Author: Michael Hodges Page 1 of 8

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I @ Cranbrook Art Museum

On November 29, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Ceramic, Furniture, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings, Textile

An installation photo of How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part 1 at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2, 2025 (Courtesy Cranbrook Museum of Art, PD Rearick; subsequent photos by Detroit Art Review).

There was a time, decades ago, when Cranbrook held itself at a careful remove from the city of Detroit, only 18 miles distant, but light years away. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who spent two happy years in the early forties at the Academy of Art while Charles helped Henry Ford convert the Willow Run plant from auto to bomber production, called it “the Ivory Tower sitting on the outside of the volcano of Detroit.”

In recent years, that relationship changed dramatically – a shift epitomized by the current exhibition, How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection I, at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2. The museum has been energetically acquiring art by contemporary Detroit artists, and since 2014 has amassed over 300 works, of which 30-odd are currently on display. The show includes young artists like Sherri Bryant and Matthew Angelo Harrison, as well as the late, beloved Gilda Snowden, and Cass Corridor greats Michael Luchs, Nancy Mitchnick and Gordon Newton. “This was a substantial gear shift in our focus,” said chief curator Laura Mott, “to be a storyteller of Detroit art, and I think that’s an important role.”

Charles McGee, Play Patterns II, Fabrics, paper, the artist’s hair, paint and enamel on Dibond attached to wood frame, 120 x 240 inches, 2011.

Their biggest acquisition, both in price and size, was the late Charles McGee’s Play Patterns II from 2011, a dazzling, colorful canvas starring spindly, hieroglyph-like figures that’s a close cousin to the artist’s 1984 Noah’s Ark: Genesis at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Over an 80-year career, McGee – named the Kresge Foundation’s first Eminent Artist in 2008 – produced a mountain of work ranging from the severely geometric to idiosyncratic figurative portraits and highly stylized abstractions, both in painting and sculpture, that formed much of his later work. A good example of the latter is the black-and-white United We Stand outside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. McGee died in 2021 at 96.

Joshua Rainer, The Flying Dream, Oil on canvas, 46 x 102 inches, 2023.

Mott says she first included a painting by Joshua Rainer at the Art Museum in Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit, which closed last March, without knowing that he was an Art Academy student. Indeed, he’s the first enrolled student to appear in a non-student exhibition at the museum. Mott says artist Mario Moore, who co-curated Skilled Labor with her, “calls Rainer ’the human printer’ because his skill level is insane,” noting that the portrait of his grandmother in Skilled Labor was often mistaken for a photograph.

Rainer’s piece in Detroit Collection is The Flying Dream. It’s less photo-realistic and moodier, an evocatively colored work in grayish pinks and dull orange, in which a body – presumably the artist – is suspended horizontally in mid-air, face down. The unexpected hues give it an undeniable dream-like quality, an image halfway between believable and hallucinatory. But in ways that are hard to explain, the painting’s dominant impression is one of a profound, mesmerizing stillness.

Ed Fraga, 229 Gratiot, 35 x 35 x 3 inches, 1986.

Ed Fraga, a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow, has produced a rich oeuvre that mostly wanders the subconscious, delving both into the psychological and the spiritual, with results that are enigmatic yet oddly beguiling. In considering the Wayne State University grad’s relationship to his audience, Steve Panton in Essay’d speculated that, “Perhaps at times it is closer to the artist as magician, encouraging the viewer to suspend disbelief, and see more mystery in the world.”

“Mysterious” is certainly the word for 229 Gratiot, a collection of small portraits a bit like a whimsical two-dimensional closet of curiosities. They range from an apparent saint whose halo divides into concentric circles, a luminous female fetus floating on an azure square, a palm bearing stigmata, and a tiny cameo of the kneeling Land-o-Lakes butter maiden. Typical of much of Fraga’s work, it’s a bit dizzying and elusive but an awful lot of fun to study.

