Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

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“Seven Mile and Livernois” @ the Detroit Institute of Art

By

On May 15, 2024

In Installation, Metal, Sculpture

Detroit Artist Tiff Massey Mounts an Exhibition: “Seven Mile and Livernois” at the Detroit Institute of Art

Tiff Massey, Installation image, Courtesy of DAR, 2024

Museums are often risk-averse institutions, choosing their curatorial offerings with an eye to what is safe and canonical. The Detroit Institute of Art has made a provocative and unexpected choice with its just-opened exhibition of Detroit-based sculptor and community activist Tiff Massey.  “Seven Mile and Livernois,” as this year-long exhibition is called, places the artist’s practice squarely in the neighborhood where she grew up while also acknowledging her ties to art history, and in particular to artists whose works in the DIA’s collection shaped her childhood experience.

Massey is the youngest artist to be chosen for a museum exhibition at the DIA, as well as the first Black woman to earn an MFA in metalsmithing from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.  The artworks, 11 in all, range from a piece, Facet, that she created in 2010 when she was still a student at Cranbrook, to 4 recent artworks commissioned by the DIA. (The museum provided funds for fabrication, though the artist retains ownership.)

Tiff Massey, Whatupdoe (part 1), 2024, stainless steel, photo K.A. Letts

As we enter the exhibition, a delicate swag of metal chain is draped high across a deep blue wall.  Through the door into the next gallery, however, we see that this chain is connected to a much longer one that, as it grows in size, goes from ornament to architecture. At its midpoint, individual components reach beyond head-high and we simultaneously shrink from adult to child size and perhaps smaller as we measure our bodies against these monumental links. It is a through-the-looking-glass experience.

The chain, entitled WhatupDoe, is intended by the artist as a love letter to her spiritual community in Detroit and beyond. She celebrates her affection for the city, for its hair salons, fashion boutiques, and coffee shops, its hip hop artists and hair weaves, in the sculptures that extend throughout the exhibition. In a nearby wall title for an older piece, I Got Bricks (2014), Massey directly addresses her audience, “Detroit, I’m designing for us, so we can see ourselves …This represents us building something together.”

Tiff Massey, I Remember Way Back When, 2023, stained wood, photo K.A. Letts

Massey’s intense emotional involvement with her social connections, friends and family is balanced by her acknowledgement of her early art education.  As the artist developed plans for the exhibition with Juana Williams and Katie Pfohl, Associate Curators of Contemporary Art, she chose a couple of artworks from the DIA’s collection that hold special resonance for her: they are now displayed in the galleries along with her own work.  She draws a particularly interesting comparison between her art practice and Stack, a minimalist sculpture by Donald Judd.  In a recent interview in Detroit Cultural she says, “I chose Donald Judd because I remember this piece specifically from when I was a kid and my mom would take me to all of these institutions.” Stack, narrow and tall, climbs militantly up the wall of the gallery, a lacquered green tower of rectangles. In response, Massey has created Baby Bling, an adjacent, long row of objects that reference the hair ties she wore as a child. Made of enormous red metal beads, woven rope and brass, their horizontal orientation implies movement outward, toward caring and community.

Stack by Donald Judd (r.) 1969, plexiglass and stainless steel on the right.   Tiff Massey,  Baby Bling (detail, l.) installation on the left), photo K.A. Letts

Themes of adornment run through the exhibition, rituals involving hair being especially prominent. Across the gallery from Baby Bling we find I Remember Way Back When. Eleven outsize scarlet replicas of Snap-Tight Kiddie Barrettes recall the 1980s when little girls’ hair was carefully dressed by grandmas, mothers, and aunties. And at the end of the gallery, there is an enormous, wall-size homage to the elegant and exuberant hair weave, in ombre shades of green and seemingly endless in its shapes and patterns.

Tiff Massey, Quilt Code 6, Assmbledge, Detroit Institute of Arts, 2024

The other artwork with which Massey has chosen to pair her work is Louise Nevelson’s Homage to the World. The correspondences between this wall relief and Massey’s Quilt Code 6 are straightforward. As the artist developed plans for the exhibition with Juana Williams and Katie Pfohl, Associate Curators of Contemporary Art, she chose a couple of artworks from the DIA’s collection that hold special resonance for her; they are now displayed in the galleries along with her own work. ”Nevelson’s relief derives its power from the accretion of randomly found scraps into a massive wall of chunky wood pieces in sooty black; Quilt Code 6, by contrast, is finer and more literary, composed of carefully curated symbols and signs. As the name suggests, this piece shares characteristics with the American story quilt, a folk art fiber genre used to great effect by Faith Ringgold.

