Category: Mixed Media Page 2 of 7

Sharon Que @ MATE’RIA Gallery

On June 13, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Metal, Mixed Media, Sculpture

Sharon Que, Installation image. All images courtesy of DAR

Born Sharon Querciograssa, Sharon Que opened a new exhibition at the MATE’RIA Gallery on June 8, 2024, with constructed reliefs that rest on the wall, keeping the viewer engaged through exotic material, illustrated line drawings, and intriguing compositions. Que refreshingly sets her oeuvre apart from mainstream American sculpture. Her eclectic collection of disparate objects first confronts the viewer with an aesthetic experience, followed by a precise, calculated, measured, and intellectually investigated, sometimes having scientific connotations.

Sharon Que, Pollination, Mahogany, Plywood, Pine, Gold Leaf 20x31x3.75″

In Pollination, the wooden grid pieces are divided into two fields; squares of solid stained mahogany are juxtaposed against laminated squares of like-sized pine, punctuated with a spill of protruding star-like objects painted and covered with gold leaf. We are left be-dazzled in wonder, in awe of the precision with which the squares are made and arranged.

In an essay by Mary Ann Wilkinson, the former curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, she says, “Que has been making objects for more than thirty years. She credits her awakening as an artist as a consequence of her eye-opening travels to Italy, Greece, and Turkey in the mid-1980s. Que’s deft combinations of physical elements often lead viewers to overlook the subtle emotional undercurrent of her work. Often, the mood seems to be melancholy, evoked by dark coloration, a sense of being anchored or bound, or a suggestion of emotional ambivalence.”

Sharon Que, Roller Coaster, Steel, Wood, Gold Leaf, Paint 29x36x15″ 2024

In Roller Coaster, Que finds a used wooden frame, creates an imaginary metal circular structure, and places it in the upper half of the composition, where it rests and comes forward. The simple line drawing acts as a side view, which we might perceive as an elevation view.

In her statement, she says, “There is a scaffolding system that exists for each of my sculpture exhibitions made up of the interactions with people, nature, music, and art that I have come across accidentally or made great efforts to experience. My imagery can take the form of data visualization algorithms. Algorithmic operations describe motion and growth; data visualization aims to reduce the clutter to make complex data more accessible.”

Sharon Que, I’ll Watch Over You, Wood, Birch Bark, Paint, Gold Leaf, 2024

Those familiar with Sharon Que’s work will notice motifs that often reoccur. In “I’ll Watch Over You,” the squares of wood appear with a drawing of a previous oval sculpture on the left (Dear Mr. Fantasy), and the repetition of a line matrix forms a field on the right side. In addition, she is repeatedly drawn to using the same tree bark as a background (Birch) while finding comfort in a band of colored strips next to her geometric field of circular shapes.

Sharon Que, That Long Lonely Highway, 9.5×16.5X2.25″ Wood, Birch Bark, Paint, Gold Leaf, 2024

In an interview with Sharon in 2014, I asked her about influences in her work, and she responded by talking about walks in the woods and at the beach; she said, “I was working simultaneously with magnetic sand from Lake Michigan and a two-dimensional image of the field of force around a magnet. In retrospect, it seems obvious to put the two together, but the obvious sometimes evades me.” In response to a question about her family, she says, “Some of my ancestry goes back to Emilia Romagna in Italy, where Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini all originated. Before that, in ancient times, this region was inhabited by Etruscans, the undisputed masters of bronze casting.”

Simone DeSousa, the gallery owner, says that Sharon Que approaches her work from a triad of content, material, and technique, looking for synergy among the three. She uses recurring images from nature and geometry to reveal her own “coded inner life.

My personal experience with Sharon started when she was a middle school student at Shelby Jr. High School. She was taking my art class, and there was a brief introduction to ceramics. It was her turn after I did a rather crude demonstration of using the electric potter’s wheel. She dropped a large clump of stoneware down, centered the clay without effort, and pulled a beautiful, perfect cylinder with ease. At that moment, it was clear the teacher became the student.

It is hard to place Que’s work in a historical context. Still, in some ways, her work reminds me of the work of Joseph Cornell, a collector of objects with ambiguous meanings and mysterious connections. In both Que and Cornell, their work becomes a metaphor for their lives.