Jack Craig, Molded Carpet Chair, Green; Molded carpet, wood, fabric; 32 x 22.5 x 21 inches, 2024.

Leaping genres, one creative endeavor the Academy of Art has always been known for is chair design, starting with Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames’ molded plywood chairs that took first place for seating in the 1941 Organic Design for Home Furnishings competition at the Museum of Modern Art. Along with other Academy designers of that era like Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll and Harry Weese, Cranbrook’s output revolutionized the look of the American home and office, and made U.S. modernist design a world leader.

Continuing that grand tradition, but giving it a more artsy, less functional, spin is Jack Craig’s Molded Carpet Chair, Green, which was also exhibited at the David Klein Gallery in a solo show that closed in October, and included a number of other phantasmagorical pieces. Mott notes that the early Eames and Saarinen works went into commercial production, but with recent Academy alumni like Craig and Chris Schanck, “you see more of an art design. Molded Carpet Chair is not going into production,” she said. “These are exquisitely made art objects that suggest function,” rather than exhibiting it. In the case of Molded Carpet Chair, the result is a lush object that feels more organic than structural, with all sorts of exuberant, textured excrescences sprouting on it.

A companion show on the Art Museum’s first floor is Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, which runs until January 12, 2025. One of the world’s most-celebrated ceramicists, Takaezu died in 2011 and had a most-astonishing biography. Born into an impoverished Japanese immigrant family on a remote part of Maui, Takaezu was the sixth of 11 children and had to quit school at 15 to work as a housekeeper in Honolulu to help support her family. But luck was on her side – when the family left during World War II, she got a job at the Hawaiian Potters Guild. Ultimately, she studied ceramics part-time at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under Claude Horan, whom Takaezu called the father of Hawaiian ceramics.

Toshiko Takaezu, Light, Porcelain, 1970.

The turning point in Takaezu’s life came when she saw pieces by Maija Grotell, who was the head of ceramics at the Academy of Art. Never having traveled to the mainland, Takaezu made her way to Michigan, applied to Cranbrook, and got in. That not only supercharged and refined her touch with clay, but also started her on an academic path that landed her eventually at Princeton University, where she was a longtime professor and inspiration to generations of ceramicists.

Takaezu’s artistic genius spanned numerous genres. She not only worked in ceramics, but also weaving, painting, bronze casting and printmaking, displaying remarkable finesse in each. Part of the pleasure of this career retrospective, organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York, is that there are examples from all these various disciplines on display.

But most remarkable are her signature creations, the “closed vessels,” like Light in the image above — essentially large pots that suggest a mouth or opening at the top but, on examination, turn out not to be there. This ability to both suggest a vessel while at the same time denying it is part of what gives the artist’s work its profundity. These pieces are, as the exhibition’s biographical panel notes, “abstract paintings in the round.”

Toshiko Takaezu, Gaea (Earth Mother), Stoneware, 1979-90.

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part 1 – is at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2, 2025. Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within will be up through January 12, 2025.

Lois Teicher @ Galerie Camille

By Michael Hodges

On October 13, 2024

In Drawing, Sculpture

Lois Teicher, Quiet Performance: The Stillness of Shape at the Galerie Camille

An installation shot of Lois Teicher – Quiet Performance: The Stillness of Shape, at Galerie Camille in Midtown Detroit, up through October 19. In the picture, Teicher is the one gesturing with her hands. (Photos courtesy of Galerie Camille, except where noted.)

Sculptor Lois Teicher has mastered the art of weightlessness, which is all the more challenging when working in steel and aluminum. Whether diminutive or huge, her curved, geometric forms in strong primary colors pose as delicately as dancers, high-wire acts often seeming to balance on one toe. In her new show at Detroit’s Galerie Camille, Quiet Performance: The Stillness of Shape, the eighty something artist who’s still working at full clip gives us a range of her small works, a couple of which echo her massive public sculptures in Detroit and elsewhere.

