Category: Mixed Media Page 2 of 7

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery

On October 29, 2024

In Drawing, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University

“Echoes from the Rust,” Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Exhibition installation. All photos by K.A. Letts

It’s a tall order to ask a few to speak for the many, as these six artists from Detroit and Pittsburgh have been chosen to do in the exhibition “Echoes from the Rust,” on display at Elaine L. Jacob Gallery until January 10, 2025. The expansive theme of resilience in the face of hardship and of the importance of ethnic identity, immigration, labor, and location in the region’s artistic production could easily encompass the stories of 60 artists…or six hundred. But these half-dozen accomplished makers of images and objects, selected by independent curator Kemuel Benyehudah, describe as well as anyone can how midwestern values are shaped by personal experience, geographic displacement, and economic adversity.

Hubert Massey, Cityscape of Detroit, 1999, charcoal drawing on paper.

Narrative art enjoys exceptional credibility in the Midwest, where the ghosts of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera lurk in the consciousness of several of the exhibition’s artists. Eminent Detroit muralist Hubert Massey’s reverence for the craft of drawing is evident in the two semi-circular charcoal works on paper displayed on the gallery’s main floor. In these preparatory drawings for his frescos in the Detroit Athletic Club, carefully rendered architectural features of Detroit form a backdrop for monumental figures that would be at home in a depression-era WPA mural. N.E. Brown, of Pittsburgh, likewise traffics in the archetypal, with meticulously painted scenes of workers that range from the miniscule “Blue Collar” to “The Mill,” in which a masked and gloved worker rendered in burnt wood to graphically evokes the heat and dim light of an industrial environment.

N.E. Brown, Blue Collar, 2024, oil on canvas.

Like several other artists in the exhibition, Adnan Charara is an immigrant delivered in 1982 to Detroit by political upheaval in his native Sierra Leone. Charara’s family of Lebanese descent found a home in the Middle Eastern diaspora of Dearborn, while the artist himself found a vocation in fine art after completing his education in environmental studies and urban planning. Charara is that odd combination of a highly educated, yet self-taught, artist. Through his extensive self-guided studies, he has arrived at a style of expression that seamlessly combines a variety of art historical styles with his comic sensibility.

Adnan Charara, Unconscious, 2006, oil on canvas.

Charara’s three black and white silkscreen prints of workers, created in 2014, are reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s DIA murals, but represent less an homage to Rivera than Charara’s direct observations of industrial workers from the same source materials. Two large canvases, more typical of his current style, are wiggly, jittery masses of small figures crawling over and across a more-or-less undefined, yet urban, space. Hieronymous Bosch might recognize and approve of the anxious yet optimistic citizens of this no man’s land.

Omid Shekari, Is there a way Out, 2023, acrylic on industrial canvas.

Omid Shekari, another global transplant, arrives at the gallery from Iran by way of Pittsburgh. Displaced by the political upheavals in his native country, Shekari vividly remembers his experience as the victim of an oppressive regime, a past that continues to shape his art practice. He says, “My work looks at power and questions the levels of violence that it causes, as well as possibilities to resist such a phenomenon.”

Shekari’s musings on questions of political power and its oppressive use take form as imaginary architecture, metaphors for the cultural and political structures that imprison humanity. Seen as if from above, Body – Nation – State’s wall-mounted metal structure evokes a dream-like sense of displacement juxtaposed with a brutal reminder of human vulnerability. In the middle of this miniature built environment, a small piece of meat adds a jarring note of corporeality. Human fragility hangs suspended and displaced, surrounded by an edifice both shadowy and solid. The same aerial point of view shows up in Shekari’s painting Is There a Way Out, depicting a claustrophobic vision of a nation imprisoned. The same theme is revisited in his metal sculpture, Nation [government-bank-armed forces-prison] State, a seemingly impenetrable labyrinth for holding in –or keeping out–something. Is it information? Free thought? Free expression?

Halima Afi Cassells, Gold Cash Gold, 2024, paper cut.

Halima Afi Cassells views the state of the Midwest with guarded optimism through the lens of her deep cultural roots in the city of Detroit. Her carefully crafted paper cuts acknowledge the importance of technical mastery in a region known for making things. Three delicate artworks privilege the aesthetic over the political, but her strong social justice message is fully displayed in her 17-minute video, Detroit Future State. Composed of two parts, Detroit Future State is a polemic in which the ideal is contrasted with the real. In the first part of the video, an elegantly clothed and coiffed Cassells describes a utopian Detroit future as if it has already come to pass, with community gardens, abundant housing, and adequate healthcare. At the end of this blissful description, Cassell trades her fashionable costume for down-to-earth street clothes and delivers—in black and white–a wry description of things as they actually are in the city.