Transcending a simple literal reading, Que’s work explores the mysterious link between the known and the unknown. In each piece, she dips into her trove of life experience and formulates an expression that is exclusively hers, a very personal sensibility, and original.

Sharon Que earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in 1986. Her works are part of the permanent collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the public sculpture on the campus of Oakland University. She has also exhibited in Venice, Italy, San Francisco, and Chicago and extensively in the metro Detroit area.

**Sharon Que’s Ice Cream Castle exhibition will be on view at the MATE’RIA Gallery through August 10, 2024.**

Michael E. Smith @ What Pipeline

By Dennis Nawrocki

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].

Valerie Mann @ Bloomfield Birmingham Art Center

By K.A. Letts

On May 29, 2023

In Mixed Media

“Good Grief” by Valerie Mann is on exhibition at the Bloomfield Birmingham Art Center

Spidery wire grids that cast shadows on the gallery walls, subtly worn fabrics, discarded electrical cords and occasional flashing lights populate a solo exhibition of recent work by Michigan artist Valerie Mann. “Good Grief,” now at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center until June 1, shows this mid-career creative, once again, to be a master of her materials. An inveterate collector of scavenged bits and pieces, Mann finds creative promise in unloved discards that speak of a previous life and re-purposes them to tell a story of loss, recovery, and resilience.

Unlike many artists who are newly enamored of upcycling in their art practice, Mann’s childhood on an Indiana farm birthed her make-and-mend mentality and honed her appreciation for the expressive potential of discarded objects and commonly available commodities. As she points out, “I’ve worked this way long before it was cool.” Her virtuosic use of reclaimed oddments perfectly illustrates a moment when contemporary art trends catch up with the long-held vision of an individual artist.

Valerie Mann, Safety Net, 2021, reclaimed fabric and wire, thread, steel, 39” x 44” x 6,” All images by K.A. Letts

In formal terms, the best works in “Good Grief” are four large wall assemblages made of various common materials arranged in loose grids. Each beautifully crafted, tapestry-adjacent artwork has its own visual vocabulary and tells an emotive story that transcends mere narrative. Each invites us to a slightly different meditative state, weaving the familiar with the fantastical.

The ethereal Safety Net evokes feelings of weightless consciousness at the boundary of sleep and wakefulness. Carefully sewn, empty pockets of reclaimed cotton tulle in subtle tones of pink and green are reminiscent of small nets used in home aquariums, and we feel ourselves slipping through them to the cloud shadows beyond. In this liminal space, the poetic and the practical are perfectly balanced.

Valerie Mann, Spill, 2023, utility wire, 73” x 60” x 5”

In Spill, Mann has chosen a relatively anonymous base component—workaday galvanized steel utility wire—in order to let the rectangular forms, interconnected and repeated in varying sizes, dominate the composition. We can almost hear the silvery sound of pins or nails or paper clips dropping as she catches the moment in mid-fall. The relative featurelessness of the wire shortens the perceptual distance between the physical forms and the shadows on the wall behind them, setting up a visual fugue–the shape introduced in substance and repeated in shadow. The result is a satisfying contrapuntal composition.

The artwork that most directly addresses the exhibition’s theme of loss is Lamentations, a recent winner of the BBAC President’s Award. Tiny bits of unrecognizable detritus, charred fragments in small bags of tulle, muslin, and lace, illustrate a state of sorrow felt by the community as well as the individual. It reminds us that grieving is both a collective and a solitary pursuit. The title Lamentations recalls Biblical references to sack cloth and ashes. The emotional contrast between the delicate containers of reclaimed fabric and the raw, burned contents within captures the way in which unspeakable loss is contained within public conventions of mourning.

Valerie Mann, Lamentations, 2022, reclaimed fabric, thread steel, ashes, 49” x 67” x 5″

The mood lightens considerably with Correspondence, an exuberant assemblage made from tangled rows of various wires, extension cords and blinking Christmas lights. Who knew that electrical supplies could come in such variety? The composition of the piece, with its more-or-less orderly lines of looping scribbles, suggests a kind of calligraphy, as if the artist is writing us a cheerful holiday letter. The informal, yet intentional, quality of the composition is reminiscent of late paintings by Cy Twombly.

