Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Laura Magnusson, “Blue” @ Flint Institute of Arts

Laura Magnusson, Blue, 2019

Water is a paradoxical thing, both sustaining and dangerous; it’s our origin, our literal lifeblood, yet it has a hundred ways of eroding our foundations and pulling us under. Canadian interdisciplinary artist, University of Michigan grad, and trained scuba diver Laura Magnusson considers water her collaborator: supportive, receptive, restrictive, indifferent.” Her eleven-minute silent video Blue (2019), on view at the Flint Institute of Arts through December 30, is set entirely underwater — 70 feet below the surface of the Caribbean, in fact, off the shore of the Mexican island of Cozumel. Down there, the horizon disappears into an azure haze that hangs over the cyan-tinted sand of the nearly featureless sea floor. It’s an abstract environment, an open stage for a performance that Magnusson describes as a voyage through the afterlife of sexual violence” and “the impact statement (she) was never permitted to give before a court of law.”

The video opens on Magnusson crouched on the seabed, wearing a winter parka with a fur-trimmed hood and matching snow boots that seem less incongruous than one might imagine in this alien environment. Magnusson begins to trudge through the course sand, leaning into the water’s resistance, carrying in one hand the large tank that’s providing her with air, and in the other a model of a corrugated metal building complete with pine trees and a porch. In the doorway stands a figure in black underwear, a miniature version of the artist.

Laura Magnusson, Blue, 2019

First, Magnusson tries to bury the model building (which looks to be broken, a corner or fragment rather than a complete structure), scooping sand up over it. She makes a few attempts to leap upward toward the surface, but sinks back down each time, descending to the sea floor in slow motion. She wrestles to remove the parka before appearing half-buried in the sand, still wearing it. Eventually we see the coat fluttering free through the water like a diaphanous sea creature. Magnusson crouches again, nude now but for underpants and a diver’s weight belt, encircled by the arc of her air tube.

Magnusson alternates between standing, crouching, and self-burial until the cycle is interrupted by a shot of the artist wearing a pained expression above the scuba regulator stuck in her mouth. The hood of the parka is pulled up over her head, and she’s framed by a black void as silverfish dart around her. Crouching again, she screams silently into the sea, bubbles streaming from her mouth. In a close-up, we see her fingers attempting to pry the miniature figure of herself from out of the doorway of the model structure. It feels like a breakthrough, but it’s followed by a literal reversal: the film starts moving backward. Air retreats into Magnusson’s mouth and she retraces her steps as if pushed back by the current. In the end, the broken building remains planted in the sand, and the black void returns, minus Magnusson, with only the silvery-blue fish remaining. The video loops and begins again.

Laura Magnusson, Blue, 2019

 

Speaking in a YouTube video on Blue, Magnusson reveals some of the thinking behind the piece. The model is based on the inn in Manitoba where Magnusson was assaulted; its small scale allows her to better grapple with the place, though she fails to completely bury it or wrest her miniature self from its doorway. The multi-layered construction of the handmade parka, which the artist describes as clamshell-like,” was inspired by the shell of Hafrún,” a living clam discovered in Iceland in 2006 that was 507 years old — when it was killed by scientists who pried it open to determine its age. If the coat is protective, why shed it, unless it’s a hindrance as well? Why does Magnusson bury herself? Some sea creatures cloak themselves in sand as camouflage; does the artist want to protect herself, anchor herself, or disappear? Magnusson explains that her actions in Blue were not scripted, but developed during the performance and organized in the editing process. This is not a tidy, linear narrative of someone whos conquered adversity, with a satisfying resolution and a prescription for a clear path forward; its a metaphorical document of a continuing journey toward healing, one Magnusson calls circuitous,” “wandering” and, appropriately, fluid.

 

Laura Magnusson, “Blue” on display at the  Flint Institute of Arts through December, 30, 2023.

Larry Zdeb @ Color / Ink Studio

Larry Zdeb: Dream Journals – Mixed Media Assemblages at the Color|Ink Studio

“Dream Journals,” a solo show of mixed media assemblages by Troy artist Larry Zdeb, installation and reception at Color|Ink Studio, Dec. 10, 2023.

Larry Zdeb is a connoisseur of other people’s memories and a gifted poet of the found object.  He collects anonymous vintage photographs, broken bits of machinery and unidentifiable detritus, fashioning them into cryptic but emotionally resonant assemblages that puzzle and intrigue. Culled from rich troves of innumerable estate sales, musty basements and obscure garages in Detroit and environs over the last 20 years, 40 of his three-dimensional constructs, entitled “Dream Journals,” will populate the walls of Color|Ink Studio in Hazel Park until December 20, 2023.

