Author: Ron Scott Page 29 of 35

After Dark @ Detroit Institute of Arts

On November 6, 2016

Installation, Detroit After Dark, Image courtesy of the Detroit Art Review

Photography at night has been around since the late 1800’s when photographers were experimenting with exposing a variety of sensitive chemicals to light, first on plates by Louis Daguerre, followed by salt prints on paper by William Talbot. Later in the early 1900’s Alfred Stieglitz began working at night, and in 1932, Brassai published Paris De Nuit, a collection of black and white photographs of the streets of Paris at night.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has turned to its collection under the direction of Nancy Barr, Curator of Photography, to produce Detroit After Dark. She says in her statement in the catalogue, “Detroit After Dark: Photographs from the Collection of the DIA takes a closer look at night photographs made in the Motor City just after 1950 through present day—its city streets and architecture, as well as its diverse and often frenetic music scene.”

For the purpose of this review, this writer will draw a distinction between the journalistic photography (mostly the Detroit music scene) and focus on the art photography in the exhibition.

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Robert Frank, Untitled, Gelatin silver print, 1955

With a Guggenheim grant in his pocket, Robert Frank bought a used Ford in June of 1955 and began a 10,000-mile journey around the United States. Detroit was one destination where he stayed long enough to capture images from Belle Isle to this Romeo strawberry stand at night, illuminated with a string of party lights. After developing and making contact sheets from 760 rolls of black and white Tri-X film, 83 images would be enough to make The Americans, first published in Paris, then eventually the United States. Frank didn’t set out to address the issues that faced the country, but inadvertently became an incontestable witness, using his 35mm Leica Rangefinder, to the solitude of American society.

Scott Hocking, Jefferson at Dearborn, Pigment Print, 2012 Courtesy of the DIA

Scott Hocking, a Detroit artist who has created site-specific sculpture installations and a variety of photographic projects, provides the viewer with a stark image of a lonely building on Jefferson Avenue, formally centered with time exposure that provides a lit building against a Windsor backdrop. The exposure is possible because of the stillness in the frame. Detroit Nights is an ongoing project, documenting the streets, railroads, quiet corners and unpredictable public lighting of Detroit at night. In a statement, he says, “I am interested in forgotten places, and things kept out of sight. I don’t know if this is because I’m from Detroit, a city that has become known for urban prairies and empty factories; but I try to work the same way no matter where I am.” Scott Hocking is represented by the Susanne Hilberry Gallery.

Jenny Risher, Image courtesy of Jeff Cancelosi

Jenny Risher, shown here holding her book with her photograph from the exhibition, is a commercial photographer with a collection of personal work. Known for her book, Heart Soul Detroit, where she interviewed and photographed 50 iconic Detroiters, including Smokey Robinson, Jack White Eminem and Lily Tomlin. Here in this image is Ms. Risher holding open her book, revealing the image from the exhibition, Mr. Porter.

Jenny Risher, Mr. Porter, Pigment print, Courtesy of the DIA

Dave Jordano, Abandoned Brush Park Building, Pigment print, 2010, Courtesy of the DIA

Dave Jordano first established himself as a successful commercial photographer in Chicago working with national print campaigns, before turning his lens to personal work here in Detroit. Jordano was born in Detroit and graduated from the Center for Creative Studies in 1974 with a BFA in Photography. His large image, Abandoned Brush Park Building, dominates the exhibition with its scale depicting the contrast between this abandoned building and the lights of Comerica Park. He says in a statement, “These photographs represent a visual document that speaks to the quiet determination of Detroit residents, both as independent shop operators and as home owners who have survived the long and difficult path of living in a post-industrial city stripped of economic prosperity and opportunity. These photographs speak truth without casting an overly sentimental gaze.” Like other photographers in Detroit, there seems to be a trend in capturing a still image using a tripod to provide the ability to depict a large depth of field and focus, highlighted by a light source.