Valerie Mann, Correspondence, 2023, reclaimed wire, cords, lights, and steel, 72” x 68” x 4”

Several small works on paper and wall assemblages round out the offerings in “Good Grief.” Good Grief, Hold; Good Grief, Detach; Connect, and Relate are based on the larger pieces, transpositions of the wall constructions themselves into two-dimensions. Along with Good Grief V and Good Grief VI, these seem less consequential than the larger assemblages. While skillfully executed, the two-dimensional watercolors, collages and drawings lack the visceral energy and textural interest of the three-dimensional work. Several smaller wall-mounted constructions, Uncontained, Good Grief, Connect and Compartmentalize embody the feelings of detachment and isolation with which we can all identify post-pandemic.

Valerie Mann, Good Grief, Hold, 2022, watercolor, gouache, graphite, 16” x 20,”

The artworks in “Good Grief,” many of which Mann created during her residency in June of 2022 at the Glen Arbor Art Center in Leelanau County, Michigan, address emotions that have been very much front and center in our shared consciousness since COVID-19’s assault on our complacency. Mann describes her creative motivation: The ideas I’ve been thinking about for the last few years are grief; how we individually, collectively, and communally experience grief; how we process grief and maintain some of our wholenesses or become more whole; how we learn about ourselves and our connections to the universal experience of grief.

Valerie Mann, Good Grief, Connect, 2022, found objects, linen thread, 24” x 26” x 2”

Our confidence has been shaken. More sensitive to dislocations in the community than most, Mann possesses the formal means to speak for all of us about our collective loss. Through the artworks in “Good Grief,” she has performed a kind of exorcism and a ritual of remembrance which we can all share.

Valerie Mann, Good Grief, Relationships,2022, watercolor, collage, 16” x 20,”

Valerie Mann has been making, exhibiting, and selling her work in the U.S. and abroad for over 30 years. In 1989, she earned a BFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in 1991 was awarded an MFA in sculpture from Michigan State University.

Good Grief by Valerie Mann is on exhibition at the Bloomfield Birmingham Art Center

Concerning Landscape @ Detroit Artists Market

By Michael Hodges

On February 4, 2023

In Assemblage / Collage, Ceramic, Fiber, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture

An installation shot of Concerning Landscape at Detroit Artists Market, up through Feb. 18. Image courtesy of Michael Hodges.

Over the centuries, the venerable landscape painting has evolved far from the Dutch masters who first perfected the genre — a fact underlined by the heterogeneous work in Concerning Landscape, up through Feb. 18 at both the Detroit Artists Market and the new Brigitte Harris Cancer Pavilion at the Henry Ford Cancer Institute in Detroit.

Curator Megan Winkel has adopted a refreshingly ecumenical point of view in pulling this together. Works range from Ann Smith’s intriguingly peculiar sculptures with their bunched reeds and dangling root systems to Carla Anderson’s photographic prints of geologic forms, including lyrically striated rocks in a spring in Yellowstone County, Wyoming.

A fan of the grand view? Not to worry. Concerning Landscape also embraces figurative vistas, like Helen Gotlib’s meticulous intaglio print, West Lake Preserve II, or Bill Schahfer’s lush photo study, Lagoon Life.

Helen Gotlib, West Lake Preserve II, Intaglio print, carved birch panel, palladium leaf; 2021. All Images courtesy of DAM

“West Lake Preserve” places the viewer right in the tall weeds, looking up a small valley to a pond and woods, a highly satisfying view. The large print’s divided into eight separate panels, and with the exception of a little dull orange at the top, it’s mostly a duotone essay in sepia and black. The photographic print, Lagoon Life, by contrast, stars a white ibis posing beneath a jungle crush of palm trees that all loom, menacingly, over the elegant bird’s head.

Winkel comes at all this curation from an interesting vantage point. She’s the manager and curator for the Healing Arts Program at Henry Ford Health Systems in Detroit, tasked with buying art for the sprawling medical empire. “Curatorial projects for me are mostly big buildings now,” she said, “and thinking about all the ways people can experience art when they’re not seeking it out.” The landscape, she adds, has understandably long found a home in medical centers given its generally soothing visions of a natural world far beyond the reach of the artificial light of the hospital ward.