Tiff Massey, 39 Reasons I am not Playing, 2018, brass, photo K.A. Letts

In this exhibition, Massey both speaks for and to her community; she is fluent in the language of the hood and of the academy as she advocates for her city:  “We’re a UNESCO city of design, and I’ve been talking about this in every interview but I don’t think we’re taking that designation seriously enough, and so to me it’s like how can I bring these elements and make sure that we have highly curated, beautiful spaces in the hood too.”

Massey demonstrates her commitment to her city and her people in “Seven Mile and Livernois.” It seems only fair, at least to this writer, that the DIA should take this opportunity to reciprocate by acquiring one of her public artworks for their permanent collection.

Tiff Massey, Whatupdoe, Stainless Steel, 2014, image courtesy DIA.

Tiff Massey’s exhibition, “Seven Mile and Livernois“, at the Detroit Institute of Art, is on display through May 11, 2025. 

 

 

 

 

Michael E. Smith @ What Pipeline

By

On May 10, 2024

In Installation, Mixed Media, Sculpture

Michael E. Smith, Installation view:  What Pipeline, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and What Pipeline, Detroit. – Photos: Alivia Zivich

Entering the dimly lit, modestly scaled, rectangular space that features the Michael E. Smith exhibition at What Pipeline gallery, shy of a single object festooning the walls, a visitor might wonder where they have landed. Sparsely furnished with six red velvet armchairs (c. 1950s?) pushed flat against the walls and arranged asymmetrically around the space, they are conspicuously worn, discolored, and stained.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2024, tape, plastic, LEDs, 4 x 4 x 29.5 in.

Providing dusky illumination via LEDs are three thin, tapered pedestals fabricated of stacked rolls of packing tape that also simulate ashtrays. Such accoutrement suggest an empty, forlorn gathering space or institutional waiting room, perhaps of a hospital, dormitory, sleazy hotel lobby, bus station, or brothel.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2024, basketball, tape, metal rods, 9 x 9 x 16 in.

Soon, one notices an oddity, just 16 inches tall, positioned on the floor: a black orb supported on four slim metal rods that reads as a “character” (as described by Smith) with black taped head, metal arms and legs dwarfed by the furnishings surrounding its mute, frozen presence. Marooned in a world of Big Furniture, the diminutive character appears overwhelmed as it sizes up its location, situation, and intentions, perhaps the avatar of an artist evolving a project.

Sculptor and installationist Smith, born in Detroit in 1977, studied at College for Creative Studies and Yale University, exhibits nationally and internationally, as well as at Susanne Hilberry (since closed) and What Pipeline galleries in Detroit, and now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. A collector of objects (especially chairs), he transports a selection of found materials to exhibition venues and arranges and edits his miscellaneous trove on site preparatory to opening day.

Michael E. Smith, Installation view: Michael E. Smith, What Pipeline, 2024.

After traversing the spartan introductory gallery and proceeding into the adjacent gallery/office, enticing “treats” by Smith greet the exploratory visitor. Delectable objects on wall, table, and floor include: a pair of cherry dotted cakes (bongo drums wrapped in tinfoil) project from the wall; a sheet cake in a take-away box and a gold foil wrapped present topped by a starfish rest on a table; and a heavenly blue, creature-comfort circular rug both suggests an ideal angle from which to view the artist’s trio of offerings, as well as softening the cement floor of the gallery. Not to mention the luminous daylight that floods through the window of the room.

Michael E. Smith, . Untitled, 2024, cake box, foam, 19 x 15 x 4.5 in.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2024, present, starfish, steel rod, 21 x 15 x 19 in.

Quickly enough, one realizes that not all the goodies are especially appetizing, for the cherries are in fact beads and the butter pecan hued frosting of both cakes is formed from repellant, inedible foam. Moreover, the starfish (instead of a florid bow) that decorates the shiny present, is impaled on a steel rod.

Overall, Smith proffers intriguing dichotomies between front gallery and back room spaces in this newly minted manifestation of his installation and object-oriented practice: spare, minimalist waiting room and bona fide artworks stocking the adjacent room; dusky versus light-filled ambiences; empty lobby and rear room coziness; real furniture and faux edibles. Smith’s mastery of both genres, fore and aft, in tandem with the striking, touching introduction of the “character,” whets an appetite for more such artful alloys anon.

Michael E. Smith remains on view through June 15, 2024. The gallery, located at 3525 W. Vernor Highway, is housed in a small, gable roofed building set back from Vernor Hwy with parking directly in front. Learn more about the gallery at [email protected].