The Detroit Institute for the Arts and its permanent collection bring powerful imagery in the Detroit After Dark, exhibition. DIA Director Salvador Salort-Pons says in the catalogue, “The DIA is indebted to the photographers committed to their practice in the city and who have contributed to this exhibition. I am grateful to those artists who have gifted their work to the museum and to the patrons who have donated art and contributed funds for the purchase and acquisitions of photographs for the permanent collection.”

Detroit Institute of Arts

5200 Woodward 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue. -Thu., 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat.-Sun.

Exhibition free with regular museum admission. Admission to DIA is free for residents of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties. Others: $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $6 ages 6-17.

Jim Crawford @ Trinosophes

By Ron Scott

On November 1, 2016

In Installation, Paintings, Photography

Jim Crawford, Pile Series, All images courtesy of Glen Mannisto, with assistance form Robert Hensleigh

The prevailing stereotype of Detroit’s ’60s and ’70s iconic Cass Corridor art scene is misleading. Images of beer-swigging, dope-smoking, post-adolescent boys, spitting on studio floors and recycling beer cans into expressionistic, assemblaged sculptures with which they hoped to violate the hallowed halls of the Detroit Institute of Arts come to mind. It was a myth created by romantic souls who tried to rescue bohemia from Detroit’s growing derelict landscape. Of course there was also a considerable population of heady, intellectual /artist types who cowed up around the Detroit Institute of Arts, read books, went to arty films, listened to music other than the MC5, even went to the opera and had jobs too. Artist Jim Crawford who has a mini-retrospective at Trinosophes, a performance space in downtown Detroit, seems like he could have been one of those.

Jim Crawford, Tea Stain Series in Vitrine, 3 x 5 Cards

Crawford’s art is marked by a psychologically reflexive interiority—it occurs more in the mind as noumenon than as object or phenomenon—and makes what seems an ordinary material world into the extraordinary. Simple gestures or processes, replacing the traditional romance of creating a single object, are repeated and accumulated to explore a sense of time and evolved change, and to challenge our perception in an artistic process sometimes referred to as Conceptual Art. In 1970, in a beautifully measured and meditative ritual production, Crawford translated his daily cups of tea at his job at the Michigan Council for the Arts into a very deliberate series of over one hundred tea bag stains on 3”X5” cards. In the Trinosohes gallery, the tannic-colored blots have been arranged on a grid in two display vitrines to accomplish a stunning array of difference and signifying presence. Each stain records a moment with countless daily variables (temperature, emotional presence, gravity, haptics), or what acute perception can distinguish, becoming a sign of those variable influences as much as a thing to perceive in itself.

Jim Crawford, Folded Paper Series, Graphite, staples, paper, 1971 (smallest: 8″ x 12”, largest: 22” x 26”)

Like many artists Crawford works serially, and the Trinosophe exhibition features six main series that he has explored from the late ’60s until now. The most conventional form in the exhibition (created in the early ’70s, and of which seven individual examples are exhibited) is composed of sheets of paper folded into flat, randomly occurring geometric shapes, punctuated with staples, and marked or patinaed with graphite or paint. Created to be two-sided, they are a unique composition like nothing else: resembling geometric clouds (each is magnificently unique, but best experienced together so go see the show), and apprehended or readable more as signs than as objects. As in the best of human productions, the materials have dictated the form. In a public interview at the gallery, Crawford quipped, “I had a long staple gun,” allowing staples to reach and punctuate everywhere on these manipulated forms, depositing dash-like marks, leaving shadows and an almost musical notational presence. The scribbled or shaded graphite illuminates and posits a “natural” surface (think birch bark); and the creases of the folds give the pieces a sense of volume and mass, but therein lies the challenge. They suggest dimensionality or objectivity, yet are ultimately inscrutable, seductively flat signs, abstracted and void of referent.