Lois Teicher, Curved Form with Rectangle and Space – ed 21, Aluminum.

The best example of that echo is Curved Form with Rectangle and Space – ed 21. The descriptive title pretty much sums it up — this is a narrow, concave rectangle, maybe 8 inches tall, balanced on one corner and leaning slightly to the left, with a tall, symmetrical hole cut slightly off center within the dark-blue metal. People who know Detroit well will experience a jolt of recognition, for this is the exact form – almost a tiny maquette – of Teicher’s 14-foot-high, white sculpture of the same name that’s the commanding centerpiece of the Hudson’s Art Park between the Scarab Club and John R Street, right behind the Detroit Institute of Arts. In his highly useful guide to the city’s public sculpture, Art in Detroit Public Places, critic Dennis Nawrocki notes that the opening cut in the work allows the viewer to see through, “subtly playing with negative and positive space.”

There’s something immensely satisfying and graceful about both pieces, small and large. In the case of the latter, which went up in 2000, the sculpture brings a stamp-sized pocket park alive that years ago had been nothing but a drab patch of grass. Students of Detroit urbanism won’t be surprised to learn that the park was the brainchild of urban planner Sue Mosey at the University Cultural Center Association (now Midtown Detroit Inc.), who in her 30-year career brought countless overlooked bits of Midtown back to vibrant life. In this case, Teicher’s sculpture delivers a striking grace note on a stretch of road that was in desperate need of it.

Galerie Camille director Marta Carvajal, who curated the show, praises Teicher’s gift for simplicity and “the unstable balance – she finds balance using the least amount of surface. Her mind,” Carvajal adds, “works on a different level than ours, with very sophisticated laws of physics.”

Lois Teicher, Curved Form with Rectangle and Space, Powder-coated stainless steel, 14 x 7 feet, 2000. (Photo: Detroit Art Review)

Teicher, who lives in Dearborn, graduated from Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies (now the College for Creative Studies) when she was 61, after raising her three children, and then went on to get her MFA at Eastern Michigan University. She currently maintains a studio in Eastern Market. Working with fabricators and engineers, Teicher has immersed herself in industrial processes that would scare off many, developing, as Maryann Wilkinson, former executive director of the Scarab Club wrote in Essay’d, “a unique style for large-scale sculpture that emphasizes tension and a suggestion of movement that serves to deny her work’s complexity and weight.”

That tension is equally present in the mostly diminutive work on display in Quiet Performance, like the 10-inch-high Dynamic, which stars a bowed crimson circle a bit like the rising sun on the Japanese flag, pleasingly perched at the far left edge of a convex white platform. It’s a graceful, beguiling orb – and one that’s echoed in Cosmos, one of a number of pencil-and-oil compositions framed on the wall, though it must be noted that in the case of Cosmos, the painted “sun” is rising out of a nebulous, sooty cloud.

Lois Teicher, Dynamic, Welded aluminum, 10.5 x 12 x 7 inches.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the artist just likes playing with elemental geometry, as with the mid-sized, dark-blue sculpture, Linked. Here Teicher gives us two flat circular discs intersecting at right angles, almost as if a circular buzz saw had made it halfway through a flat circle before stopping. Again, the composition is perfectly balanced on the two rims, yet also suggests imminent collapse, however unlikely.

Lois Teicher, Linked, Aluminum & enamel, 13.5 x 26 x 19 inches.

An undeniable touch of whimsy also permeates another of Teicher’s ink and oil compositions on the wall, Envelope Series 3 – a loosely rendered picture of two overlapping envelopes, each unsealed with the flap sticking straight up. There’s something about the concept’s lack of consequence – Really, a painting of envelopes? – that makes the conceit amusing. But there’s real visual interest here, too, in the way Teicher has turned the simplest of images into an affecting color study. An open business envelope seen from the back, of course, divides into five isosceles triangles — three very broad, and two quite narrow. In this work, the bottom of the top envelope is colored with deep crimson that edges over the lines, while its partly covered cousin is smoky black on the outside and a strong yellow within. The work is simultaneously oddball and charming.

