Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Author: Michael Hodges Page 2 of 8

Group Exhibition @ Library Street Collective’s – The Shepherd

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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

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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.

David Barr @ Collected Detroit Gallery

By

On April 5, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Sculpture

David Barr: Structural Relief, at Collected Detroit through April 13, 2024

An installation view of David Barr: Structural Relief, which is at Collected Detroit through April 13.  Images courtesy of Detroit Art Review. 

Novi artist David Barr, who died in 2015, was a creative polymath whose work ranged across media, including giant metal sculptures, wooden-relief wall hangings of great precision, and lithographs documenting a preposterous geometric intervention in the earth’s crust.

David Barr: Structural Relief at Collected Detroit gallery through April 13 focuses mainly on the artist’s multiple “structurist reliefs,” large, 3-D wooden wall hangings with layered straight lines and curves of varied colors that achieve an almost immediate architectural presence.

The exhibition was curated by Leslie Ann Pilling of the Metropolitan Museum of Design Detroit.

Also on the walls are the four rather elegant lithographs that “document” Barr’s Four Corners Project, which the Archives of American Art spotlit in a 1985 film for the Smithsonian Institution. In the early eighties, Barr enlisted the University of Michigan’s Institute of Mathematical Geography to figure out how to embed an imaginary tetrahedron – a pyramid – in the earth, with its four corners just poking through the soil in South Africa, Easter Island, Indonesia and Greenland. Barr traveled to each site to mark it with a small marble pyramid.

David Barr, Four Corners Project, Lithograph, 1981.  Image courtesy of Collected Detroit. 

But it’s the structurist reliefs that occupied most of Barr’s attention for several decades, and the geometric works on display here in Collected Detroit’s airy, fourth-floor digs are defined by crisp, sharp-edged lines, whether straight or curved. As noted, at times, these multi-layered compositions seem to leap out of an architect’s sketchbook. Structurist Relief No. 104 leans particularly hard in this direction, with its floating planes and cubes – see the detail below – looking a bit like something that might have emerged from Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Studio, circa 1928.

David Barr, – Structurist Relief No. 104; Mixed Media 44.5 by 48 inches, 1974. 

David Barr, Detail, Structurist Relief No. 104; Mixed Media 44.5 by 48 inches, 1974.

Barr, who grew up in Grosse Pointe, was going to follow in the footsteps of his father, a Chrysler engineer. However, once enrolled at Wayne State, the young man found himself unexpectedly seduced by the fine arts. Barr ended up focusing on sculpture and industrial design, borrowing materials and concepts from the engineering trades that he deployed in installations and reliefs. After graduating in 1965 with a Master’s in Fine Arts, the artist began a lifelong career as a professor teaching at Macomb Community College.

Exactly thirty years later, Barr founded what in many respects might be his greatest contribution to the arts — Benzie County’s remarkable Michigan Legacy Art Park near Crystal Mountain, with 40 sculptural installations along 1.6 miles of forest paths that wind through 30 acres of deep woodlands. Installations include his lumber-industry Sawpath series, as well as other remarkable pieces of great size by Lois Teicher, Sergio DeGiusti, David Greenwood, Leslie Laskey and Joe Zajak, among others.

David Barr, Structurist Relief No. 310; Mixed media, 41 by 47.5 inches, 1991.

But Barr never abandoned his trademark reliefs. And over time, the compositions seemed to stretch and assert themselves in new ways. A budding sensuousness crept into what initially had been a mostly rectilinear universe. Starting in the 1980s, curvaceous forms began to compete with narrow verticals in charged juxtaposition, as in the rather breathtaking Structurist Relief No. 310, above.

Surfaces began buckling and cracking, spurning the strict geometry of Barr’s early years, as with Structurist Relief No. 271 from 1986. But even here, while the edges may be curved or slightly irregular, each element, as with the pink pieces below, still occupies a single plane. No waves or undulations are to be found.

David Barr, Detail – Structurist Relief No. 271; Mixed media, 50 by 66 inches, 1986.

Curator Pilling says she was immediately mesmerized by the shadows that the elements in the reliefs cast. She adds that the works’ unusual magnetism can be read in the way visitors progress through the gallery. “People spend time with each relief,” she said. “A lot of times people going through exhibitions are, like: Walk, walk, stop, walk, walk. But this is more: Walk, walk, STOP. They really take them in.”