Jim Crawford, Pile Series, 1972, 20 Untitled photographs (1967, 1972 and 1972) color, black & white photos, paint – 8” x 10”

There is also a suite of photographs that document what Crawford has called the “Pile Series; discovered throughout the city, they record the presence of piles of various industrial or commercial materials that seem, through Crawford’s discerning eye, to achieve the status of sculpture. No doubt he has positioned these twenty images to both serve as ironic description of the identity of the artist (suggesting perhaps that art challenges perception, enabling it to discern “found objects” or objets trouvés as art, thus emphasizing the prominent part that ideas and concepts play in perception), as well as to call attention to the compelling nature of our landscape, and to create a dialogue that compares art to the supposed randomness of everyday material reality. Included in the series are photos of stacks of snow fence, old tires, boxes of fruit, and lumber at a construction site. Each of the photos reveals the particular effect that weather, light, and context play in conditioning both the appearance of the particular stack and our perception of it. The raw quality of the 40-year-old 8”X10” black and white photos and derelict framing of them adds a certain historical charm to the project.

Jim Crawford, Eggshell Series (2015-2016) Mixed media (paint, glitter, walnut dye)

Two recently created series echo Crawford’s earlier strategies for dealing with recycled materials with an emphasis on personal biographical influences. Inspired by his grandmother’s practice of reading tea leaves at the kitchen table, Crawford, while cooking, has recycled cracked egg shells back into their cartons to produce stark abstracted images of the roundness of eggs. Like his grandmother’s tea leaves, the organic byproducts of his everyday life have become signs: a circle in a square, an egg in a carton, dyed with walnut stain from his walnut tree — painted and decaying they are ever changing and evolving. The delicate egg shells may at first appear as mere garbage or waste, but emerge with a powerful, though fragile, talismanic presence.

Jim Crawford, Cat Can Series, 10.5” x 14” x 9.5”, Mixed media, 2015-2016

In another series, Crawford has engaged Midnight, a stray black cat that wandered into his garden, to create the Cat Can Series. “An unlimited supply” of cat food cans from feeding Midnight becomes the material for a somewhat awkwardly stated, perhaps eccentric arrangement of aluminum cat food cans in various conditions: some painted or stained green (Midnight’s eye color), some crushed, some with labels intact (9 Lives and Friskies being the preferred brands), and all enclosed in boxed frames. Employing the same stacking gesture as the early 1970 series, Crawford resuscitates the theme of exploring the visual landscape for architectonic structure.

In wandering through Xavier’s modernist furniture store on Michigan Avenue in Detroit, Trinosophe’s co-director Rebecca Mazzei, along with Joel Peterson, ironically found a stack photos that intrigued her. Pursuing the maker of the photos, she rediscovered the seemingly forgotten artist and art of Crawford. In researching, organizing and designing the exhibition “Jim Crawford,” she has energetically brought to our attention one of the most intriguing figures of the Cass Corridor, one whose work challenges perception and through its changes translates time into evidence for the consideration of big ideas. The exhibition includes various support materials from Crawford’s own archives, such as a post card series and ring binders and files containing Crawford’s copious notations on his projects.

Jim Crawford at Trinosophes – Through December 23, 2016

Thomas Berding @ Oakland University Art Gallery

By Ron Scott

On October 29, 2016

In Paintings

Thomas Berding, Command Tree, 44 X 48″, Oil on Canvas, 2013, Courtesy of Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum Collection

Oakland University Art Gallery opened an exhibition, The Berding Memorandum, on September 15, 2016, with a collection of abstract expressionist work by Thomas Berdling, Professor of Studio Art at Michigan State University. His abstract expressionism has obliviously evolved over several years where earlier work has more reference to the real world, be it landscape or figures. While his work is not a literal translation, there is no mistake the paintings are a response to a particular situation, often referenced in work’s title. An example is the painting Command Tree, 2013, where you find a reference to an orange-yellow tree that comes forward dominating the composition over a re-shuffled landscape with background structures.