Lois Teicher, Envelope Series 3, Ink, oil sticks, Bristol board, 14 x 16 inches.

Playfulness or capriciousness also seems to have been the leitmotif behind Teicher’s first big public commission in 1996, which is worth mentioning in any essay about the artist. Paper Airplane Series with Deep Groove was constructed for Flint’s Bishop International Airport. Three separate sheets of steel have been folded into the classic shape of childhood paper airplanes. The largest sits on the floor in the airport’s main terminal and is painted white with blue lines to perfectly mimic the sheet of school paper commonly employed for the purpose. There are even holes for the standard three-ring binder. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Lois Teicher, Paper Airplane Series with Deep Grove, Bishop International Airport, 1996.

Lois Teicher’s Quiet Performance: The Stillness of Shape is up at Galerie Camille in Midtown Detroit through October 19. The gallery will host an artist’s talk on October 18 from 5 to 8 p.m.

Jim Chatelain @ Oakland University Art Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On September 21, 2024

In Drawing, Paintings

An installation view of Jim Chatelain: Correcting Past Mistakes, will be up at the Oakland University Art Gallery through November 24, 2024 (Photos courtesy of OUAG, except where noted.)

Continuing its tradition of outstanding exhibitions, the Oakland University Art Gallery presents Jim Chatelain: Correcting Past Mistakes, up through November 24. The 40 works on display, created between 2001 and 2024, represent an eruption of color and tangled abstraction, in some cases intriguingly intestinal in appearance. Altogether, the show opens a fascinating window on the non-figurative work of the celebrated Cass Corridor artist, now in his mid-70s, who’s still producing at an impressive clip.

Many people may be familiar with Chatelain’s earliest paintings that caused a sensation in the much-talked-about 1978 “Bad” Painting show at Manhattan’s New Museum — crudely outlined urban figures of the sort you might have seen on Cass Avenue in those years, rendered with seemingly slapdash brushstrokes and an air of menace. Subsequent figurative work involved a weirdly magnificent series of facial portraits, full of distorted and bulbous features, that – never mind their odd appearance – manage to be both poignant and disturbing in equal measure.

In a biographical essay for the Paul Kotula Projects gallery in Ferndale, Robert Storr – who long headed the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture – urged art enthusiasts to “take a walk on the wild side with [Chatelain] as your guide. You’ll meet a cast of hard-bitten urban types, [with] extraordinary toughness whose heavily lined faces bear the unmistakable trace of what it takes to just keep going in the late modern purgatory that is big city life in our time. Chatelain knows these people inside and out; he’s their recording angel.”

Jim Chatelain, Untitled, Acrylic paint, paint pen 0n linen paper, 24 x 20 inches, 2023.

Compared with those gritty predecessors, one of the delights of Correcting Past Mistakes is just how beautiful these twisted abstracts, often suggesting collapse and calamity, really are. Curator Ryan Standfest, an artist who teaches at Oakland and has long been a Chatelain admirer, describes the works as “frenzied and active” with an “aura of tumult.” Yet these are meticulously crafted works, never mind their vaguely cartoon-like appearance. “The paintings are vibrant, with colors that pop,” Standfest says. “One color doesn’t cancel out the other – they support each other quite well.” This echoes the artist’s own appraisal. In an interview with Standfest in the show’s handsome catalog, Chatelain describes his choice in colors as “really pop-y. My palette is really like that. It’s the blue of the Superman costume and the red of the cape.”

Chatelain, who maintains a studio in Ferndale as well as one in Delhi, New York, about 120 miles from Manhattan, hails from Findlay, Ohio. In 1967, he transferred from Findlay College to Wayne State University, sight unseen, graduating with a BFA in 1971. While at Wayne, he studied painting with John Egner, a professor who was a co-founder of the legendary Willis Gallery and a key mentor to much of the early Cass Corridor talent. Their collective work finally got the official stamp of approval in 1980 when the Detroit Institute of Arts pulled together the seminal show Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor 1963-1977.

