Center, 1969. James Lee Byars created this piece. His performance work shows the value in conceptual art. It can force us to ask questions and add substance to what may be the seemingly mundane of the everyday. Namely, all of us have questions, none of us have sufficient answers, and this highlights the beauty of communal interaction. The piece consists of a group of artists, which includes Byars, who sat at a call-in center. Prior to the live broadcast on Belgian T.V., various intellectuals were asked to call into the broadcast with an important question. And that was it. Byars merely acknowledged the questions—Byers offered no answers.

Art Misery

There is one piece that is merely a blue pen without a cap positioned at an angle by a red pen cap. It is by Wilfredo Prieto and titled Infidelity. While it invokes an initial laugh at its title’s implication, this piece falls flat as an original conceptual piece when compared with the other pieces in the show. In my mind, this piece fails because it echoes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp entered a urinal into a show and titled the urinal Fountain. Through this act, Duchamp expressed his belief that the artist defines the art and not the viewer. He selected the urinal, he positioned it at a different angle, he created a new context for the object, and through this process he highlighted the value of the artist’s intellectual analysis of an object (his “readymades”) in contrast to an artist’s physical ability to create a piece of art. How does Infidelity add to this important piece?

I enjoy conceptual art, but the artist needs to challenge himself or herself before I can appreciate his or her particular idea. As noted, these discussions and these types of questions are only original once.

Art Ecstasy

There are two pieces that highlight particularly deep thought by extraordinarily unique and creative voices. The first is a remarkable multiple faceted piece that the artist presents in several stages. The artist was inspired by his thoughts on his father’s death. The artist is Pablo Helguera and the piece is titled Endingness, 2005. The artist provides an essay on memory, death, and his art practice. He also provides a movable art sculpture, which consists of geometrical shapes. The shapes are made of wax and framed with wood and the artist carved his essay into the wax. You can see the artist’s hand at work, and you can see an artist that is open emotionally to let viewers experience the artist’s process as the artist explores difficult questions. The final element is an orchestral score that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed at MOCAD.

The second piece was Love Lettering, 2002, by the brother and sister art team Rivane and Sergio Neuenschwander. Rivane is the sister artist, and her brother Sergio is a neuroscientist. This is a beautifully quiet piece. This collaboration illustrates what is great about conceptual art. It engrosses viewers through a single-channel video where color saturated fish swim through the screen with pieces of a love letter attached to their tails. The words are taken out of context, which highlights fleeting, fragmented memories of love and lost. You get the tragic sense of someone that tries to grasp a beautiful memory, yet is unable to grasp it fully. The piece also has an organic, industrial soundtrack, which accompanies the piece without competing with the gentle and quiet ephemeral strength of the main imagery of the piece.

There are other pieces, but these are the ones that resonated with me the most. The piece that frustrated me the most also sparked the most discussions after I saw the show a second time. Does that fact validate it? Please see the show and let me know your thoughts.

-Colin Darke

Walking into “The Quiet Life,” a solo exhibition of Canadian artist David R. Harper’s multimedia work that opened last week at The Butcher’s Daughter Gallery in Ferndale, feels like entering the home of an eccentric 19th Century biology enthusiast. The color is predominantly white, not cold, antiseptic white, but the white of god-light, the kind you imagine existing in parlors where Enlightenment values and ideas volleyed back and forth, and even the teapots and doilies seemed to be working toward something greater than themselves.

Harper’s chosen media in “The Quiet Life” are embroidery, taxidermy, and ceramics; genteel and requiring great delicacy of hand to accomplish, painstakingly slow in their execution. The result is a collection of two and three dimensional still-lives, as Harper designates them. He pointed out to me that taxidermy is a method of “stilling life” for us to examine and gain understanding. It’s a human practice with a long and complex history often unexamined by artists who use it in their work for novel or ironic reasons. Stuffed animals function as trophies, specimens of study and home décor. The very oddity of this practice finds a home in Harper’s work. The Megalos, one of Harper’s three dimensional still-lives, arranges a group of dainty ceramic urns around the sprawling form of a snow-white sloth-like creature (really made from cowhide). Delicately hued stuffed birds are placed atop stacks of thick books with seemingly random lists of words printed on their covers in The Bblio I-IV. Though the stuffed animals are, by definition, morbid, there is nothing grim or depressing about them. Rather, these assemblages have a light touch about them, a weird mixture of scientific and spiritual reverence respects the life these forms once housed, and what the remains still have to teach us. It’s an approach to death that doesn’t exist anymore, from back when people lived much closer to it in their daily lives, when hair lockets and other memento mori weren’t creepy. It’s new light shed on a frame of mind that might help us today.