If you haven’t been to Collected Detroit since the pandemic, be aware that the gallery has moved from its first-floor location on Fourth Street just around the corner. It’s now on Henry Street, on the top floor of an adjacent building.

Also well worth a look if you visit the gallery are freestanding works here and there by Harry Bertoia, Joseph E. Senungetuk, Detroit’s legendary Charles McGee and, most astonishing, the Hollywood actor Anthony Quinn. The sinuous “Nude” that this Renaissance man sculpted out of marble sits on a ledge right by a window, one ankle resting delicately on the other, cool as a cucumber.

David Barr: Structural Relief will be at Collected Detroit through April 13.

Look At Me! Look At Me Now! Magical World of Dr. Seuss @ Art Leaders Gallery

By

On March 16, 2024

In Drawing, Paintings

An installation view of Look At Me! Look A Me Now! Exhibition at West Bloomfield’s Art Leaders Gallery, up through March 30.

In a treat for anyone who loves cartoons, The Imaginative, Profound & Magical World of Dr. Seuss: The Rare Editions Exhibition will be up at Art Leaders Gallery in West Bloomfield through March 30, 2024. On Saturday, March 23, the gallery will host a special open house for the Seuss exhibit from 3 to 6 p.m.

This show of prints and sculptures, which you’ll find at the center of the Art Leaders space, is surprisingly magnetic. On display are a number of treasures that will appeal to fans, including several “before and after” pairings, where the original rough draft – with multiple, seemingly messy lines working out each visual element – is framed in a diptych with the polished, final version. It makes for fun viewing and gives a little glimpse into the process that produces what looks like simple art.

Consider the two versions of Look at Me Now, starring Seuss’ best-known creation, the Cat in the Hat, who’s juggling all manner of breakable items while balancing on a ball. It’s classic Seussian absurdity, and an almost universally recognizable childhood image.

Dr. Seuss, Look At Me Now!, Look At Me Now!,  Diptych, 26.5 by 17.5 inches. (Photos courtesy of Art Leaders Gallery.)

Dr. Seuss published his first children’s book, “And to Think I Saw That on Mulberry Street,” in 1937. But it was “The Cat in the Hat” exactly 20 years later that really catapulted the artist into the pop-cult stratosphere. It was fame that never flagged. His death in 1991 at 87 prompted all sorts of elegiac summaries: In its front-page obituary, the New York Times called Seuss “the modern Mother Goose,” while Time Magazine declared he was “one of the last doctors to make house calls – some 200 million of them in 20 languages.”

(“The Cat in the Hat,” by the way, was significant not just for its unhinged hero — who generated childish excitement and anxiety in equal measure — but also because it employed a limited vocabulary of about 220 “beginner’s words” recommended by reading specialists. Seuss then wrote it all up in a cadence — “anapestic tetrameter,” if you must — that was particularly easy for young readers to master and learn. From there on in, his books aimed to make learning how to read fun – quite a shift from the old “Dick and Jane” primers of the time.)

One of the charms of Seuss’ work, of course, has always been its complete lack of pretension and his willingness to make fun of himself. Four months after the launch of “Cat in the Hat,” the Saturday Evening Post helped the artist do just that when it ran what would become the most-iconic Seuss self-portrait, The Cat Behind the Hat – featuring the good doctor as his famous feline, looking dyspeptic, complete with stovepipe hat – in its July 6, 1957 issue.

Dr. Seuss, The Cat Behind the Hat, 20 by 10 inches.

Theodor Seuss Geisel – aka Dr. Seuss – initially got his start in advertising. Two years out of Dartmouth College in 1927, the young Geisel, from Springfield, Massachusetts, got a job drawing ads for “The Flit” — a household insecticide spray Standard Oil of New Jersey produced which promised to kill almost anything that crept, fluttered or crawled. Charmingly, the style of one ad from the early forties is unmistakably Seuss-ian, with an impish bug in a red-striped shirt who’s just flown right through a woman’s fancy hat, sparking predictable outrage.

Once Seuss was working full-time on children’s literature – his output was staggering – he took to working on his own personal art at night and on weekends, much of which is in the Art Leaders exhibition. Some, like the luridly colored Worm Glowing Bright in the Forest in the Night, approach abstract expressionism, albeit with the puckish intrusion of a befuddled yellow worm. Others, like Life’s a Great Balancing Act, play with patterns in a way that’s slightly reminiscent of Escher, but always, again, with a dash of oddball humor.