Jim Chatelain, Basket, Acrylic paint pen with vinyl paint on paper and mat board, 21 ½ x 17 inches, 2024.

The recent abstracts on display at OUAG are remarkably immersive and seductive. Go ahead — just try to resist their labyrinthine magnetism. In her catalog essay, critic Lynn Crawford describes the works as “unfamiliar, uncanny, yet bursting with life.” And indeed, it’s hard not to get sucked into their twisted contours, where something – digestion, perhaps? – is clearly going on. For her part, Crawford refers to “blended strands of lifeforms” that “radiate an energy and are possibly equipped to take on initiatives themselves.”

Yet there’s also a series of constructions that employ Phillips-head screws as their chief element and mostly rely on a muted palette that stands in sharp contrast to the boldly colored works that constitute the majority of the show. One can’t help but be struck by the exertion that went into these pieces, and they manifest an air of struggle and threat that sets them apart, echoing some of the ominousness in Chatelain’s early figurative work.

Even the title of one, Head on a Plate, implies danger. Standfest laughs when asked about these works. “There are an insane number of screws on them,” he says. “Talk about violence! Just imagine Jim screwing each one of those in, over and over.” He adds, “I’ve never asked him if he had a strategy, whether he marked off where they would go or just made it up as he went along.”

Jim Chatelain, Head on a Plate, Enamel paint, screws on plywood, 48 x 32 inches, 2001.

Jim Chatelain, Head on a Plate (detail), Enamel paint, screws on plywood, 48 x 32 inches, 2001. (Photo: Detroit Art Review)

Yet the title above also points to another key element of Chatelain’s oeuvre, a dark humor that ripples through many works. Standfest argues there’s “something of a violent physical comedy to Jim’s work that links to the [earlier] figures in some ways. He describes the figurative work as ‘situations,’ and there’s a tension in that.” Chatelain himself acknowledges a certain puckishness to much of what he’s produced. “In those early 70s figure paintings, there’s humor in those. They’re cartoonish in some ways,” he says. “It’s a little harder to do with the abstract work, but I think it can be done, [though] I can’t say that’s the case with all of it or most of it.” Chatelain sums it all up in a refreshing artistic philosophy: “It’s a failed painting that doesn’t have a little humor coming out of it.”

Jim Chatelain, The Caged Flea, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches, 2015.

The gallery will host three talks open to the public before the show closes. On September 26, curator Ryan Standfest will lead a walkthrough of the show. On October 30, Dan Nadel, who’s curating an alternate history of American art in the 1960s for New York’s Whitney Museum, will speak. On November 6, Standfest will interview Chatelain. All gallery talks take place at noon.

Jim Chatelain: Correcting Past Mistakes will be up at the Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 24, 2024.

Group Exhibition @ Library Street Collective’s – The Shepherd

By Michael Hodges

On August 13, 2024

In Uncategorized

An installation view of In an effort to be held, curated by Allison Glenn, and on view at the Shepherd until October 12. Photo: Detroit Art Review

If you haven’t yet been to the Shepherd, the former church at the center of a new cultural complex on Detroit’s east side, you are missing out on one of the most stunning exhibition spaces in the metro area. Happily, In an effort to be held — the handsome second show at the brand-new gallery (it debuted May 18) — provides a compelling reason to push east of Indian Village to the three-acre site just a block off Jefferson. While a few elements have yet to be completed, notably the coffeeshop, the just-hatched Little Village, as the three block complex is called, boasts a bed-and-breakfast aimed at artists (but open to all), a library devoted to books on artists of color, a skateboard park designed by boarding-legend Tony Hawk, and a whimsical outdoor sculpture park with work by the late, great Charles McGee.

