Category: Paintings Page 1 of 49

Menagerie and Descriptive Intuition @ BBAC

On April 15, 2025

An installation shot of Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. It and a companion show, Descriptive Intuition by James Kaye, will be up through May 1.

Two lively shows by Michigan artists at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center up through May 1 — James Kaye’s Descriptive Intuition and Menagerie by Jackson Wrede — offer up a refresher course in the relative power of abstraction vs. figurative art. Side by side, the two exhibitions make for punchy viewing. Passing from one into the other is both stimulating and invigorating.

On entering BBAC, you’ll find yourself descending several steps into Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie in the center’s airy and spacious DeSalle Gallery. The lighting design in the room is particularly dramatic, and singles out Wrede’s individual color-packed works in ways that make them pop off the walls. See if you can resist their pull – the betting is you can’t. Wrede, who lives in Grand Rapids and is a graduate of the Kendall School of Art and Design, has remarkable skills in the hyperrealist realm, but these are not soulless, technical exercises. The face of the young woman in Girl Wearing Fur, for example, conveys an almost palpable sense of emotional depth.

Jackson Wrede, Girl Wearing Fur, Oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 inches.

It has to be said that Wrede’s oeuvre is both wide and impressively ecumenical, ranging from the sensitive portrayal above to an equally compelling picture of electric-green iguanas sharing a very private moment. Or consider Wrede’s take on the Mona Lisa, sporting a pair of hyper-developed, Arnold Schwarzenegger arms. Truth be told, in Mona Lifta (note the distinction), she looks even more pleased with herself than usual. But credit Wrede with precision: Everything above the icon’s shoulders is exactly as it is in Da Vinci’s original, even down to the pastoral landscape behind the subject that appears to be happening at two dramatically different levels. Overall, the portrait is great fun, shot through with absurdity and humor. Bring the kids. They’ll love it.

Jackson Wrede, Mona Lifta, Oil on canvas, 20 x 14 inches.

In a 2023 interview with the online British magazine, “Behind the Artist,” Wrede said that despite the classical formality of many of his pieces, he pretty much goes on gut instinct.

“So many artists have rules or templates they think about when composing an image—the rule of thirds, the Golden Ratio, we’ve heard them all,” he said. “I don’t use any of those really. Perhaps they accidentally come out in my work sometimes, but I think the main question you have to ask yourself is, ‘Does this look cool?’” And certainly, in the case of the self-portrait below, with its cartoon aesthetic, the answer pretty much has to be “Yes.”

Jackson Wrede, Self-Portrait in a Cowboy Hat, Oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 inches.

Detroiter James Kaye plows a completely different furrow than Wrede. Most of the Descriptive Intuition in BBAC’s Robinson Gallery falls into the abstract-expressionist basket, and these works are rendered with a certain, for lack of a better word, forcefulness. They certainly command attention. And the level of technical skill and detail the College for Creative Studies grad deploys is daunting. Consider Dissecting Escape, somewhat more monochromatic than many of the works on display here, with its dozen-odd horizontal canvas strips sewn together and then painted in highly textured relief. The acrylic and enamel are applied in seemingly slapdash fashion, built up in layers and punctuated by small dots of strong red. The upshot is the piece reads as both free form and, with all those parallel stitched lines, oddly structural at the same time. It’s a gratifying juxtaposition.

James Kaye, Dissecting Escape, Canvas, foam, acrylic paint, enamel paint, steel.

Kaye, a College for Creative Studies graduate, has snagged one long wall for his Fingertips 1-24 series, a parade of two dozen identically sized abstracts clearly painted with gusto and starring strong splotches of color. The individual works are charming, but it’s the visual power of all 24, marching across the wall two by two, that makes it such a magnetic sight.

James Kaye, Fingertips 1-24, Enamel paint, glue, acrylic paint.

Kaye doesn’t confine himself just to painting. He’s also got a small collection of sculptures and vessels on display, which have every bit as much authority as the canvases. Intriguingly, his bowls are all crafted from turned wood, despite looking for all the world like they were highly glazed works created on a potter’s wheel. Consider Flying, a warm, maple vessel that features a wood-grained base partly painted over in strong gray, black and white circles. The aesthetics of the sharply outlined dots stand in contradiction to the veined wood, yet the combination of the two is both peculiar and pleasing – about the best any artist could hope for.

James Kaye, Flying, Spalted maple, enamel paint, epoxy.