Harper’s embroidered pieces carry the same sense of enlightened death. When Sickness Came, We Learned A Lot About Ourselves and Equal Amounts About One Another, a white skull covered in decorative swirls of blues from the heart of a glacier and whose title might best sum up what Harper is exploring, is the best example of his light touch with death. Using media with long traditions of refined, domestic exploration of the greater mysteries, he ushers a little pre-modern light into this neon-seared world.

(All of the photos are courtesy of the Butcher’s Daughter)

I attended a panel discussion during Art X Detroit last month, “Art of the Commons: A Discussion About Contemporary Art in Detroit.” Led by the learned and astute Vince Carducci, the panel consisted of a group of young artists who are using different tools to ostensibly bring art to the people, and I say ostensibly because I came away uncertain as to what their true intentions are, or what the outcome of their efforts will be. The focus of “Art of the Commons” was civic art, work that explores the space between public and private, and ideally creates a sense of community in so doing. The work of Design 99, represented at the discussion by Mitch Cope is certainly civic, and admirably so, though it may not be art. Aside from their work in interior design providing good services to people in all income brackets (their price for an in-store consultation is Ninety-nine cents a minute) they have a bunch of projects going in some of Detroit’s most blighted neighborhoods. We were shown slides of “The Powerhouse,” a fixer upper bought by Design 99 and redone to be powered entirely “off the grid” with solar panels and wind turbines. It’s accessorized by a little vehicle painted in cheery pastel stripes to match the house and called “The Neighborhood Machine.” Another community art project offered by Design 99 to the citizens of Brightmoor is “The Talking Fence,” a regular chain-link number equipped with a microphone into which residents are encouraged to tell their stories. Design 99 threw a barbeque for the neighborhood to expand upon this theme, of which many pictures were shown. Cope explained that folks were encouraged to share their stories there too, but the tone of the whole thing was brought down because not many people had positive stories to tell. Likewise, an indoor hockey game in an abandoned building set up by panelist Scott Hocking was ruined by the discovery of a dead body on the premises. These are telling reminders of the chasm that lies between the commons and the young intellectuals trying to bring art to them; we see beauty in the ugliness of this Rustbelt landscape we have grown up viewing as picturesque and grand in its distance. The people who have lived their lives up to their asses in it (and as much a part of it, to outsider’s eyes, as the shattered glass and rusted car hulks) view it in a less whimsical light.

People like me who grew up in Detroit in relative comfort in decent neighborhoods gazed, awestruck, at these modern ruins and waste-strewn wild places while scooting safely past them in our parent’s cars. Our experience of the city is different; our fierce love for it is contingent on us not having to live in its worst parts. I believe that very strongly. That’s a mis-communication that, in the re-infiltration of artists and young professionals into urban Detroit with the conscious intent of resurrecting it, must be navigated carefully.

That’s why I wasn’t quite convinced by Scott Hocking’s defense of his urban art works, many of which are beautiful and need no defense. Hocking is sort of an Andy Goldsworthy of urban decay, setting up fragile structures in abandoned factories and photographing them. For his piece “Ziggurat,” he used loose bricks found in the old Packard Plant to build a massive, stepped pyramid that stands mute and majestic in that cavernous, silent space. His descriptions of growing up in Detroit, of seeing a rare, ruinous beauty in the crumbling landscape, and spending his life sculpting and glorifying that beauty resonated with me, and made me squirm. Then I heard the term “ruin porn” for the first time and understood why I ‘d been squirming. An audience member accused Hocking of dealing in same, pointing out that the aesthetic that is making Detroit and the Rustbelt famous is the very detritus of economic and cultural ruin that has poisoned our city for generations. The poor people who live with these ruins are disadvantaged by them, and we artists come in and play with what essentially are the tools of their torture, attempting to weave magic into them. From that angle, it’s a pretty reprehensible thing to do. And yet- Detroit is beautiful. It’s a lush jungle, a battered blue collar temple, and an outlaw’s paradise. There’s a largeness, a freedom that prevails here; the good with the bad. Ruins seem to be both our main draw and our most abundant resource. Why not use them to reflect our experience? Then again, maybe Design 99 has the right idea, and the best thing to do is board up and tear down the old places and make new, better ones.