He says in an interview with Dick Goody, Director of the Oakland University Art Gallery, “While my paintings are not literal translations of the reference material I use, the paintings of the last five years have indeed been made in response to sources like the ones you intuitively feel are in the work. This includes the screen-based and two-dimensional schematic constructions that visualize this making and unmaking of the world, such as explosion views common in assembly manuals, flow charts, diagrammatic schemes, encrypted texts, among others.”

Thomas Berding, Breakage, Oil on Canvas, 70 X 76″, 2014 All Images Courtesy of Oakland University Art Gallery

Abstract Expressionism, born in the mid-1940s and lead the way for ten years as part of the New York City art scene, made a deep and lasting impression on artist Berding’s age group. It’s not hard to see the remnants of early Pollack, de Kooning, and color similarities with Matisse in Berding’s work. In the work Breakage, we experience a landscape that has a busy foreground, making way to a mid-ground of larger shapes, and upward to a sky with transparent building like shapes. His tools are less brush, and more palette knife and tape removed. Through out his work there is a unified effort to create a color feel, often a thematic color arrangement for a particular painting where a sense of mapping, charting or sorting is taking place.

Many historians feel the AE period was cut short as society sped towards change that was mirrored in daily life of the 1960’s and embraced Pop Art, Minimalism, and later conceptual art that thrived on installation. Looking back over the millennium, movements in art typically lasted longer, and this could be why artists of a certain age still want to explore the qualities they relate to in abstract work as if to say, the period wasn’t yet finished.

Thomas Berding, By Land and By Sea, Oil on Canvas, 70 X 76, 2008

With a palette dominated by green in Land and Sky, this abstraction seems to have an elevated point of view, as if the viewer is located high across the river overlooking the cityscape that leads to a horizon of buildings. The converging yellow shapes create an unreal type of perspective that takes the eye back towards the mid ground of complex color and shape. Richard Diebenkorn started out as a realistic artist, and gradually became an abstract painter that used the landscape in the 1950’s to create his Ocean Park series that depended deeply on his dependence with the local landscape. Here too, Berding give us his distinctively intense yet aloof rendition of his landscape experience, producing an ambiguous degree of abstraction that makes us wonder where he is going with this personal pandemonium?

Thomas Berding, Turning Tables, Oil, Acrylic, Flashe on Canvas, 24 X 24, 2016

In a gallery full of smaller square 24 X 24” work, we experience a work process that some would describe as studies. Here in Turning Tables, Berding gives us a painting that shares a sensibility with Matisse, both in using shape and color. Because smaller work can move along faster, it might be that the artist is using this process to become more spontaneous and intuitive with his internal tools. It’s as if he has said to himself; I need to loosen up and work a bit faster, at least conceptually and see where it goes?

Thomas Berding, born in Cincinnati, Ohio and received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, and over his career has exhibited in many venues through out the mid-west. He has obviously been educated and influenced by modernism with its reductive style, drawn to abstraction, resulting in a personal narrative that expresses a kind of controlled explosion of color and shape. For those living in the Metro Detroit area, the OUAG provides their students, and us with a fresh experience in the abstract expressionistic work of Thomas Berding.

Oakland University Art Gallery

35 Years @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

By Ron Scott

On October 5, 2016

In Paintings

George N’Namdi stands next to work by Detroit artist, Charles McGee, Noah’s Ark # 8, 60 X 45 1984

George N’Namdi opened the current exhibition, 35 Years in celebration of all the N’Namdi galleries since 1981, when he opened his first gallery, Jazzonia, on Harmonie Park in downtown Detroit. I remember that location because the Detroit Artist Market was on Randolph street and myself, and many friends were part of those DAM exhibitions. This exhibition features works collected by George N’Namdi before and after 1981, which includes over 40 artists spanning many genres and mediums.

Educator and art dealer, George R. N’Namdi was born September 12, 1946, in Columbus, Ohio. He attended Columbus East High School in 1965 and went on to graduated from Ohio State University in 1970, before obtaining his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. This exhibition brings together a small selection of work that has been represented in the gallery for a span of near forty years.