Josh Challen Ice, Held Together, 2024, plywood, plastic, construction lumber, ratchet strap, blue tape, inkjet print.

The exhibition’s underlying theme honors the importance of labor in defining the soul of the rustbelt, past and present. It finds its most elegant expression in constructions by Pittsburgh artist Joshua Challen Ice. Ice honors the value of beauty and the importance of craftsmanship in the making of things. He creates each object and installation, often from upcycled materials, with precision while leaving evidence of his labor in the form of clamps, stamps, and straps. His remarkable sculpture, Held Tight, is an impressive example; it replicates the shape of a strand of DNA beginning at ground level and traveling upward. Beautifully created in wood and wrapped around one of the gallery’s central pillars, the construct echoes the architecture of the spiral staircase nearby. Left on one of the crosspieces, as if by accident, is a workman’s jacket, a reminder that these unique and impressive objects are made by someone.

“Echoes from the Rust” is an exhibition in which superior technical and formal expertise serves the artists’ progressive vision. Each artist’s output reflects, in its own way, a shared ethic of hard work, craftsmanship, and social justice. There is an abiding optimism in the work that describes an often neglected part of America, brought together here in a celebration of resilience and grit.

“Echoes from the Rust,” Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Installation. Background: Hubert Massey Cityscape of Detroit, 1999, charcoal drawing on paper. Foreground: Josh Challen Ice, Absent Hands, 2024, construction lumber, ink stamp, concrete.

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, on display until January 10, 2025.

Lester Johnson @ Stamelos Gallery

By Sean Bieri

On September 27, 2024

In Mixed Media, Paintings, Prints

Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works, September 12-December 8, 2024, Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn

Lester Johnson, Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works, Installation View

Before visiting the exhibition Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works, give a listen to the 1954 jazz standard, performed by the Miles Davis Quintet, that lends the show its title (if you forget, there’s a QR code near the front of the gallery that will take you to it). Calling the tune “toe-tapping” is a little corny, but — see if you can resist. A wall plaque says the song celebrates “four cherished things in life: truth, honor, happiness, and love.” Those all seem to be in short supply of late, replaced instead by bias, expediency, dopamine hits, and heart emojis. But there’s plenty of all four on vivid display on the walls of the Stamelos Gallery, as venerable Detroit artist and educator Lester Johnson takes every opportunity to share his spotlight with a pantheon of family, friends, artists, ancestors, teachers, musicians, and personal heroes that have helped shape and inform his art over the course of his long career. Consider the second part of the show’s title: it’s not “Selected Works of Lester Johnson,” but “Lester Johnson’s Selected Works,” a subtle difference that shifts the focus more to the works, all of which are, to some extent, group efforts, even if only via musical inspiration. This is true of the work of many artists, but Johnson, in the titles of his art and in his commentary on wall labels throughout the show, foregrounds this communal aspect, never missing a chance to generously acknowledge his collaborators and muses.

Lester Johnson, Elaine’s Gift, 2010 Fabric, fiberglass, paint, and tape.

Notice the number of titles that include the names of others: Marlene’s Gift; Elaine’s Gift; Claudia’s Choice, a nod to a friend who brought back printed cloth from a trip to Africa for Johnson to use in his art; Lynn’s Song, a multicolored work in cast paper dedicated to Lynn Forgach, director of the Exeter paper company in New York, with whom Johnson collaborated in the early ‘80s at the suggestion of another great Detroit creative, Al Loving. The tag for the piece even includes nods of gratitude to the student apprentices at Exeter for helping Johnson expand his abilities.

Lester Johnson, Alma Thomas, Digital Print, 2018.

The painter Alma Thomas, whose mosaic-like abstractions share the bright hues used in many of Johnson’s works, is honored in a tapestry-like digital print. The print itself is mostly in muted browns and blues, a collage combining African motifs, a photo of women stitching a quilt, a gnarled glove holding an auto worker’s ID badge, and a picture of Thomas at work on a painting, suggesting a kinship across time and space between these various forms of the labor of Black hands.