Landscape as an art subject, of course, has a long, respectable history. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed the genre, and the walls in upper-class homes were sometimes painted with pastoral views. But the status of the landscape plummeted in the Middle Ages, when religion elbowed every other art subject aside. Indeed, the natural world was reduced to a mere afterthought, and one with generally lousy perspective, to boot.

Things began to turn around in the Renaissance, particularly during Holland’s “Golden Age” in the late 16^th and 17^thcenturies, when an exquisite sensitivity to landscape and weather welled up in many studios, yielding in the best cases – van Ruisdael comes to mind — breathtakingly believable clouds and storm-tossed skies. Indeed, an online essay by the National Gallery of Art notes that “with their emphasis on atmosphere, Dutch landscapes might better be called ‘sky-scapes.’” (The Detroit Institute of Arts, by the way, has an outstanding collection of Golden Age Dutch paintings, well worth seeking out on your next visit.)

Catherine Peet, Looking Up from the Deep, Mixed media, 10” diameter.

The one piece in Concerning Landscape that gives van Ruisdael a run for his money is the vertiginous, gorgeous, Looking Up from the Deep by Catherine Peet, which you’ll find at the Henry Ford Cancer Pavilion gallery. This delicate sunrise or sunset-tinged cloudscape feels like it should be peering down at you from the dome of some state capitol, an impression strengthened by its circular frame.

Sharing some of the same warm tones but at the far abstract end of the spectrum is Carole Harris’ mixed-media Desert Flower. The 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow has constructed an overlapping stack of hand-made fiber sheets that read like thick, highly textured paper, in colors ranging from cocoa to an alarming red peeking out beneath all the others.

The simplicity of this particular conceit is striking, as is Harris’ ability to make real drama out of colors that only emerge as narrow strips visible beneath the warm brown sheet on top. That Desert Flower pushes the boundary of “landscape” goes without question – so, too, the fact that it kind of knocks the wind out of you.

Carole Harris, Desert Flower, Fiber, 2023

Russian transplant Olya Salimova, currently on a one-year BOLT Residency with the Chicago Artists Coalition, gives us something entirely different with her Body into Dill, one of the most original and daffy conceptions in the entire show. The centerpiece of this photograph is a rectangular garden space – disturbingly, about the size of a grave – that’s dug into the patchy lawn of some unpretentious backyard. Metal garden edging sunk in the turned-up dirt sketches a simple human shape, rather like police outlines of dead bodies on the sidewalk. Within that human-like enclosure, someone – Salimova? — has planted dill weed.

Its obvious imperfections are part of what makes this image so compelling. The yard clearly needs work, and the plantings in the “body” are scattered, newly dug and unsubstantial — apart from some vigorous leaf action filling up the head.

Olya Salimova, Body into Dill, Photography, 2021.

For those who enjoy a little disorientation in their photography – And when well done, who doesn’t? – Jon Setter’s collection of a half-dozen large prints, all up-close shots of building details, is a delight to behold. Each reads as an abstract design in 1920s Russian Constructivist mode. But in one case you’re looking at parallel diagonals on the late, lamented Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak, and in another, the Detroit Free Press building downtown on West Lafayette. As a group, these deliberately confusing framings are both mischievous and fun to examine.

Jon Setter, Purple and Gold with Shadow (Detroit Free Press), Archival pigment print, 2021.

Finally, Scenic Overlook 2 by Sharon Que, an Ann Arbor sculptor who also does high-end violin restoration, might remind you of a minimalist diorama minus the glass case. On a simple wooden shelf, Que’s sacked two smaller pieces of wood topped by a chalky white boulder or peak – part of the fun is the uncertainty — next to which sits a big, black, bushy… something.

Let’s stipulate that the white form is, indeed, a mountaintop. Call the spiky black, roundish thing next to it a plant, and you’ve got a surprisingly convincing perspective study of a bush and a white peak far, far in the distance – never mind its actual proximity in the assemblage.

Is it weird? Is it oddly compelling? Yes and yes.

Sharon Que, Scenic Overlook 2, Wood, magnetite, paint; 2016.

Concerning Landscape at Detroit Artists Market, up through Feb. 18.