Marisol: A Retrospective @ Toledo Museum of Art

By

On April 2, 2024

In Installation, Sculpture

Marisol, The Party, 1965-1966, installation, Toledo Museum of Art, 15 figures, 3 wall panels, painted and carved wood, mirrors, plastic, television set, clothes, shoes, glasses and other accessories. Toledo Museum of Art Collection, photo: K.A. Letts.

It’s far from common for a major artist’s retrospective to drop at Detroit’s doorstep rather than on the coasts, but “Marisol: A Retrospective,” at the Toledo Museum of Art has just landed like a thunderclap, shattering previous dismissive evaluations of the artist’s work and life. Until June 2, anyone with eyes and transportation should be beating a path to this paradigm-shifting survey of a boundary-breaking artist.  For museum visitors who may previously have seen only one or two of Marisol’s pieces, this exhibition will be a revelation.

 Born in Paris in 1930 to an elite Venezuelan family, Maria Sol Escobar spent her early childhood traveling between the U.S. and South America. Despite the family’s comfortable circumstances, Marisol suffered early trauma when her mother, Josefina, committed suicide. In response, she began a prolonged period of silence, a gesture that became a habit. Throughout her life Marisol maintained a Garbo-esque mystique which both intrigued and alienated her audience and may have contributed to later critical neglect of her work.

Marisol arrived in New York in the 1950’s where she studied at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research and the Brooklyn Museum of Art School. Several works from this early period, during which she was influenced by Pre-Columbian clay figures, as well as Rodin’s Gates of Hell, are on display in the museum’s entry gallery, and along with a comprehensive timeline of her life, provides an introduction to the more iconic work that follows.

Although Pop art, with which Marisol was later strongly associated, was in its early stages, her work was first noticed and shown by Leo Castelli in 1957. Spooked by the sudden attention, the artist left for Rome in 1958 and stayed away for two years, a pattern of alternating visibility and absence that repeated itself several times throughout her life. Upon returning to New York in 1960, Marisol found herself drawn to Andy Warhol and his circle. She began to work in assemblage, combining found, carved and drawn components in sculptures that came to define her singular style.  She was a sensation, both artistically and socially. Warhol included her in two of his films, and she was often photographed for Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times Magazine, and Vogue.   Her exotic good looks made her both a victim and a beneficiary of the casual sexism of the time.

Marisol  Baby Girl, 1963 wood and mixed media overall: 74 x 35 x 47 inches (187.96 x 88.9 x 119.38 cm) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1964

The central gallery of Toledo Museum of Art, in which the most iconic of Marisol’s sculptures are displayed, shows Marisol’s art practice during the 1960’s at the most critically successful period of her career.  The quantity and quality of the work is breathtaking. The artist’s output from this period is both intensely personal and often baldly political, formally inventive yet thematically transparent. Though Marisol’s career pre-dated the second-wave feminism of the seventies, and she was never a fully “feminist” artist, many of her pieces are filtered through an unmistakable female identity.

Two of the most celebrated sculptures on display from this period are the enormous Baby Boy (1962-1963) and Baby Girl (1963). These sentimental yet monstrous infants–Baby Boy is 8 feet tall, and Baby Girl, if standing, would reach 10 feet in height—are psychologically fraught comments on the dominant role children play in society’s definition of women as mothers. Each child clutches a tiny representation of the mother, both of whom are likenesses of Marisol herself.  The artist also said that Baby Boy, who is wearing red, white and blue, was a representation of the United States as an infant, heedlessly throwing his weight around on the world stage.

Marisol, Mi Mama y Yo, 1968, wood and mixed media, 74” x 35” x 47” Buffalo AKG Museum, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1964 (K1964:8) © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Though it would be hard to pick out a favorite piece among the many masterworks in the gallery, a few stand out. One is an installation with multiple figures, The Party, which coincidentally is in the Toledo Museum of Art’s permanent collection. A flock of fashionable ladies in mid-century formal attire– and all with Marisol’s face– gather for cocktails, a group portrait of social isolation. Marisol puts an even finer point on her alienation in a photograph taken by John B. Schiff in 1963. The real Marisol sits at a table with two 3-dimensional images of herself in Dinner Date. She is alone yet keeping herself company.

Marisol, Pope John 23, 1961, wood, mixed media, Abrams Family Collection, photo: K.A. Letts.