Lester Johnson, A Garland of Praise Songs for Rosa Parks, 2013 Fabric, wood, and paint.

A Garland of Praise Songs for Rosa Parks is dedicated to the storied civil rights icon, as well as to America’s longest-serving Black judge, Detroit’s Damon Keith. (The piece resides in the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University.) It’s the largest example on display here of Johnson’s “totems” — staff-like cylinders of wood or fiberglass, wrapped in twine, tape, reeds, digital prints featuring colorful patterns, or, more often and most strikingly, fabric printed with African designs. Attributed on Johnson’s website to his African and Native American spiritual heritage, the totems call for “a cross-cultural exchange of energy and vision.” Standing vertically in collections of eight, ten, as many as 26, most of the totems are a few feet tall, but even those made of paper that are no taller than one’s hand project an aura of strength, confidence, and authority. The totems appear again worked into Johnson’s multiculturally-inspired “kimonos” — robe-shaped wall hangings weaving together Japanese, African and Australian Aboriginal influences. Built into the kimonos like columns or spines, the totems lend the garment-like constructions an almost architectural stability. The kimonos displayed here are named in honor of Nelson Mandela, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

Lester Johnson, Kimono Nefertiti, 2009 Mixed media.

Johnson was born in Detroit in 1937; born that same year, just a few blocks from where Johnson would grow up, was the Blue Bird Inn, the legendary nightclub that hosted a stellar line-up of modern jazz players in the 1950s and ‘60s. Jazz music has greatly informed Johnson’s work through the years, particularly that of Miles Davis, who lived in Detroit briefly in the mid-‘50s. Davis and his music are mentioned a number of times in Four. An airbrushed painting from 1972 named for his influential 1959 album Kind Of Blue features arcs and angular shapes, leaning back to the right against a blue background. The shapes are striped with what look like tire tracks, as if pointing out the musician’s Motor City connection. As recently as this year, Johnson evoked Davis again with In A Silent Way Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter Tribute, an upward-pointing triangle of nine interlocking pyramids, painted a cool blue. The many facets of the structure cast shadows and catch the light, creating varying tones and intensities of color, perhaps even suggesting dignified facial features.

Lester Johnson, In A Silent Way Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter Tribute, Mixed media, 2024.

Johnson honors other musicians here as well. The woman known as “Mama Africa,” South African anti-apartheid activist and Afropop star Miriam Makeba, is commemorated with a collection of twelve richly patterned totems. Motown’s Gladys Knight inspired a 1974 print that comprises several panels of hard-edged black-and-white angles and stripes, like noir-ish depictions of urban architecture, countered by single red square with a record-like circle inside, a point of stability in a field of anxiety. John Coltrane Print from 1969 has the hip feel of jazz album graphic design. A 2005 abstract painting, showing colorful vertical stripes reminiscent of Johnson’s totems emerging from behind a green triangle, is named for the Luther Vandross song Never Too Much. A similarly vivid abstract work from the same year, named for the Thelonious Monk standard Round Midnight, features (ironically) areas of sunny yellow intersected by a purple field and a blue triangle, suggesting a passageway.

Lester Johnson, Total Eclipse, Acrylic, 1971.

One of the few works here that doesn’t bear someone’s name is Total Eclipse from 1971, an acrylic painting made up of 35 squares with circles inside, each intersected and subdivided by lines and angles like a pie chart. Despite the title, none of the circles is entirely occluded, and none are without shadow. Each “lunar” disc has some part shaded in, and each angular segment of the squares is painted in varying shades of blue and purple, or else white. It’s not a scientific diagram nor a mystical chart, but it looks like it could be either if you knew how to read it. As it is, the image seems to flicker like a multi-faceted gem, an ode perhaps to diversity and perpetual change.

There’s a lot of “cool” in this show — cool colors, cool music — but the overall vibe is a warm one, celebratory and grateful. Seen as a portrait of Lester Johnson, the exhibit is testimony to how any of us are, in many ways, collages of the people we’ve let into our lives — the ones who have informed and inspired us. It might be a fruitful and fun question to ask one’s self: “Whose names would appear on the wall tags if this was my show?”

Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works, September 12-December 8, 2024, Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn.