In his intro to the panel discussion, Vince Carducci spoke of the “re-enchantment” of Detroit through the efforts of Design 99, Scott Hocking, Detroit Soup, and others. I feel what he’s talking about, but I’m not sure things such as urban decay and the chaos and violence underneath deserve to be re-enchanted. I’ve often heard it said that art doesn’t change the world, it only changes itself, disrupting society in small ways. The young folks of Design 99 are attempting to change the world through art, to make it relevant in the day to day of people’s lives. Artists like Scott Hocking and Tyree Guyton are determined to make the world understand Detroit’s merit as a dark, but wonderful place with it’s own unique culture. I wonder; is there any historical precedent for this? A community of creative people united in making art to save a city? Can art change the world? If it can, Detroit is the place for it. After all, all we’ve got now  is our talent- and our ruins.

- Clara DeGalan

Cranbrook Thesis Show 2011

A ‘test’ within Corina Reynold’s art piece ”The IAE” it asked me, how long did you spend looking at each piece? I darkened the dot that said 2 – 5 seconds. It makes me wonder, did I really see the art?
Aaron Jones (Architecture)

Jessica Calek (Architecture)

Katie Wynne (Sculpture)

Jason Carter (Painting)

A view of the Main Gallery

Erin Sweeny (Photography)

Brittney Pool (3D Design)

The South Gallery

Aim Sirampuj (2D Design)

James Carrillo (Photography)

Jessica Edgar (Ceramics)

Susie Ellis (Painting)

James Payne (Sculpture)

Lauren Cherry (Ceramics)

Rustin McCann

Dan Roberts (Sculpture)

Dan Roberts (Sculpture)

Edgar Mosa (Metalsmithing)

Ye Liu (Architecture)

Erin Yuasa (Ceramic)

Kyle Ford (Painting)

Yingquing Liu (Metalsmithing)

Younghee Hong (Metalsmithing)

Richard Hesketh (Ceramics)

Richard Hesketh (Ceramics)

Ryan Clark (Print Media)

Lower Gallery

Juan Torres – Architecture

Tony Garbarini – Print Media

30th Annual Michigan Fine Arts Competition at the BBAC

Perusing in a circle at the 30th Annual Michigan Fine Arts Competition at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center I saw the names of artists who also had submitted work to a show I had just juried at the Scarab Club. I thought to myself about how amazing that for someone with a high level of craft or skill they have plenty of venues to ensure that their work will be seen.
Stephen Palmer – ”Sawtooth”

Gilda Snowden – ”Flora Urbana 2”

William Dwyer – ”Seven of Ten”

Robert B. Park – ”The Game-Changer and the Cosmological Constant”

Luralee Kiesel – ”Weeping Willow #8”

John Albert Murphy – ”Stars”

Kirk Roda

K. W. Bell – ”Calligraffiti II”

(from left to right) Laura Juncker, Darcel Deneau, Liz Davis, Douglas LaFerle

Charles Torner – ”A Sculpture in the Forest”

Some work in their retail area

Sandy Rice – Brother

Nolan Simon & Blue Cheer

Nolan Simon’s work at the CAVE was completely re-appropriated and added to by Mike Smith’s College for Creative Studies class. When I asked Dylan Spaysky, one of the people that run the gallery, what did the original show look like before all the students came in and moved things around, he easily responded with, ”What differences?”.

Chris Riddell @ 3322 Lawley

The last mindf*ck happened while walking to Chris Riddell’s show at 3322 Lawley just down from Mitch and Gina and not that far from Scott Hocking’s show Tartarus. After seeing the Heidelburg-esque arrangement of found objects although more sinister, I couldn’t stop looking at houses wondering if certain homes were the homes of outsider artists or if that was just how someone thought about decorating their home…




See what I mean? This house in the same neighborhood totally looks like a work of art.