Chakiaia Booker, Industrialization, 50 X 59 X 15, 1980

Known for her sculpture made from rubber, and her wearable sculptures, Chakaia Booker was one of the artists supported and exhibited by George N’Namdi in the early eighties. Her work “Echoes in Black, ” was accepted into the Whitney Biennial in 2000. The successful artist exhibits her work at the June Kelly Gallery in New York City and has work in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gerald Jackson, Island People, Mixed Media, 84 X 108, 1985

Born in Chicago, Gerald Jackson gained notice when his work was included in two influential 1970s exhibitions–the 1970 Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, and the 1971 Black Artists: Two Generations at the Newark Museum. Jackson’s Island People is a figurative expressionist work from 1985 where the work outline of figures overlaps within a flatten picture plane.

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Sam Gilliam, 71X 98 X10, Trade Mark, Mixed Media on Canvas-Aluminum, 1994

Sam Gilliam, the African American artists, who was born in the south, eventually spent his life in Washington DC, where he taught painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and at Carnegie Mellon University. Known for his color fieldwork, and a lyrical kind of abstraction, he often worked with shaped canvas and was early to move away from using stretcher bars for his canvases. In the1980s Gilliam’s style changed dramatically to quilted paintings reminiscent of African patchwork quilts from his childhood. In his statement he says, “Only when making the work can I determine the many languages that form the planes on which it is to exist. Like abstract phrases the many intentions of the work (before an audience) passes through an intuitive sieve… The work was not planned, there are ploys, to the way it was laid out and then put together.”

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Alvin Loving, Dreams of Amorous, 61 X 51, 1998

Al Loving (1935–2005) was an Abstract Expressionist painter, and one of the few African American artists recognized for his contributions to the movement. Born and raised in Detroit, he was known for his geometric work using bright color and hard-edge line in his arrangement of cubes and rectangles. Loving receive his BFA from the University of Illinois in 1963, and then his MFA from the University of Michigan in 1965, and soon after moved to New York City. In 1968, he had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum.

The N’Namdi Collection is one of the finest private collections of African-American art in the United States and combines works covering more than a century of art in many genres. As demonstrated in this exhibition, there as been a commitment by George N’Namdi to the contributions of African art and the discourse surrounding contemporary art in the United States. Looking ahead, N’Namdi said “We are putting together an investment team for restaurants and galleries to create a gallery district on Grand River around Rosa Parks. All this development that is taking place downtown will ultimately begin to spread into our neighborhoods.”

The N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

Ray Johnson @ CCS’s Valade Family Gallery

By Ron Scott

On September 27, 2016

In Installation

The Bob Boxes at the College for Creative Studies and the Valade Family Gallery

Ray Johnson, Installation – All images courtesy of Robert Hensleigh

There is a remarkable exhibition at the College for Creative Studies’ Valade Gallery and the subject, Ray Johnson, has haunted me for years. I thought this obsession was because he was a Finnish kinsman with similar, exotic ethnic roots in the Copper Country of Northern Michigan, or maybe because a seminal figure of Detroit art and culture, Gilbert Silverman, famed for his iconic collection of Fluxus art, was his close friend and became his lifelong patron. Of course the great documentary film about Johnson’s life and death, “How to Draw a Bunny” (a must see for anyone interested in Johnson’s artistic strategies), was also instrumental in creating his haunting identity. I thought maybe my fascination with Johnson was that he was a Detroiter who went to Cass Technical High School and then attended the unique and ultimate, progressive Black Mountain College, where the American avant-garde art was born, and where my own poet-model, Charles Olson, taught. While there in the vital Post WWll years Johnson engaged with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Cy Twombly, Fracine du Plessix Gray, and many other art world lights.

But yesterday, curious about his local roots, I went to his childhood home on Quincy Street in Detroit and astonishingly discovered I was born directly behind his house on Holmur Street, the year he left for Black Mountain College. We discovered that my sister went to school with him.