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

By K.A. Letts

On July 2, 2024

In Ceramic, Mixed Media, Paintings

**Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment, New Work by Lakela Brown @ Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit**

Visitors to MOCAD this summer will have four new shows to enjoy, each adding a facet to the kaleidoscopic multicultural Detroit art scene. At the entrance to the museum, we find “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7.” It’s a collection of significant objects and images providing a window into the art world of the late 1960’s, post-rebellion, when African American artists in Detroit achieved a collective sense of themselves and their purpose. Next, Lakela Brown’s first solo museum show “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” looks to a future that explores Black experience through racially specific foodways and styles of personal adornment. Drawing our attention out to the broader landscape, Meleko Mokgosi , a Botswanan artist and academic now living in the U.S., provides a scholarly examination of Black artists as they have seen themselves and are seen by others through the lens of colonialism and diasporic history. Lastly, in Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead, museum visitors will find a more informal conversation among the city’s artists, curators, and administrators on the collaborative nature of art presentation.

With apologies to the creatives responsible for “Zones of Non-Being” and “Word of Mouth,” and meaning no disrespect, l will concentrate here upon the artists represented in “Kinship” and “From Scratch. “

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7

Those with a particular interest in the art history of Detroit and of the African American artists working in abstraction in particular, will have the pleasure of seeing a selection of work by some of the city’s most significant practitioners, many represented by the iconic Gallery 7, which showed outstanding work by Black (male) artists from 1969-1979. (In a spirit of retrospective reparation for past gender discrimination, Abel Gonzalez Fernandez, the curator of the exhibition, has also tactfully included work by several contemporaneous female artists, Elizabeth Youngblood, Gilda Snowden, and Naomi Dickerson.)

Fernandez has done an admirable job of telling the story of this seminal period in the city’s art history by employing a small, but choice, selection of artworks begged and borrowed from collectors, the artists themselves or their estates. A welcome bonus is a newspaper-style publication accompanying the exhibition, which includes a well-researched and written short history of the gallery by the curator. The compilation of contemporary press coverage that accompanies his essay goes a long way toward explaining the excitement that accompanied the art that was shown there during the gallery’s ten-year existence. It is also a melancholy reminder of how much the art audience lost when intelligent art journalism in Detroit’s mainstream newspapers ceased with the advent of the Internet.

Lester Johnson (b. 1937) The Sorceress and the Dreamtime Spirits, 1974, installation: wood, fabric, vegetal fiber, feathers, bells. All images courtesy of K.A. Letts

Several of the artists in “Kinship” take inspiration from African artifacts. One of the show’s highlights is The Sorceress and The Dreamtime Spirits (1974) 9 wall-mounted sculptures by Lester Johnson that mimic the form of West African ceremonial objects. The long rods made of found branches and poles are fabricated and decorated with industrial and post-industrial materials, a process Johnson describes as “creating a hybrid product between ancestors and urban present.”

Elizabeth Youngblood (b. 1952) Loop 8, 2015, porcelain and wire.

Loop 8, by Elizabeth Youngblood, subtly references Black personal adornment, a recurring theme in the art of female African Americans, as we see in Lakela Brown’s nearby solo show. (But more on that later.) Using the simplest means of expression, wire, and barely modeled porcelain clay, Youngblood teases out tremulous but insistent meaning from humble materials.

Harold Neal, a major figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970’s, is represented in “Kinship” by Brotherhood, a medium-sized, text-heavy artwork that wears its racial advocacy on its sleeve. The artist’s work, through the 1960’s and 1970s when Gallery 7 was in operation, was figurative and militantly political. As a movement leader, he led a faction of Black creatives whose radical work was in tension, if not in opposition, to the more cerebral concerns of his fellow gallery artists. (A recently published history of this group, “Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 through the Black Arts Movement” by Julia R. Myers, is available from Amazon.)

Harold Neal (1924-1996) Brotherhood, n.d., oil on board.

The art practice of the Gallery 7 artists focused primarily on their own personal experience as African Americans, or as gallery founder Charles McGee explained, “My roots are in America, and the ideas I deal with as an artist come out of this time and place.” McGee occupies a special position in Detroit’s art history. In addition to his importance as the force behind Gallery 7, he was an influential arts educator and a leader in the African American art community. Many of his public artworks can be seen throughout the city, and his importance was recently acknowledged by a posthumous survey of his work in the newly opened Shepherd in Detroit’s Little Village. Ring Around the Rosy, an early McGee work from the 1960s, is a tantalizing glimpse of the artist’s figurative work before he moved in a less conventional direction.