Think of it as a Performance! (My favorite quote of the week, thanks to Ben Hernandez.)

This weekend has even more to offer for the art-gallery-hopper. There is a film festival, Scrummage at the Russell Industrial Center tonight (Cinco De Mayo), Ian Swanson’s show opens at Starkweather, Lemberg and Hilberry have work by hometown favorites and there is even more CCS shenanigans happening at Art Effect in Eastern Market. Oh yeah, and there’s a a Garage Sessions at 9227 Mason, Sparklefest at NorthEnd Studios and the Detroit Arts Summit all on Saturday. Overwhelmed yet?

The relocated Burton Theater for Scrummage Moving Pictures

(The space is on the third floor of building 1A West. On weekdays, you enter from Clay (the usual entrance), go just past the first building and turn right into the alley (with an overpass on top), which takes you back toward 75 and to a parking lot with a huge mural of a robot tiger. If you don’t see a humungous robot tiger, keep looking, or you’re in the wrong parking lot. The entrance is to the right of a white security box, with a wooden staircase. Just go up to the third floor, it’s the first studio on you’re left. We’ll put signs up and everything.)

Rich Branstrom - Deer

Rick Kolb – Harbor Town

Rich Branstrom – Duck

In producing a voyage to the unique beauty of Up North, the Detroit Artists Market’s latest show falls short. Perhaps because of its limited scope (a showcase of northern Michigan artists), co-curators John F. Korachis and Rebecca Glotfelty failed to produce (as promised) a coherent artistic statement that reflects the charm of northern Michigan. And I am okay with that.

John and Rebecca showcased 20 northern Michigan artists whose work ranges from delicate, detail rich watercolor paintings to comical, readymade-esque sculptures. The show starts and ends with pieces that have the strongest points of view. Namely, the first few paintings (the paintings by Meredith Krell and Rick Kolb) have vivid colors (straight out of the tube primary colors) that depict postcard scenes of northern Michigan. The last few items are sculptures of a dog, a duck, and a deer’s head that Douglas Racich crafted out of found objects (the dog’s head is a boot). While an entire show of crafted sculptures would not resonate with me, I think that these pieces are a nice stopping point in the show. The show has quiet moments, funny moments, and confusing moments – like all worthwhile voyages should have.

One piece that I particularly liked was Steve Toornman’s Lake News. This is a serene painting that captures a stolen moment on a magnificent lake. I am glad that the show did not cling on to easily recognizable images from northern Michigan, but I am equally glad that the show does highlight some of the great imagery of northern Michigan. (Fun Fact: two of the most successful pieces (in my view) were painted by two artists who are married—Meredith Krell and Steve Toornman from Charlevoix.)

Douglas Racich – Lightning Rod

Pat Custer Denison – Bird of Many Legends

Please make a point to journey to the Northern Lights, which closes on Friday, May 27, 2011. DAM is open from 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays, and is located at 4719 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201, www.detroitartistsmarket.org.

- Colin Darke

Caleb Charland's photographs. Photo by Chris Lee

“Unhooked from Time” has a lot of work in a wide gamut of media, but it really gets rolling with its photos and films. I was a little disappointed in the non-photographic 2D work on offer. Jennilie Brewster’s collage paintings, Bomb and Nuclear have intriguing components, where gaps in the dense crosshatching and slashes dug in the paint look like worm tunnels, and in her rusty, post-apocalyptic palette. The other paintings in the show don’t lack for magical ideas (Renata Palubinskas’s two petite oils, Girl and Bird and Desecration 2 have the ring of tempera illuminations from a Fifteenth Century book of hours, but feel a little stiff and dusty because of that), but none of them really came together for me. There were two fine, solemn drawings by Carolyn Reed Barritt that channeled time through nostalgia and loss. Each drawing depicts a worn out doll looming out of deep shadow like poignant, friendly ghosts.