None of this means a thing of course unless you’re Ray Johnson. And then it means everything, because if anything Johnson is about relationships: between people, objects, words, colliding and collaging (his basic gesture as an artist) or putting things together.

rj3-table-2-people

Johnson, often referred to as “the most famous unknown artist in America,” in addition to running with the New York School of famous painters, poets, and composers, spent years developing a network of relationships in the art world via that most democratic of institutions, the United States Postal Service. He basically created the New York Correspondance School (a play on the New York School of Abstract Expressionists and pun on creative movement of his art) and the phenomenon of “mail art” as a way of circumventing the capitalist art market of collectors, galleries, curators, and museums, creating a direct and intimate communication between artists. Using his own very finely crafted collage techniques and a complex personal iconography (rabbits, strange silhouetted portraiture of famous movie stars and artists, homoerotica, spinning on complex language games and puns), he created a network that sent out small-scale art works composed of drawings, photos, and cut-out texts from magazines of movie stars, product packaging, found objects, and ultimately whatever was part of the visual surface of post war popular culture that he swam in.

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In the most significant aspect of Johnson’s mail art project, he asked for additions and collaborations on his work, as well as others he had “sent out,” to redirect and create an alternative visual dialogue among chosen artists. Johnson’s interest in both Zen practices and chance operations (through his close friendship with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham) played a central part of his artistic practice and even more significantly in his enigmatic philosophical vision and life practice. Ultimately the New York Correspondence School attracted thousands of participants becoming a global network that eventually lost its human connectedness, which perhaps prompted Johnson in 1973 to proclaim the New York Correspondence School dead.

The exhibition at the Valade Gallery, The Bob Boxes, is the result of one particular mail art relationship that Johnson had with artist/collagist, Robert Warner. From 1988 until Johnson’s death in 1995, they maintained a correspondence exchanging mail and phone calls. At one point Johnson delivered thirteen boxes of various “mail art” he had created and collected, including found objects from everyday life and popular culture. (It is probable that the famous boxes of “assemblage” artist Joseph Cornell, whom Johnson had admired and befriended, inspired the “boxes” he created for Bob Warner, “The Bob Boxes.”)

rj5-many-tables

Like Cage and, indeed the ultimate assemblage artist, Marcel Duchamp, Johnson was primarily interested in how chance encounters, between people, objects, or words, created new sets of possibilities or connections, or extended the possibilities for making meaning out of the world. He wasn’t interested in a singular system, visual, linguistic or cinematic, but any kind of “relationship” between things that prompted a vital often satirical critique. He referred to his small collages as “moticos” (an anagram for osmotic), created to stimulate or inspire connective tissue in everyday life. In a very real sense then there was no separation between Johnson’s art and life, and his seamless playful landscape provoked many to call him a Neo-Dada artist, a surrealist, which of course he rejected as just one more effort to classify him.

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The Valade Gallery’s exhibition is then really a performance of Bob Warner’s “unpacking” of the 13 boxes that Johnson gave him. Placed on tables, the contents of the boxes — Warner’s humorous title for the exhibition is “Tables of Content” — have been distributed, and the results on each table are a tsunami of the flotsam and jetsam of the American visual landscape that Johnson assembled for Warner and us, providing a ready-made mail art kit for our visual challenge.

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In addition to the “Tables of Content,” there are three vitrines containing early photographs from Johnson’s life in Detroit, including some wonderful drawings that he made while at Cass Technical High School. There are also seven hours of video — ”The Ray Johnson Videos” made by Nicholas Maravel — of Johnson talking about his work and generally performing himself for the camera.

Amazingly “The Bob Boxes” is the first exhibition of Ray Johnson in his hometown of Detroit for over forty years, and the Valade Gallery’s curator, Jonathan Rajewski, has provided a fine context and perspective on the work of one of the most enigmatic artists of the 20^th century.

College for Creative Studies

A.Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education

The Valade Family Gallery 460 W.Baltimore Detroit, MI 48202

Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12 to 5 p.m.