In many of her assemblages and installations, Marisol shows herself to be wickedly clever at mocking social pretension, political hypocrisy, and male privilege. Her assemblage Pope John 23 (1962) shows Marisol at her most deftly satirical. A barrel-clad pope sits astride a roughly knocked-together hobby horse, its head featuring the face of the artist, literally being ridden by the patriarchy. Marisol created sculptures of prominent political figures such as the Kennedy family, the British royal family and even Lyndon Baines Johnson, holding 3 small birds representing his wife, Lady Bird, and two daughters.

Marisol, The Fishman, 1973, Wood, plaster, paint acrylic, and glass eyes, 68.25 x 28 x 33.25, Buffalo AKG Art Museum Bequest of Marisol, 2016 (2021:37a-g) © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum

At the height of her fame in the late 1960’s, Marisol once again abandoned the New York art world for Tahiti, where she took up scuba diving and spent several years creating a new body of work centered around environmental themes. The artworks in the penultimate gallery at the TMA are devoted to these misunderstood images and objects, which to contemporary eyes now seem prescient. Though Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published in 1962, and the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, the destructive relationship of humans to the planet–and its implications–hadn’t fully registered with the cultural elite. The new work also had a surrealist edge that was at odds with art fashions of that moment such as conceptual art and post-minimalism.   The glossily finished, figurative sculptures of fish she made and then exhibited in 1973 met with bafflement and critical rejection.

Marisol,   John, Washington, and Emily Roebling Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge for the First Time, 1989, wood, stain, graphite, paint, plaster, Buffalo AKG Museum, photo: K.A. Letts

 

Marisol,   Georgia O’Keeffe and dogs, 1977, graphite and oil on wood. 52.5 x 53 x 60.25” Buffalo AKG Art Museum Bequest of Marisol, 2016 (2021:44a-i) © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930-2016

The final gallery in Marisol’s retrospective is filled with maquettes and examples of public art works the artist designed for North and South American sites. Her often controversial commissions featured historical and cultural figures such as the revolutionary Simon Bolivar , Father Damien(a Belgian born missionary to lepers in Hawaii), Mark Twain, Georgia O’Keeffe (and her dogs) and Queen Isabella. A particularly impressive piece is a model for a monument to John, Washington and Emily Roebling, builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, shown crossing for the first time.  Unfortunately the final work was never completed.

After a period of relative obscurity at the beginning of the 21st century, Marisol was the subject of a traveling survey of her work in 2014, organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The exhibition curator, Marina Pacini, stated at the time that Marisol was “an incredibly significant sculptor who has been inappropriately written out of art history.” Indeed, when the artist died in 2016, the headline for her obituary in the Guardian read “Marisol: The Forgotten Star of Pop Art.” This reductive assessment has begun to change through the efforts of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which received the artist’s estate and papers as a bequest. “Marisol: A Retrospective” is a welcome step toward the reassessment and rehabilitation of this neglected visionary.

Gallery Installation, Toledo Museum of Art, sculptures and photographs by the artist during the 1970’s, photo: K.A. Letts.

Marisol: A Retrospective is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator) in cooperation with several major museums, including the Toledo Museum of Art ( Jessica S. Hong, senior curator of modern and contemporary art.)  Exhibition schedule: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Oct. 7, 2023-Jan. 21, 2024; Toledo Museum of Art, March 2-June 2, 2024; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, July 12, 2024-Jan. 6lm2025; Dallas Museum of Art, Feb. 23-July 6, 2025.

 And a Bonus: Caravaggio!

For museum visitors who can make it down to Toledo before April 14, a small but fascinating collection of Renaissance masterpieces awaits. Four paintings by Caravaggio, on loan from The Kimball Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Conn.), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit) form the framework upon which the organizers of this exhibition build their survey of artworks from the Toledo Museum of Art’s own collection.  Caravaggio’s influence is foregrounded here in paintings by Hendrik ter Brugghen, Artemesia Gentileschi, and Jusepe de Ribera, to name only a few.

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.

 

Iris Eichenberg @ David Klein Gallery

By

On October 14, 2023

In Ceramic, Installation, Sculpture, Textile

Iris Eichenberg: Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich? will be at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit though Nov. 4, 2023.

An installation shot of Iris Eichenberg: Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich? will be at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit through Nov. 4, 2023.  (All images courtesy of David Klein Gallery.)

With Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich?, Iris Eichenberg — the German-born, Dutch-educated head of metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art — continues her probing search for roots and meaning, particularly as found in material objects and places in memory. The solo exhibition will be up at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery until Nov. 4, 2023.