Assemblage, the 3-d cousin of 2-d collage, has been a dominant genre in artists’ practice since the early 20th century. The constructivists, followed by cubists and surrealists–and thousands of artists from then to now–have found the idiosyncratic combination of industrially produced images and objects, handmade tchotchkes and cryptic images into compelling artworks an ideal mode for expressing the dislocations and absurdities of modern life.   Picasso and Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, and Robert Rauschenberg have all had their say, but Zdeb finds he is most influenced by the surrealist boxes of Joseph Cornell as well as the work of a lesser-known near-contemporary Janice Lowry (1946-2009).

Elsinore, Larry Zdeb, 2015, wood box with photograph in a steel frame, automotive identification number, adding machine button and copper tube.

Zdeb was born in Highland Park, Michigan, and discovered his vocation for art as a draftee during the Vietnam War era. He was trained and served as an Air Force cartographer, and upon his discharge studied art at Oakland Community College. He began creating his signature assemblages in 2003 and has since participated in over a hundred exhibitions from California to New York City.

The artworks in “Dream Journals” are drawn from unlovely constituent parts, often technical or industrial in nature—a funnel, a cloudy lens, obscure bits of obsolete technical equipment. He traffics only in the broken and discarded, never breaking an intact object, always intent upon reclaiming the discarded.  His color palette runs to shades of gray, olive drab and khaki reminiscent of his military experience.  These aggregations of neglected and lost mementos, while carefully crafted, maintain an air of the contingent. They are formally simple but emotionally complex, nostalgic but unsentimental.

Harris, Larry Zdeb, 2012, 8” x 9″ wood drawer, photograph under engineering acetate, clock spring, brass stencil, fasteners & telescope part.

His assemblage Harris illustrates Zdeb at his most enigmatic. A photo of a formally dressed young man is mounted inside a small wooden box. He gazes out at the viewer seriously, but his expression is obscured by the shadow of a sheet metal label placed above, and a thin curl of steel in front of his face emphasizes his anonymity.  Outside the box, an attached, cloudy lens implies that perhaps some memories can’t be retrieved.

Wednesday, Larry Zdeb, 2010, 14” x 24″ wood frame, 1943 license plate tab, cardboard box with the pictures, newspaper engraver mat, painted tin, feed sack, wire, adding machine part, sand toy, steel part with switch for battery-powered illumination.

In the work Wednesday, the image of a comely young woman in an improbable pose raises more questions than it answers. Next to her, a headline promises: “Spectacle Opens at Auditorium Tonight.” Is she the spectacle? Once again, shadow plays an important part in the composition, the ultramarine funnel casting a heart-shaped penumbra on the forms below. The specificity of the day and date underline–but don’t explain–the mystery of the artwork’s meaning.

Les Preludes, Larry Zdeb, 2023, 12” x 19″ wood, violin part with license plate number, brass mesh, fasteners, hinge, photograph under painted orange plastic, leather glove cut fingers, player piano part with wires, changeable alarm clock numbers, newspaper engraver mat, paper & cloth.

Zdeb offers a small collection of performance-related imagery in Les Preludes: a photograph of a dancer–her prettiness marred by a grubby translucent orange overlay–part of a violin, embossed advertisements, numbers (seat numbers?) The constituent parts are arranged in a row like a sentence or a line from a poem.  In one of his more recent assemblages, the artist breaks out of his usual preferred box format into a line of connected images.

Parasol, 2022, Larry Zdeb, 12” x 18”, painted toy parasol, architectural wood parts, piano part with cloth, antique photograph, wood, copper, buttons, adding machine button.

Parasol, similarly, offers a kind of triptych: a modified cross on the left connects to the center image of a young woman in a hat, surrounded by an elaborate, improvised wooden frame and followed on the right by an open canvas sunshade. The rough textures and faded, abraded colors of the combined elements undermine their intrinsic sweetness.

Zdeb’s artworks might all be said to be about memory and its elusive nature. He returns again and again to photographic images of unidentified subjects, often in costume or in uniform, as if they are reaching out from the past to present themselves to a modern audience. His components form implied narratives that hint at, but then withhold their meanings.