Carolyn Reed Barritt's pencil drawings. Photo by Chris Lee

The flower-patterned hide of the button-eyed Floral Horse blends with the patterned wallpaper in the background as if fading into the backlogs of memory; one hoof wears a sad little shoe which almost made me cry.  “Unhooked from Time” is rich with good drawings; Nicole Gordon and Brent Fogt’s large drawings on mylar, Asylum and Oak respectively, deserve to be lingered over for their elaborate, butter-smooth surfaces.

I love art made with computer circuit boards. There’s something that’s just cool about them, with their technicolor green hue out of a Diebenkorn landscape and their eerie resemblance to city grids- the grids that make our macro-cosmic grids go. A wall-sized, back lit installation of circuit boards by Charles Jevremovic reads like a winking mini-city, and speaks of the technological detritus that mounts behind us as we march toward ever finer, tinier circuits.

It seems no show is complete nowadays without the obligatory huge pile of garbage installation that maybe sticks around because it’s relevant in the rust belt (unfortunately), but “Unhooked from Time’s” offering, by Andrew Thompson and Scotty Wagner, Seen and Unseen, has something extra- peek into the yellow viewing portal that’s almost hidden in its bulky side to find out what.

Andrew Thompson and Scotty Wagner's installation with a hidden surprise. Photos by Chris Lee (left) and Cynthia Greig (right)

Photography and film may be the media best suited to dialog on the nature of time, since time is such a factor in their production. Ginny Makis’s ink jet prints of satellite images of a city with blue highlighted trails look like torturous treasure maps, and feel like time lost scurrying from here to there. Time flexes its muscles in lapse, flash and decay in Caleb Charland’s amazing photographs, which mix formal beauty with technical magic tricks to create stunning, cerebral pictures- most magically of all- entirely photo shop-free. His green, gold and silver shots of moldy packaging elevate fungus to regal status. A time-lapse shot of a lit match careening through the air in a perfect arc to alight upon a waiting candle on the floor is sleight of hand broken down to its second by second process, reflected in the painstaking technical process of photographing it. My favorite of Charland’s pictures, Silhouette with Matches, carves an empty body shape into a shower of golden sparks against a grassy landscape, like a  quick snapshot of a forest god, taken just as he disappears.

“Unhooked from Time” has a bunch of fun films on display, all of which combine humor and profundity with varying results. The standout is The Slowly Project, by a Milan and New York based artist named Liuba. It follows the artist, dressed in a gauzy green frock, walking with exaggerated slowness through urban areas in Italy and New York. The soundtrack includes the reactions of people on the street who see her, and find her bemusing, charming, and irritating by turns. To me, Liuba is spellbinding. Her anachronistic, dreamy loveliness and graceful, slow motion movements speak not only on our world’s frantic pace but on what opens up when something occurs to break that pace, causing people to stop, look, and awaken to new possibilities.

Still frame from Liuba's video piece ''The Slowly Project''. Photo by Chris Lee

Unhooked from Time runs April 6-May 15
Their Spring-Summer Gallery Hours: Tue-Sat, noon-9:00pm, Sun, noon-4:00

So we asked the same 3 questions to 4 different people: A local artist (Andrew Thompson), someone new and curious about Detroit (Tunde Wey), a teacher at Wayne State University (Mame Jackson) and a student (Crystal Palmer). Feel free to add your own thoughts to the comments section at the bottom!

What was your favorite element of Art X Detroit? (Or what panels, performances or pieces stuck out to you?)

Frank Pahl performs live accompanied by guest musicians, including Joel Peterson, amidst his kinetic sound installation, ”The Rube Goldberg Variations” @ The Scarab Club

Tunde Wey:

“I saw Monica Blaire’s performance and she was wonderful. I especially liked the diversity in the audience. People who I would normally not imagine hanging out together were all present having a good time.”

Mame Jackson:

“Much sticks in my mind – Marcus Belgrave at the Charles Wright Museum, Invincible in the Planetarium, Frank Pahl and his array of bells and gongs at the historic Scarab Club, Tyree Guyton’s installation of shoes on Edmond Street, Shawn Nethercot moderating panel of emerging young artists at MOCAD, Lynn Crawford and Steve Hughes reading new works at Leopold’s, Chido Johnson’s wire push cars, etc. etc. – but perhaps most exciting to me was the energy of the community itself, the excitement and responsiveness of the truly supportive Detroit community, that came out in such numbers that events were filled to overflowing.”