“Topoanalysis” is a term coined by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and refers to the psychological study of key sites in our intimate lives. And as the question in the title — “Who am I?” — underlines, this exhibition explores identity and personal history through allegorical representations of people and houses that still echo in Eichenberg’s life.

 

Iris Eichenberg, Academy Way, Wood, bark; 16 ½ by 24 ½ by 10 ½ inches, 2023.

The show comes in three parts, employing very different materials: wood, fabric, and pottery. But this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the artist’s career since she first landed in America, at Cranbrook in 2006. Creative tools in Eichenberg’s hands have included materials as disparate as her grandmother’s silk stockings and silver spoons, colorful birds crammed in painful cages, knitted mittens, glistening ceramic vessels, or, in the case of her 2020 show The Center Piece / The Blank, white and dark-gray discs hung from elegant, wide strips of black fabric. From a distance, the wallscape read almost like modernist architecture.

What Eichenberg said in this writer’s first conversation with her 14 years ago is clearly still as apt as it was then, and amounts to a sort of design philosophy: “I always try to encounter and fight with new material.” Indeed she does.

In Topoanalysis, Eichenberg’s constructed simplified “houses” up to a couple feet tall that look a bit like giant versions of children’s blocks. Each structure, rendered in warm, contrasting wood tones, is a stand-in for someplace the artist lived, where memories and emotions are deeply lodged. Some of these houses are attached to poles with a cross-piece or handle at the far end, suggesting, perhaps, that even a house constitutes a tool.

 

Iris Eichenberg, J.P. Lennepkade 287/289 (Table), Wood, French linen, 30 by 76 ½ by 44 ½ inches, 2023.

It’s worth noting that for all their simplicity, the workmanship on these wooden sculptures is gorgeous, as are their compositional arrangements. An absolute knock-out, even if a total mystery, is J.P. Lennepkade 287/289 (Table), where a house resembling a Monopoly token you’d put on Park Place hangs several inches above the floor, suspended by a wooden dowel and cross-piece hanging from a tidy slot in the middle of a handsomely constructed table.

Interestingly, Eichenberg – an artist of multitudinous talents – milled all the wood that went into Topoanalysis from an old walnut tree that had to be taken down in a friend’s garden.

The artist’s current residence at Cranbrook, designed by Eliel Saarinen, is represented by a squat, gabled affair titled Academy Way that rests on a large, curvaceous piece of bark. (Other houses often sit on a cushion of beige French linen.) As it happens, the bark is not flush with the floor, but has a low “arch” in the center, right where you expect a solid foundation line. Stand back a ways, and you can see light peeking through from the far side.

 

Iris Eichenberg, Wer Bin Eich, French linen, brass weights, charcoal, 100 by 98 by 52 inches, 2023.

Compared to the wood houses, something entirely different is going on with Wer Bin Eich, an eight-foot-tall house built of draped French linen hung from hooks, a little like a quickly erected tent. Of all the works in the show, this is perhaps the most enigmatic, not least because of the rough charcoal sketch facing it on the wall a couple of feet away that echoes its outline in quick, slapdash strokes. If the wooden houses suggest permanence and solidity, Wer Bin Eich trumpets instability and the fragile nature of human constructions.

Peering down at these artifacts are three muted, abstract portraits of friends of Eichenberg’s – Ilse, Ida, and Frida. Their faces are rendered in dribs and drabs of meticulously stitched fabrics, ranging from cheesecloth to horse hair to damask.

 

Iris Eichenberg, Ida, French linen, gold linen, cheesecloth, mopcloth, rabbit fur, produce bag, Chinese silk, 72 by 48 inches, 2023.

Finally, the show is capped by a series of nine dark-gray earthenware vessels, some resting on wooden shelves that almost act as frames, and one cozying up to one of her wood houses.

These are not the fine, glossy ceramics Eichenberg’s made in the past. In their slumping and swelling, these primitive, near-black earthenware vessels feel almost organic – like zaftig body parts — with mouths that yearn to talk or pour. It’s hard not to see them as animate little… somethings.

All in all, Topoanalysis is an intriguing, sometimes dizzying mix. As Wayne State art historian Dora Apel wrote in “Essay’d” in 2019, in a comment that applies equally well to this domestic installation, Eichenberg’s work “evokes alienation and dislocation, combined with a sense of yearning for comfort, warmth, and attachment.”

Iris Eichenberg, Black Earthenware Pot, Wood, black earthenware, various dimensions, 2023.

The solo show Iris Eichenberg: Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich? will be up at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery through Nov. 4, 2023.

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