**Two exhibitions will be at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center through May 1, 2025: Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie and James Kaye’s Descriptive Intuition.**

The Reality Show @ Paint Creek Center for the Arts

By Ron Scott

On April 2, 2025

In Assemblage / Collage, Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

Paint Creek Center for the Arts, Installation image Courtesy of DAR

The Paint Creek Center for the Arts opened its 2025 season on March 28^th, 2025. Two hundred twenty viewers came to the opening to see art by forty-five artists whose work was accepted into an exhibition titled The Reality Show.

In a statement by Julia Felts, gallery director, “In a time when reality television, social media and spam can shape our perceptions of everyday life, how do we know what is real? Whether you’re capturing your own reality through life’ pleasures, struggles, and monotonies, interpreting the reality of someone else or exposing pop culture’s simulated perfection, we invited artists to submit their artwork showcasing and defining what reality means in the modern world.”

Christine Heylett, Nature of Things, 48×48″, Board, Paint, Paper Courtesy of DAR

Awarded Best in Show, artist Christina Haylett’s large collage titled The Nature of Things, “48 x 48” creates a grid of symbols set over a large black imaginary animal. A montage of small squares provides the adhesive in this surreal fantasy of imaginary reptiles and objects. She says, “Climate change is part of our daily concerns and every day there are programs in our media about all of this.”

Calum Clow, Hindsight and 2020, 30×28″ Cardboard on Wooden Panel, Courtesy of DAR

This nearly square figure painting was created using Oil, Mixed Media, and Cardboard on a wood panel illustrates a female mom seated at the laundromat during the Covid-19 virus pandemic using a ¾ profile looking off to the left. In his notes the artist provides the audience with a story.

“In the Summer of 2020, our laundry machine broke. So we donned our masks and cleaned our clothes at the laundromat. The portrait is from a photo I took of my mother, watching another day of breaking news stories on multiple televisions while doing laundry. This painting documents our reality within this moment of a global pandemic, a civil rights movement, and a tumultuous political landscape. It questions how the perspective of our own reality is changed through reflecting upon the realities of the world around us.”

Eddie Checkings, Backstabber, 24×24″ Collage, Acrylic, on Wood, Courtesy of DAR

Eddie Checkings is an artist mostly recognized on Instagram with work that is more illustrative than, let’s say, traditional forms of painting. Backstabber’s square composition is a collage on a wood panel that might reflect a story. The surreal figure is set on a field of numbers that flattens out the facial expression, where the emphasis could be more dependent on an event. In looking at the artist’s other work, the range of subjects varies greatly, relying on line, color, and composition.

Installation image, Paint Creek Center for the Arts, Courtesy of DAR

The title of the PCCA exhibition, The Reality Show, provides a platform to call on artists to provide a tremendous range in personal subjects and experiences. The expressions of art in the show widely vary to include paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, and multimedia works of art.

Paint Creek Center for the Arts (PCCA) is a nonprofit art center in downtown Rochester dedicated to promoting the arts and artistic excellence through various cultural programs, including exhibitions, studio art classes, outreach programs, community involvement projects, and the Art & Apples Festival. PCCA programs reach many different segments of the region and serve as tools for community enhancement and economic development by improving quality of life and drawing visitors to the area. PCCA is an important cultural resource and destination and a vital presence in greater Rochester’s diverse and growing business and residential community. https://pccart.org 248.651.4110

Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage: Work by Peter Bernal @ Marshall Fredericks Museum

By Sean Bieri

On March 27, 2025

In Paintings

The main gallery of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum in Saginaw is a forest of white plaster, packed with casts of the ubiquitous Michigan sculptor’s works in varying scales and levels of abstraction. The massive head of The Spirit of Detroit is flanked by similarly epic portraits of Churchill and JFK. Horizontal male and female figures titled Night and Day sail by at just above head height, not far from a row of attenuated figures representing Seven Saints and Sinners. (A long Satanic snake hangs from the hands of the female figure of Temptation.)

Stylized creatures — birds, otters, bears, gazelles — undulate and soar through the gallery, all watched over by an enormous crucified Christ, sans cross. Fredericks has been called “America’s Public Sculptor,” an epithet one doesn’t earn by being overly confrontational or controversial, and indeed there’s nothing much in Fredericks’s cute critters, children’s book scenes, patriotic and religious themes, and writ-large theatricality that might ruffle anyone’s feathers.