The Clown, Larry Zdeb, 2022, 13” x 14, wood box with steel chambers, each chamber has rolled engineering acetate pieces with rolling wood balls inside, player piano parts with wires, cast iron vent and photograph under refrigerator door plastic.

Each composition in “Dream Journals” is its own conundrum. Zeb is careful not to reveal too much—that would be telling. Instead, his basketball players and ballerinas, his musicians and mannequins, suggest half-remembered visions and barely recalled reminiscences of past friends, past events, and past lives.   These imperfectly recalled scenarios illuminate a larger theme—that no matter how hard we try to retain our memories, they are constantly in the process of slipping away.

Dream Journals: Mixed Media Assemblages by Larry Zdeb at the Color|Ink Studio through December 20, 2023.

 

Marianna Olague and Patrick Ethen @ David Klein Gallery

An installation shot of Marianna Olague: People You Know at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery, up through Dec. 23. Running simultaneously: Patrick Ethen: Selected Light Works. (All photos courtesy David Klein Gallery)

Need to get out of the cold? Two shows blazing with light and color in downtown Detroit at the David Klein Gallery should help warm you up and capture your attention at the same time – Marianna Olague: People You Know, and the electronic Patrick Ethen: Selected Light Works. Both shows are up through Dec. 23.

People You Know is the latest in a series of deeply convincing portraits that Olague has produced of family and friends in her hometown of El Paso, Texas, where she’s based. Olague’s gifted on many levels – her technical mastery is striking – but perhaps rarest of all is her enviable skill at finding and replicating the astonishing beauty of the mundane.

Marianna Olague, A Home of Our Own, Oil on canvas, 60 x 58 inches, 2023.

Olague, who got her  MFA in painting at Cranbrook in 2019 and a drawing degree at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she now teaches, creates transfixing portraits rendered in a palette she calls “over-saturated and improbable.” Or call it an intensified version of the way life looks under the pounding Rio Grande sun. In A Home of Our Own, Olague plays with a range of orange hues, from the saffron on the concrete blocks to the tanned skin of the young man whom Olague catches in an unguarded moment, gaze locked on his beloved. There’s a luminosity to A Home of Our Own, visible not just in the impossibly warm orange of that concrete wall, but in the trust and mutual dependence that radiate off the handsome young couple.

While the U.S.-Mexican border itself isn’t represented in these compositions, “it remains,” as Olague writes in her artist’s statement, “an omnipotent presence both on and off the canvas.” Case in point: she notes that the young couple in A Home of Our Own commute back and forth daily between El Paso and Juarez, Mexico.

Marianna Olague, H.O.R.S.E., Oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches, 2023

Most of the eight portraits here are static, the subject usually seated, generally looking at the viewer. Only H.O.R.S.E. packs kinetic energy, and in this case, the shadow’s the thing – floating beneath the soaring athlete caught mid-leap on the basketball court. Not only does the shadow itself, almost comic in its simplicity, suggest movement, but it gives us a different perspective on the young person in motion – almost like a camera shot from another angle – that makes the whole composition suddenly feel rather 3-D.

Strong colors organize H.O.R.S.E. as much as with A Home of Our Own, but the centerpiece of the portrait – the youngster, seen from behind, jumping and aiming for the hoop – is rendered in muted tones against dull concrete. Balancing those are the piercing green of a tree arched over a storefront, the powerful blue sky, and the orange glow of both basketball and the player’s high-top sneakers.

By contrast, the show-stopper “Onyx” is a dazzling color study in deep blues and yellows starring a sweet-looking black dog seated in front of a kitchen table and chairs, all of which Olague’s simplified until outlines dissolve into blocks of strong color. Shadows in a range of electric blues dominate the frame, scissored here and there by linear strips of sharp sunlight crossing the floor. As color studies go, it’s a knock-out, and does pretty well in the why-we-like-dogs department, too.

Marianna Olague, Onyx, Oil on canvas, 56 x 40 inches, 2023

“Quickening” is a tribute to the artist’s sister, who was eight months pregnant at the time of the painting. Seated on a deck outdoors in late sunset light, Olague’s framed the young woman’s forthright, determined face with a long, pink robe beneath and mottled tones of blue and green forest above and beyond. There’s an engaging verticality at work – in the upright, yellow slats of the railing behind the young woman, and the shadows from their mates on the opposite side that land, distorted into curves, on the woman’s waist and hips.

Marianna Olague, Quickening, 72 x 50 inches, 2023.