Dr. Seuss, Life’s a Great Balancing Act, 30.75 by 22 inches.

A man of his times, Seuss has, perhaps inevitably, come under fire for depictions of minorities that now seem tone-deaf and condescending. The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, announced in 2017 that it would replace a mural that included such images. And in 2021, the Seuss estate said it would voluntarily stop selling six titles, including Mulberry Street, thought to contain egregious examples of racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Happily, the art in this spirited exhibition avoids those sorts of dated allusions. Most just underlines Dr. Seuss’ gift for enchanting idiocy, and his ability to spin magical, gossamer worlds out of thin air. His approach is almost unfailingly gentle, indulgent, and tolerant of the frailties of this brittle world. In Seuss-land, all human rancor can be boiled down to the contentious standoff between two neighbors featured in My Petunia Can Lick Your Geranium, competing over who had the better garden.

Dr. Seuss, My Petunia Can Lick Your Geranium, 27 by 34 inches.

 The publisher of The Art of Dr. Seuss, Robert M. Chase, notes that almost everyone has a “significant Dr. Seuss memory” and that any number of creative artists and writers acknowledge the master’s influence on their work. “Indeed,” writes Chase on the website of the same name, “what Walt Disney was to entertainment, Theodor Seuss Geisel was to art and literature.”

Dr. Seuss, Cat from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, 22 by 44 inches.

The Imaginative, Profound & Magical World of Dr. Seuss: Look At Me! Look At Me Now! The Rare Editions Exhibition will be at West Bloomfield’s Art Leaders Gallery through March 30, 2024.

 

 

 

Beyond Topography Exhibition @ Janice Charach Gallery

By

On January 24, 2024

In Drawing, Installation, Paintings, Photography

Beyond Topography is a 23-person group show of Michigan Artists at the Janice Charach Gallery

An installation shot of Beyond Topography, a group show up through Feb. 21 at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield. (Photos courtesy of Clinton Snider.)

 Painter, curator, and teacher Clinton Snider always found early depictions of the American wilderness transporting. Think of the first large room in the American wing on the second floor of the Detroit Institute of Arts, with its canvases crammed with mountains, gorges and other examples of glorious, untamed landscape. Snider acknowledges the current of Manifest Destiny running through many of these paintings, but notes that “at the same time, they’re deeply beautiful and spiritual.”

So when Natalie Balazovich, the director of West Bloomfield’s Janice Charach Gallery asked Snider to curate a show on landscape, he found himself thinking of those classic works, but at the same time, in his words, “reacting against them.” He knew he didn’t want a show of pretty views. His intent was always to bend the landscape paradigm, but still arrive at something with spirituality and force. The result is Beyond Topography, a 23-person group show of Michigan artists up through Feb. 21 that takes a broad view indeed of what constitutes a landscape.

Jim Nawara, Studio View – Powerline Shadows, Oil on panel, 34 x 44 inches.

Studio View – Powerline Shadows by Jim Nawara straddles both the traditional landscape and the unconventional approach Snider is reaching for. The use of color in this lush portrait is exhilarating. It gives the composition three-dimensionality but also amounts to a stirring essay in greens and greenish-blues.

Cutting through this Arcadia, however, are two parallel black lines a little like skid marks – the shadows of overhead power lines that stripe horizontally across tree trunks and bush alike. It’s a human intervention – a desecration, if you will — that on the one hand coarsens this image of perfect beauty, but on the other elevates Studio View above and beyond the merely pretty, landing it someplace immensely satisfying.

Mel Rosas, The Excursion, Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches.

In The Excursion, a peeling wall with a Spanish colonial look dominates the foreground, framing an arch that opens onto a sub-tropical landscape of fields and mountains that beckon like postcards from Eden. On our side of this magic threshold, all is every day and grimy. On the other side lies paradise, and the viewer can hardly resist its gravitational pull.  Rosas, who taught for years at Wayne State and says he grew up speaking English but dreaming in Spanish, has repeatedly traveled to Panama, where his father was born. The artist’s work nearly always involves these sorts of gritty, Latin urban vignettes, often pierced by a wormhole into a bucolic past that’s mostly lost or despoiled worldwide. These are visions both spiritual and deeply uncertain. Even within the imaginary logic of the specific painting, there’s no guarantee that the idyll beyond the door frame is accessible or even exists.