Scott Hocking @ Cranbrook Art Museum

By Michael Hodges

On November 16, 2022

In Assemblage / Collage, Installation, Mixed Media, Photography, Sculpture, Video

An installation view of Scott Hocking: Detroit Stories at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Detroit Stories is up through March 19, 2023. Image courtesy of Cranbrook Art Museum

There was a time, not so long ago, when most suburbanites and even some Detroiters regarded our grand, dilapidated city as an embarrassment. It would take youngsters just out of college in the early 2000s, dazzled by the postwar-Berlin landscape and surfeit of abandoned buildings to explore, to start to write a different narrative that didn’t run away from the city’s blemishes, but celebrated the beauty to be found within our fabulous ruins.

Scott Hocking, a 40something working-class kid from Redford Township, was in the forefront of that cultural vanguard two decades back, and his early forays caught the attention of a nation accustomed to ignoring Detroit. Luckily for those unfamiliar with his work and those who love it alike, the Cranbrook Art Museum has just opened his first career retrospective, Scott Hocking: Detroit Stories, up through March 19, 2023.

After getting his degree at the College for Creative Studies, Hocking established himself as one Detroit’s most articulate storytellers, creating work that reminded the world that the Motor City, for all its problems, is a mythic place deeply rooted in the American consciousness.

Starting in 2008, Hocking – impoverished like many students after graduation – began working with that great Detroit resource, found objects, out of sheer necessity. They were about all he could afford. But unlike the gifted Cass Corridor artists from the 1970s and 80s, who plowed the same field, Hocking wasn’t just picking up junk and creating artful collage or 3-D pastiche. His ambitions were epic in scale, and it quickly became clear his was a unique voice in a city increasingly crowded with interesting artists.

Scott Hocking, Ziggurat—East, Summer, 2008, installation view Fisher Body Plant 21, Detroit. Photo Courtesy of Scott Hocking and David Klein Gallery, Detroit.

Hocking’s first grand conceit lit up the art world like a meteor — and vanished almost as quickly. Collecting some 6,201 wooden “bricks” that paved the concrete floors of Fisher Body Plant 21, a crumbling auto factory near the east-side tangle of railroad tracks known as Milwaukee Junction, Hocking built, block by repetitive block, a majestic Ziggurat or stepped pyramid. Set in the dead center of a vast, rubble-strewn factory floor and framed by two rows of industrial “martini columns,” the massive structure looked, for all the world, like an artifact from a lost civilization. For pure sculptural drama, Ziggurat was unbeatable – mysterious and jaw-dropping all at the same time.

“I always try to explain the beauty I see in Detroit,” Hocking’s said, and it amounts to a sort of professional ethic. And indeed, his creations go a long ways toward accomplishing just that. For its part, Ziggurat quickly got national exposure. A photographer, Sean Hemmerle, rounded a corner while exploring the city’s industrial infrastructure and happened upon the monument unawares. In an interview with The Detroit News, he confessed it knocked him right off his feet. The picture he produced would end up running across a full page and a half in Time magazine as part of an essay on Detroit.

Unfortunately, Ziggurat had a short shelf life. In a development completely unrelated to the sculpture, the EPA bulldozed all the floors in Fisher Body Plant 21 to clear out toxic debris – including Hocking’s sober stepped pyramid. But it hardly matters. Also a talented photographer, he documents all his constructions so they live on long after they’ve degraded or disappeared.

It’s also worth noting, whether intentional or not, that Ziggurat works superbly at the symbolic level. Had Hocking erected a tombstone in a dead auto factory, it’d be a gesture both banal and trite. But a ziggurat, like the pyramids, is a funerary object — even if that’s not our first association upon seeing it. It’s the oblique nature of the reference that gave the doomed structure its pathos.

It has to be said that Hocking’s a veritable artistic polymath, with work ranging from the large-scale sculptures to installations to the haunting series, Detroit Nights, where he documents the dark city using available light. In the words of the show’s short introductory essay, Hocking – part archeologist and archivist – “[uncovers] layers of history, meaning and memory, with a historian’s sense of discovery and a writer’s craft of storytelling.”

Word to the wise: don’t miss his series of portraits of boats abandoned on Detroit streets.