Andrew Thompson:

“Favorite Moment of Art X was being locked out of the Science Center with two of the Kresge winners, Cedric Tai and Sengor Reid, with about a dozen other people just hanging out enjoying the evening air in the parking lot with everyone else who couldn’t get into Invicible’s showcase performance.”

Crystal Palmer:

“So, my favorite part was Steve Hughes reading “Stupor”. I loved that everyone was jammed in Leopold’s new location and how Steve was able to capture everyone’s attention reading the hilarious stories from his brilliant book. I personally was crying because I was laughing so hard in response to a story of a guy shitting himself in bed next to his girlfriend. Amazing.
Next, Valeria Montes was pretty much the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. In the ambiance of the Rivera murals, wonderfully talented singers and guitarist… Valeria was spectacular!!”

With Kresge in mind, what advice would you give them for the next go around?

”Jit” techniques taught by dancer/choreographer Haleem “Stringz” Ar-Rasheed of Hardcore Detroit hip hop dance company @ George N’Namdi

Mame Jackson:

I loved the big yellow X’s – made midtown festive!  The schedule was a bit too tight with some events ending just as others began at distant venues – making it impossible to get from one to another on time.  How about adding a day (or more) to the program and lengthening breaks between events – perhaps even extended Art X Detroit over a month instead of a weekend – eg., Art X Detroit: a Month of Sundays.
Also, how about artist-designed, painted shuttle buses (perhaps with big yellow X’s as well) circulating around the city during Art X providing free transportation from the neighborhoods to midtown (maybe even with the added enticement of having an entertainer on board – eg., a musician, magician, juggler, ventriloquist, rap artist, etc) to extend the venue beyond midtown and bring the experience of the arts to the whole city.

Andrew Thompson:

“Assume that the people you are marketing to (an audience beyond just the artists’ posses) will actually show up and schedule in bigger venues, without any of the events overlapping. Or if you do need to overlap schedules go with the Frank Paul approach at the Scarab club with repeat performances at the same time same place for multiple days. I wanted to go to everything and I couldn’t, so ended up prioritizing my friends’ event vs seeing something new (which seems to be counter to the spirit of the event)”

Crystal Palmer:

“Advice, even though the Science Center was a creative choice to host a talk, I don’t think it was worth the hassle of walking through a crazy busy zoo on a saturday afternoon. Susan Campbell’s talk was great and it was fantastic to get intimate with her project, but it was really distracting when all the families were exiting the auditorium since they were expecting some sort of like 3D underwater show or something like that… It bothered me that they didn’t want to engage in something that was new and different to them…”

Tunde Wey:

“Keep doing it!”

Is there anything that excites you that you believe will continue past Art X Detroit?

(From left to right) Senghor Reid, Rachel Harkai, and Invincible define and discuss intersections between the community and the artist during ”Nine Artists Respond: Who are the Artists in Your Neighborhood and What is the Role of the Artist in the 21st Century?” @ The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Andrew Thompson:

“I believe both events helped put Midtown and New Center on the map for a lot of future audiences as a real arts district. A place that events can happen after 5pm on a week night. We need more of that.”

Tunde Wey:

“The conversations and connections made between people at both events, I believe will continue. Hopefully these exchanges will form the basis of something tangible and engaging…. ripples of conversation and action.”

Crystal Palmer:

“Lastly, I hope that the series of events will continue art appreciation past the Detroit club. Sometimes seeing all the same people at the same locations time after time makes the city and scene seem small and insular. I love that non-art people were enjoying all the free programming and able to experience culture without pretension.”

Mame Jackson:

What excited me most was the magical sense of community that developed during Art X.  People really talked to one another – the art and the artists and Kresge’s hospitality provided a stimulation and a context for discussion.  I hope we have energy, resources, and imagination to sustain and enlarge this discussion. A specific example of this, Cedric, is that I finally met you through Art-X, and I intend to keep in touch!

Kevin Tobin @ North End Studios from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.

This video is now private, please message Kevin Tobin for the password! In the meantime, please enjoy Gilda’s video of the same night.