Andrew Krieger, Up North, Edenville, MI, Ceramic, 17 by 16.5 by 15 inches.

Andrew Krieger crushes the world of the diorama. He is the undisputed master of this three-dimensional genre so few artists risk, and one which Krieger inhabits with a pleasing mix of artistic brio and elementary-school goofiness. The artist, who’ s shown in Detroit at Popps Packing and the David Klein Gallery, as well as in Saginaw at the Marshall Fredericks Museum, creates visual narratives that usually involve a 3-D figure in front of a curved background screen. As you move around in front these constructions, changing depth and perspective conjure up an oddball sense of reality. Momentarily, the wooden or ceramic figure at the center of the story springs to life.

In the case of Up North, Edenville, MI, a hale fellow in a down parka and blocky sunglasses waves at the viewer. He’s framed by a shallow ceramic bowl painted in black and white with a surprisingly convincing wintry, wooded scene behind him. The ceramic sculpture of the waving gent in front, a blistering white that pops against its background, is at once funny and dead-on accurate in capturing the 21st-century, up-north Michigan male of the species.

Taurus Burns, To Be Black and White in a Colorblind World, Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches.

The concept of landscape gets pushed to its tight-focus extreme with this black-and-white portrait of a front porch and a man, seemingly grieving, who’s slumped over holding a gun in one hand. Behind him is one of those barred metal doors to prevent break-ins, the sort you see all over iffy neighborhoods. Burns, who’s half Black and half White, has recently produced a series of works examining the nature of this dual identity. With To Be Black and White in a Colorblind World, we’re given a portrait of regret or despair framed by the white metal railings on each side of the porch steps. Burns, who earlier this year had a solo show at Ferndale’s M Contemporary, locates at the exact center of the composition a man hunched over on porch steps, his forehead resting on forearms crossed over his knees. Organizationally, this symmetrically composed portrait resolves itself in a series of superimposed triangles comprised of legs, arms and shoulders — an almost Renaissance conceit in its painterly geometry.

Bakpak Durden, Hanging On, Framed archival print from original negative, 27 x 40 inches.

Who knew a photo of a workman’s winter jacket – the sort Carhartt sells – could be so luminous and affecting? Draped in early morning or late afternoon sunlight on a plywood panel in some indoor construction site, the jacket in Hanging On – a tannish sort of orange – positively glows, while the contrast with the rough plywood and half-erected wall nearby makes the humble overcoat read almost like an object of great beauty.

Durden, who also has the exquisite Renaissance-style painting Mimicry in the show, is something of an artistic polymath. In addition to painting and photography, the artist – with recent solo shows at Cranbrook, the University of Michigan, and Playground Detroit – has turned a remarkable number of walls across Detroit into striking murals. Indeed, it’s hard to spend much time in the city without seeing one.

Denise Fanning, A Soft Place to Land (Rest in Peace), Cotton, beeswax, grass, moss, found remnants of nature, sea grass cordage, 6 x 9 feet.

A Soft Spot to Land (Rest in Peace) by Denise Fanning, who taught for years at the College for Creative Studies but now lives in Mt. Pleasant, creates a peculiar and beautiful “landscape” out of 55 identical off-white square pillows and 55 “nests” or creations she’s delicately placed on each one. While the artist does a lot of studio work and has exhibited in galleries from Detroit to Berlin, lately she’s spent an increasing amount of time out of doors arranging and creating in nature itself – crafting ephemeral installations designed, like much of Scott Hocking’s work, to weather and disintegrate over time.

This pillow field is arranged in a 5 by 11′ grid. If you stand at the narrow end and look up the construction, it does a remarkable job of creating a sense of distance and topography, however orderly and symmetrical. The compositions that have alighted on the pillows are extraordinary miniatures in themselves – tiny essays in natural grace.

Other artists in the show include Mitchell Cope, John Charnota, Joel Dugan, Adrian Hatfield, Scott Hocking, Faina Lerman, Alex Martin, Anthony Maughan, Michael McGillis, Ivan Montoya, Lucille Nawara, Rebecca Reeder, Tylonn Sawyer, Clinton Snider, Millee Tibbs, Graem Whyte and Alison Wong.

 The group show Beyond Topography will be up through Feb. 21 at the Janice Charach Gallery.

 

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