The whole complex is the brainchild of Anthony and JJ Curis. The couple, who own Library Street Collective, curated most of Bedrock’s multiple public art installations throughout downtown, including the “animated” alleyway The Belt, the towering Charles McGee black-and-white mural on the north end of Capitol Park, and the dazzling graffiti art on every level of the Z Garage. The interior of the 1912 Romanesque Revival church has been reimagined by Brooklyn’s Peterson Rich Office as a classic gallery “white box,” albeit one that celebrates, rather than fights, the architecture and the luminous stained glass.

The principal addition to the space is a freestanding mezzanine with a dramatic overlook on the now de-sanctified altar. At the center of this platform is a large oculus, maybe five feet across, that looks down on the gallery space immediately below.

Jordan Eagles, Vinci, Grayscale image of Salvator Mundi; Plexiglass, blood of an HIV+ undetectable long-term survivor and activist, and UV resin; 26 3/4 x 19 x 3 inches; 2018. (Subsequent images by Joseph Tiano, courtesy of Library Street Collective and the Shepherd.)

Curated by the Shepherd artistic director Allison Glenn (who grew up just east of her new workplace), In an effort to be held features one spellbinding piece that directly invokes the structure’s ecclesiastical past – Vinci by New York artist Jordan Eagles, who often, brace yourself, works in blood.

The artist generally sources his material from slaughterhouses, but in the case of Vinci, Eagles used the blood of a person with HIV who’s undetectable. The black-and-white photographic reproduction of the Renaissance portrait of Christ, Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) – attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, though that’s also disputed, Glenn notes — is washed in a rich, even crimson that, softly illuminated from behind, fairly glows. Some may find the material and association disturbing – others, mesmerizingly beautiful. But there’s no question it’s hard to take your eyes off it.

Celeste, La constelación que viene, Pigments and acrylic base on dyed cotton canvas; Variable dimensions, approximately 29 feet x 16 feet; 2023.

At the far west end of the church, you’ll find the altar, stripped of religious objects, and overhead a delightful use of art in an architectural space. It’s an approach that Glenn particularly likes. “I love working with architecture,” she said. “A lot of my career has been working in public space – so when I saw the former church, I saw all the opportunities that existed outside the boxes.” In suspension above the altar, a bit like so many red-dyed clouds, La constelación que viene (The constellation that’s coming) represents the polar opposite mood from Vinci, powerful though that is. There’s a lightness and celebration attached to La constelación by the Mexican City duo Celeste (Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alemán), that uplifts and turns one’s gaze heavenward. It couldn’t fit the space Glenn chose any better if it tried.

Zak Ové, DP70, Vintage cotton doilies; 74 3/4 inches in diameter; 2023

Equally luminous in its way, though much more pointed in its use of color, is London artist Zak Ové’s DP70, a circular, multihued collage made entirely from vintage cotton doilies that, when seen from a distance, bear an uncanny resemblance to what you’d see looking through a rich kaleidoscope. The British-Trinadadian artist is best known for his loony-tunes, Crayola-colored sculptures, two of which were featured at the British Museum’s Africa Galleries last year. And while it’s mostly two-dimensional, DP70 does an astonishing imitation of a symmetrical, richly 3-D work of oddball power. “Hypnotic” is an understatement – yet at the same time, the whole conceit is drop-dead gorgeous. The artist uses a process he describes as “hyperbolic pattern-making,” invoking the masquerades of Canbulay, a Trinidadian harvest festival that came to represent emancipation in the former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago.

Cameron Harvey, Ancestor 26: Ceratonia Siliqua V; Acrylic, graphite, and reflective glass beads on canvas; 109 x 53 inches; 2023.