In the gallery at the back of David Klein, don’t miss the small solo show – Patrick Ethen: Selected Light Works. Ethen’s light designs are a treat, and have been featured in Detroit’s iconic Movement Electronic Music Festival, Murals at the Market, as well as Detroit Design Week. The works on display here are all small light objects that could go on a household wall, but some of his outdoor installations can be large and immersive. Exploiting both digital and analog technology, Ethen, who’s an architecturally trained artist and designer, gives his practice a New Age spin by calling it a sort of “pseudo-spiritual techno-futurism.” His process of assembling his constructions has been likened to weaving, albeit with circuitry and electronics.

Patrick Ethen, Valence Shell, Sculptural light installation, 19 ¾  x 19 ¾  x  4 ¾ inches, 2023.

 Marianna Olague: People You Know and Patrick Ethen: Selected Light Works will both be up at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery through December 2o23.

 

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris @ DIA

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris,  1918 – 1948, at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Cubism wasn’t born of a manifesto (Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque tended to leave the blah-blah to others), but Cubism’s outsized influence inspired the spilling of much ink as artists and critics sought to explain it, support it, modify it, or, inevitably and however prematurely, proclaim its demise. In the week of the armistice that ended World War One, artists Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (aka, Le Corbusier) penned Aprés le Cubisme, announcing the supplanting of the old style with what they dubbed Purism, an attempt at bringing order to the fractured post-war world, and to the jumble of the art world in particular — a world whose undisputed capital was Paris.

Café, Paris, 1929, Archibald John Motley, Jr., American, 1891 – 1981, Oil on canvas. Museum Purchase, Ernest & Rosemarie Kanzler Foundation Fund. © Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr. All reserved rights 2023/Bridgeman Images.

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris 1918-1948, the Detroit Institute of Art’s current exhibit of graphic works from its collection borrows its name from the Purist manifesto but sets its scene with the sole painting in the show, a recent-ish acquisition by Archibald Motley from 1929, Café, Paris, which depicts an archetypical scene of a Montmartre watering hole populated by various bohemian types. A Black American painter, Motley was one ingredient in the multicultural stew of artists that populated the City of Light between the wars. He’s joined in this exhibit by, among others, Mexico’s Diego Rivera, seen here breaking away from his own version of Cubism with still lifes that suggest the more naturalistic style he’d eventually bring to the DIA’s Detroit Industry murals; Lithuanian-born Jacques Lipchitz, one of a few artists here who kept some version of Cubism alive despite reports of its passing; and the Jewish Russian Marc Chagall, whose etching L’Apparition, a scene of a winged muse descending upon a self-portrait of the painter at his easel, is a secular Annunciation. Also here is Tsugouharu Foujita, whose delicate line drawing Head of a Girl is both modern and reflective of the graphic traditions of his native Japan. The drawing pairs nicely with the small watercolor portrait of A Young Girl by Marie Laurencin, the only painter among the women artists in the show; the others are all photographers: Berenice Abbott, Gertrude Fehr, Dora Maar, and the German-American Ilsa Bing, “queen of the Leica,” who contributes several intriguing compositions. The genderfluid Claude Cahun is represented by a riveting self-portrait as well.

Self Portrait with Leica, 1931, printed 1992, Ilse Bing, American, 1899 – 1998. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the Estate of Ilse Bing Wolff. © Estate of Isle Bing

 

Self-Portrait, ca. 1927  Claude Cahun, French, 1894-1954. Gelatin silver print. Founders Society Purchase, Albert and Peggy de Salle Charitable Trust and the DeRoy Photographic Acquisition Endowment Fund.

Dominating one wall of the exhibition’s first room is a color mock-up for a mural by Raoul Dufy, a project called The Spirit of Electricity, created for display at the 1937 World’s Fair (and now in the Museum of the City of Paris). Gifted to the DIA in 1999, the large color sketch has some resonance with the Rivera Industry murals; turbines, trains, and other modern marvels are depicted, though Dufy is apparently less interested in the technology of electricity, which he associates with the power of Zeus and other mythological figures, and more fascinated by the “Great Men” of science and history, who throng the bottom of the image. The panels are brightly colored and loosely painted. Compare this with the more muscular, more populist, and tech-savvy vision of Rivera — which may be just to say that artists’ approaches to modernity in these years were various and often contrasting.