Charles McGee (1924-2021) Ring Around the Rosy, ca 1950’s, oil on board.

Allie McGhee, a significant Detroit artist honored by a major retrospective in 2022 at Cranbrook Art Museum, is represented here by a couple of lively abstract paintings. The Artist in his Studio (1973) is chromatically subdued, allowing the gestural line to take center stage. His recurring use of a personal icon, the banana moon horn, was first seen during his tenure at Gallery 7 and continues in his current work, a personal, idiosyncratic emblem of ancestral energy brought from the past into the present. Coco Blue (1984), a more colorful cousin to The Artist in His Studio, is typical of McGhee’s later work and exhibits the exuberant presence typical of his paintings.

Allie McGhee (b. 1941) Artist in the Studio, 1973, mixed media on Masonite.

Allie McGhee, Coco Blue, 1984, mixed media on Masonite.

Album, a self-portrait by Gilda Snowden, is a psychological and physical evocation of the artist, an embodiment of her tempestuous and elusive power. Her unexpected and premature death in 2014 cut short a promising career, but this painting preserves her positive presence. It is an enduring influence she shares with the eminent artists represented in “Kinship.”

Gilda Snowden (1954-2014) Album, 1989, oil on canvas.

Artists represented in “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7” Namoi Dickerson, Lester Johnson, Charles McGee, Allie McGhee, Harold Neal, Gilda Snowden, Robert J. Stull, Elizabeth Youngblood. June 28-September 8, 2024

From Scratch: Seeding Adornment

LaKela Brown describes her first solo museum show, “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” as a love letter to her community. “I want to center culturally significant objects that challenge and hopefully correct historic […] notions of value and taste while loving the brilliance and ingenuity of my community,” she explains. Brown practices a kind of archeology in reverse—preserving present cultural artifacts for future appreciation rather than searching for ancient objects to excavate and exploit. She is looking forward rather than back.

Lakela Brown, Parts and Labor (Eight Collard Green Leaves, Five Hands) 2024, urethane resin.

Brown, who grew up in West Detroit, has filled two large galleries at MOCAD with resin and plaster casts of foods specifically related to the culture of the Black diaspora and objects of personal adornment, particularly doorknocker earrings. The materials she uses to create these artworks are well-known to artists and lend an air of elegance and permanence by their association with classical museum casts.

Lakela Brown, Doorway to Adornment, 2024, site-specific installation, urethane resin.

The first gallery features resin casts of vegetables– collard greens, corn, okra–artfully arranged on the gallery walls in square formats. In a surreal touch, and in tribute to her matriarchal connections, the artist tucks barely visible casts of the delicate hands of her grandmother, Evelyn Helen Brown, in among the vegetables. Though the usual designation for artworks featuring food is still life, these pieces, in the formality of their presentation and their low-relief arrangement on a rectilinear base, seem to be more architectural in nature. In particular, the ruffled edges of the collard greens call to mind decorative rococo details one might see in an 18th-century European drawing room. Brown makes the comparison explicit with the site-specific row of cast collard greens installed over the doorway to the second gallery, Gateway to Adornment (2024). With her casts of ethnically specific doorknocker earrings, chain necklaces, and other ornaments to the body—including casts of crowned teeth—Brown taps into a rich vein of visual associations she shares with many of her contemporaries. A case in point is the work of Tiff Massey, now on view at the DIA, which features hair ornaments—oversized ponytail ties and enormous replicas of Snaptite Kiddie Barrettes, as well as an entire wall of hair weaves. The exhibition’s curator, Jova Lynne, who also shares many of Brown’s creative interests in her own work, says, “Lakela’s practice is a mirror to Black legacies that encourage people across the diaspora, including myself, to take pride in reflections of home…In her work, I see the cultivation of land, the preservation of adornment, and the production of artworks acting as ledgers of Black life.”

Lakela Brown, Coverall Composition with Doorknocker Earrings. , Gold (2023) plaster

The exhibitions on view now at MOCAD emphatically demonstrate the interrelated nature of the art community in Detroit, a true commonwealth of creatives who share philosophies, exchange materials and cross-pollinate cultures. Born of common experience, each collection of artworks forms part of a contrapuntal melody–or maybe a jazz improvisation–of mutually reinforcing themes which flow from one gallery to the next and out into the city.

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

Sharon Que @ MATE’RIA Gallery

By Ron Scott

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].