Another rich exercise in color is found in LA-based Cameron Harvey’s Ancestor 26: Ceratonia Siliqua V, a construction that looks rather like a ceremonial robe that ancient, far-away royalty might have sported. This is sensuous, high-concept work. Harvey rolls over unstretched, shaped canvas liberally strewn with paint that she impresses as she rotates. The deep-green, abstract horizontal image that repeats from bottom to top of the “garment’s” interior – which has a certain primitive mystique – was created by Harvey pressing her forearm repeatedly into the pigment. The artist has had solo shows in, among other cities, Venice, Rome, Chicago and Malibu. Harvey is currently doing a UCROSS residency in Sheridan, Wyoming. In an effort to be held is her first time exhibiting in Detroit.

Manal Shoukair, Seed of paradise, Nylon and pomegranates, Dimensions variable, 2024.

In another clever application of architecture to a work of art, Manal Shoukair – a Lebanese-American artist working in Detroit – suspended beige nylon from the Shepherd’s mezzanine oculus with a dozen or so pomegranates clearly visible at its center. Shoukair, a 2023 Kresge Foundation “Gilda Award” winner (named for the late Gilda Snowden, artist, and College for Creative Studies professor), grapples with Islamic spirituality and issues of “contemporary femininity,” according to her artist’s statement. The pomegranate is considered a sacred fruit in Islamic tradition, and here Shoukair has created – it might as well be said – an all-nourishing breast with pomegranates at its center. That Seed of paradise is visually lined up with the very spot where the cross used to stand on the skeletal altar just makes the composition all the richer.

In an effort to be held – will be on display at the Shepherd in Detroit (above) through October 12, 2024.

Group Exhibition @ M Contemporary

By Michael Hodges

On June 9, 2024

In Paintings

General Rules Do Not Apply at Ferndale’s M Contemporary gives a quick, refreshing tour of the lyrical possibilities of colorful abstraction produced by an intriguing set of Detroit artists: Matt Eaton (now in Los Angeles), Lauren Harrington, MALT, Jaime Pattison, Senghor Reid, Zach Thompson and Dino Valdez. General Rules is up through June 15.

Jaime Pattison, Afterimages, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 58 1/2 inches, 2024. (Photos courtesy of M Contemporary).

These are sophisticated abstracts — even if Zach Thompson’s striking, half-and-half canvas stars, respectively, Wylie Coyote and Pig-Pen of “Peanuts” fame. Indeed, taken as a whole, the contrast in stylistic approach from one artist to the next is exhilarating.

A downright mesmerizing work is Jaime Pattison’s Afterimages. This is a severe gridwork composition, yet rendered in utterly seductive shades of startling red and aquamarine where the former frames the latter with thin, wispy lines to great visual effect. It’s all rather high concept. Pattison’s playing with what happens when you stare at intense red good and hard, and then close your eyes. The “after image” that pops up leaps from the opposite side of the color spectrum, almost like a photographic negative. And after looking at red, that negative will always be some shade of green.

Each of the 140 aquamarine rectangles within its red frame is a tiny, meticulously constructed abstract in itself, giving the whole a visual depth that, combined with the shock of the red – in this case approaching a neon intensity — is pretty darned transfixing.

In an April interview with the online publication Canvas Rebel, Pattison says she’s been working on “a series of large dichromatic paintings investigating notions of the screen and embodiment. Painting for me is an analog process,” she added, “a process based in the hand, a sifting through digital material to make connections to this time.”

Gallery director Melannie Chard says she’s been following Pattison, who hails from Toronto, since she first saw her work a couple years ago in the annual Student Exhibition at the College for Creative Studies. At the time, Chard says, Pattison was working in a figurative vein, “but now she’s moving into pattern” –- for which we should all be grateful.

Zach Thompson, The Coyote Has to Eat Too, Oil pigment stick, spray paint, and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

If Afterimages gives an impression of freehand precision, the left half of Zach Thompson’s canvas, titled The Coyote Has to Eat Too, announces itself with a blast of what appears to be slapdash enthusiasm, with an array of colorful, “careless” blotches scattered across a vivid yellow background.