The Spirit of Electricity, 1936/1937  Raoul Dufy, French, 1877-1953, Watercolor, gouache on paper mounted on canvas. Gift of Sara Lee Corporation. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Inevitably, perhaps, Picasso becomes at least one of the exhibit’s through lines, his position as the guy to beat implied by the title, his status as a successful giant of the art scene suggested in a photo by Man Ray in which he regards the viewer coolly from behind a respectable suit and cardigan. His decidedly non-cubist pencil drawing from 1920 of a nude bather sitting on a beach, the horizon balanced on her head, is one of the first works in the show; his late-1945 print Head of a Young Boy is one of the show’s final images. Picasso was one of the first to explore what lay beyond Cubism, and he’s shown here returning to classical sources for inspiration, as in his suite of illustrations for Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu— The Unknown Masterpiece, a short story by Balzac about an obsessed artist whose ten-year attempt to paint a portrait of his beloved results only in an undecipherable mess. Picasso’s most direct illustration of the story, showing the placid model knitting on the left, the artist absorbed in his work on the right, and the canvas in between choked by a tangle of arcs and lines, could pass for a wry New Yorker cartoon on the state of modern art. (Picasso related so strongly to the story that he moved his studio to the same Paris neighborhood in which Balzac’s fictional painter worked.) Picasso’s line work throughout the illustrations is in fact, clear and simple, evoking classical sculpture, except when he strategically applies intense hatching to emphasize a particular section of the image.

The complete set of Balzac illustrations is displayed in one of the gallery’s two octagonal side rooms. The other contains another set of illustrations, these by Louis Marcoussis, one of Cubism’s hold-outs, for a text by Gérard de Nerval, the Romantic writer whose dreamy work presaged the concerns of Surrealism. The Surrealists of course took the opposite tack from the return-to-order crowd, deciding after WW1 that irrationality and madness were more relevant to the current age than reason. The movement is represented here by the experimental photographs of Man Ray and others, as well as copies of the lavishly produced journals Minotaure and Verve; the final edition of the latter, the “war issue,” features a defiant Gallic rooster by Joan Miró, the last image to appear in the journal before it closed due to the encroachment of the Nazis.

Elsewhere in the exhibit is Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, a savage lampooning of the Spanish dictator whom Picasso depicts as some kind of anthropomorphic tumor, running roughshod through a series of grotesque misadventures. It’s one of his best known graphic works, but when you’re mounting a concise survey of thirty of the most storied years in art history, it’s not a bad idea to “play the hits” here and there. Matisse, for example, is well represented by his popular pochoir portfolio called Jazz, derived from the colorful paper cut-outs he created late in his life. Bedridden by illness while his country was being overrun by fascists, Matisse summoned happier memories of the circus and a trip to Tahiti to use as subject matter, but it was his publisher that gave the collection its musical title, to suggest the spirit of improvisation behind the work. The images are likely familiar to many art fans thanks to decades of posters and other inexpensive reproductions, but they definitely merit seeing in their original vibrant colors, and their lyrical compositions deserve a closer look.

Le Cirque, 1943  Henri Matisse, French, 1869-1954  Tériade, Greek, 1897 – 1983  Edmond Vairel, French Pochoir printed in color ink on wove paper. Gift of John S. Newberry. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Other “greatest hits” on display here that will delight devotees of the between-the-wars art scene include Cartier-Bresson’s clever photo Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, of a man leaping gingerly over a reflective layer of water on the pavement and Brassaï’s portrait of Bijou, a fading, bejeweled Belle Epoch matron ensconced in some bar in Montmartre who seems to be incapable of finding a path into the future.

“Bijou” of Montmartre, ca. 1932  Brassaï, French, 1899-1984  Gelatin silver print. Founders Society Purchase, Charles L. Freer Fund, Elliott T. Slocum Fund and Hal H. Smith Fund. © ESTATE BRASSAÏ – RMN-Grand Palais.

The path forward for many of the artists in this exhibit included nerve-wracking waits for exit visas, cross-Atlantic escapes, struggles alongside Resistance forces, and interment in concentration camps (or, as with Le Corbusier, collaboration with fascists). While it’s not quite the final image in the exhibit (that’s Bing’s photo of the Eiffel Tower, still standing through everything), maybe Picasso’s doe-eyed child in Head of a Boy, printed only a few months after the end of the war, is a good note to go out on — a fresh-faced hope for a new start after the horrors of the Second World War, from an artist whose post-war work would be so preoccupied by the image of the dove.

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris,  1918 – 1948, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2023

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