Scott Hocking, The Secrets of Nature, 2012 / 2014 / 2022, Fiberglas, wood paint, metal, concrete, various found objects, Courtesy of and David Klein Gallery, photo by deo Owensby.

One of the more striking assemblages on display, both funny and daunting, is the wall-sized Secrets of Nature. Here Hocking utilizes figurative artifacts, human and animal alike, found at what he calls “tourist traps and roadside attractions” – in particular, a clutch of Bible characters from the former Good Shepherd Scenic Gardens up north in Mancelona. The installation looms high above the viewer with dozens of saints and sinners peering down at you. The work’s got a weird depth. In the words of the accompanying label, Secrets focuses on “creation and destruction mythologies … and ancient prehistoric wisdom.”

Scott Hocking with The Egg and the MCTS, 2012, Photo Scott Hocking; Courtesy the artist and David Klein Gallery.

Another of Hocking’s astonishing, large sculptures was The Egg in Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, the towering wreck on Michigan Avenue now being renovated by the Ford Motor Co. into high-tech office space — one of the most recognizable symbols of Detroit’s decline.

Using shattered pieces of marble that had cracked off the walls along one of the upper-story hallways after decades of freeze and thaw, Hocking painstakingly assembled thousands of shards to create a symmetrical ovoid sculpture that’s easily nine feet tall. The design has an almost Japanese aesthetic in its use of irregular, jagged elements — albeit all the same thickness – to produce something elegantly and breathtakingly symmetrical.

Workers doing asbestos removal before Ford acquired the depot helpfully suggested to Hocking that the egg’s weight might be too great for the floor. So they built a structural support system right below to prevent collapse.

The Egg reflects Hocking’s interest in geometric shapes, but as with Ziggurat, you can read something more into the design – in this case, birth and renewal rather than death.

Of course, this being Detroit, making art out of the city’s desolation exposes you to the charge of “ruin porn,” the cheap shot leveled most frequently at outsiders who can’t refrain from taking pictures of our astonishing dilapidation – like the French photographers and authors Romain Meffre and Yves Marchand, whose 2010 “The Ruins of Detroit” scandalized Michiganders but dazzled the world.

Cranbrook Art Museum Director Andrew Satake Blauvelt, who curated the show, isn’t buying the allegation. “In this case, Scott is from Detroit,” he said, creating actual art in these buildings, not merely gaping. “It’s not just depressing pictures that will go in a magazine,” Blauvelt said. He points out that College for Creative Studies Prof. Michael Stone-Richards, who wrote an essay for the exhibition catalog, “also references the idea of ruins,” noting the fascination has a long history – indeed, going back to at least the 17^th century, when Germans of means started traveling to Italy in search of the ancient and profound. “We go to Rome to venerate the ruins from past centuries,” Blauvelt said, because like Detroit, “they tell a story.”

Scott Hocking, Celestial Ship of the North (Emergency Ark) AKA The Barnboat #0721, 2016, installation view, Port Austin, Michigan. Photo Courtesy of Scott Hocking and David Klein Gallery, Detroit.

Not all Hocking’s remarkable constructions are in the Motor City. Indeed, he’s been invited to create work around the world. But one of his most recent and compelling pieces is found in Michigan’s thumb outside Port Austin – where he created an enormous sculpture as part of the “barn art project” first launched by former Public Pool gallerist Jim Boyle along with Steve and Dorota Coy, two artists who go by the monicker Hygienic Dress League. The project’s turned four old barns scattered around the countryside into art objects both oddball and beautiful. (See especially architect Catie Newell’s “Secret Sky.”)

With permission from the owner, Hocking deconstructed an 1890s barn starting to slump and rebuilt it into an ark-like sculpture that hangs off several telephone poles — a fitting metaphor, many would say, for our imperiled times.

It’s often said that the arts have “saved” Detroit. And it’s indisputable that at the turn of the century, Detroit and the state of Michigan were fortunate in having a rich crop of talent who made the Motor City their subject long before it became chic – among them Taurus Burns, Clinton Snider, Corine Vermeulen and Andrew Moore. While Hocking’s work is the most peculiar and original of the bunch, they’ve all helped Michiganders and the world at large see Detroit in a fresh light.

Scott Hocking and Clinton Snider, Relics, 2001. Photo by deo Owensby.

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