At once comic and disturbing, the visual focus is our friend Wylie Coyote, lying prone in the bottom-right corner, as if shortly after being obliterated by one of those falling anvils he always seemed to attract like metal filings to a magnet. There’s also a miniature version of Mr. Coyote up above, on the edge of a vortex of swirling hues, holding a teensy sign reading, “Why me?” — a question that can’t help but trigger a laugh, even as it gets to the heart of the human condition.

A similar mix of the absurd and the profound characterizes the other half of Thompson’s work, Everything Returns to Dirt, which sports Charles Schulz’s Pig-Pen floating over, of all things, a roosting parrot. Rendered in an array of rich earth tones, including burnt orange, Thompson pulls off another oddball composition that just won’t let go.

Dino Valdez, Family Values, Acrylic and silver leaf on canvas, 72 x 48 x 1 1/2 inches, 2024.

Ready for something completely different? Painted in black acrylic and elegant silver leaf, Dino Valdez’s Family Values stands out in marvelous counterpoint to the color-rich works surrounding it. An energetic swirl of highly textured black brush strokes, Valdez, formerly exhibitions director at Red Bull House of Art Detroit, manages to achieve a surprising amount of depth that feels downright three-dimensional.

His CV says his recent work focuses on the understanding of violence, conflict, and resolution, which would seem to sum up Family Values, with its barely suppressed fury, rather neatly. Anchoring this visual storm is one perfectly straight white line (although it reads as gray in the image above) that seems to prevent the turbulence from blowing away and dissipating.

Chard says this particular piece is related Valdez’s martial-arts training, and likens the work to that of the classic abstract expressionist Franz Kline, “but not as aggressive. I like Family Values because it almost looks like a dance,” she added, “so expressive and so much energy behind it.”

Matt Eaton, Celestial Blanket (Yellow), Aerosol on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

Once an energetic presence in Detroit connected with the Library Street Collective, Contra Projects and Red Bull House of Art before his move to the West Coast, Matt Eaton has sketched out a career exploring inventive possibilities in the world of abstraction. Using materials associated with graffiti and graphic arts alike, Eaton’s work has been characterized by a skilled use of color and form.

At M Contemporary, his four identically sized canvases are hung in a square like four panes of a window, through each of which we see what appears to be a piece of fabric fluttering in the air as if hung from a clothesline. Two of these are in rich colors, as with (Yellow) above, while the other two are composed in black and silvery tones. Taken altogether, they make a rich stew.

In a 2016 interview with The Detroit News, Eaton credited the visual universe of the 1980s with steering his artistic instincts in a particular direction. “Growing up at the end of the good punk-rock age,” he said, “there was a lot of hugely influential graphic design at the time. I genuinely would be content if nobody ever saw my art again,” he added. “I’m compelled to make it. It’s more a meditative ritual than a career.”

Senghor Reid, Decision at Sundown 6, Acrylic on canvas, 2024.

If Eaton’s blankets mine the potential of simplicity, Senghor Reid’s Decision at Sundown 6 deals with almost stupefying complexity and detail. An explosion of line and squiggle radiating out from a central core near the bottom, it almost reads like – going way out on a limb, here – a visual representation of nuclear fission.

But Chard, who would know, says Decision actually has water as its subject. “It’s one of Senghor’s abstracted water series,” she said. “A lot of people recognize him for portraiture and figurative work, but he has a whole other part of his practice that deals with water, water justice and water rights.” Indeed, anyone who caught last winter’s Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit at the Cranbrook Art Museum might note the resemblance — in line, at least — between Decision at Sundown and the swimming pool in the artist’s large, cheerful Make Way for Tomorrow, that was one of the focal points of that exhibition.

Zach Thompson, Everything Returns to Dirt (detail), Oil pigment stick, spray paint, acrylic, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

General Rules Do Not Apply will be up at Ferndale’s M Contemporary through June 15.