Head of The Spirit of Detroit, plaster, Marshall Fredericks, 1958

Frederick’s energetic figurative and narrative sculptures rhyme nicely with the similarly bold, muscular, allegorical works of Detroit-based painter Peter Daniel Bernal, whose exhibition Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage is on display now through May 24. In fact Bernal, who sometimes adopts the pseudonym “Perez,” is currently working on a mural commemorating Fredericks’ work. It’ll be interesting to see how much the mural celebrates the sculptor and to what extent it pushes back against his visions of American progress or benevolent religion. Bernal’s own work, after all, is hardly non-confrontational.

Bernal is Tejano — Mexican American born and raised in southern Texas. Since 2015, he’s lived in Detroit. In between, he studied art in Kansas City, Rhode Island, and Germany. If you want a fuller biography than that, I think you should just come see his paintings. Bernal’s relationships with family and friends, school and religion, art and politics, his health and that of his community, and above all his search for an understanding of his own complex identity, is on display here in vibrant color and vivid imagery.

The Night, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

To begin in the middle: about halfway through Hidden Heritage, Bernal quotes, in title and composition, a brutal painting by Max Beckmann, The Night, a scene of home invasion, rape, and lynching. It can’t be a good sign of the times when a contemporary artist can directly reference art of the Weimar era and it resonates all too well with the current climate. (Bernal lived and studied printmaking in Weimar for five years.)

However, in Beckmann’s painting the victims and perpetrators are almost indistinguishable from one another but for their actions, whereas in Bernal’s The Night, the characters are more specific. A Native American man, whose shorn hair lies at his feet thanks to a scissor-wielding, hooded priest, is strung up by his neck by a modern-day policeman, while a conquistador twists his arm. The dying man is painted in realistic flesh tones, but his half-sized attackers are as uniformly tan as the earth they stand on, like plastic toy soldiers or clay golems, making them preternaturally monstrous. The only hopeful elements here are an Indian child who flees the scene in one corner and an emerald green quetzal bird, an ancient symbol of freedom, that flies off into the blood-red sky in the opposite corner. The collapsing of the temporal distance between conquistador and cop is, as the label for The Night bluntly states, Trumpism depicted not as an unusual historical blip but as an acute case of the authoritarianism undergirding so much of the American project.

Critical Thinkers, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2016

Trump is specifically name-checked in Critical Thinkers, an image of two identical clones of an enraged white man, neck veins bulging, who was caught on video hollering racist comments at Latinos during a protest rally. Each of the two figures carries a mirror-image Trump campaign sign in one hand while thrusting a Nazi-style salute with the other (years before Elon Musk would do likewise after Trump’s victory). The two stand in front of a conspicuously orange backdrop. Contrary to the ironic title of the painting, the two men are depicted as mindless group-thinkers overwhelmed by manipulative rhetoric and blind rage.

There’s No High Road In Dealing With Monsters, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

Not that Bernal is immune to rage. In one of the most astonishing paintings in the show, There’s No High Road In Dealing with Monsters, a skeletal, demon-like apparition wearing the severed head of Texas senator Ted Cruz as a necklace swoops down onto a desert landscape to snatch a police officer and a border agent. Though realistically rendered, the monster’s wings and headdress are flatly painted in the style of Aztec murals, and it carries a bomb wrapped in its long tail. It’s a violent image, created from anger in the wake of two violent acts — school shootings in Uvalde and Detroit — and while it’s not a prescription for violence, it does question when, as the accompanying label puts it, “complacency becomes complicity” with authoritarianism. One character in another of Bernal’s paintings seems to have decided his own complicity has gone too far; in A Policeman Disgusted With Himself, a uniformed officer vomits up a stream of blood, bones, and mutilated corpses, including one still wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Lit red from behind, perhaps by the lights of his own cruiser, the officer sports a badge on his sleeve indicating his jurisdiction: “Doesn’t Matter Where,” it reads.

A Policeman Disgusted With Himself, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

Deuteronomy 20:14, San Antonio, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2024

Bernal’s narrative scenes sometimes evoke poppier artists of the Juxtapoze magazine school of painting, but only superficially. In his Deuteronomy 20:14, San Antonio, an indictment of biblically sanctioned conquest, a huge infant clasping a rosary and seated on a heap of skulls represents God. Its eyes are shut to the angel-winged cowboy types that flit around its head stealing babies while an Indigenous man burns at the stake in the background, but it raises its hand in blessing nevertheless. Something about the “all-seeing eye” on the baby’s red sash and the composition in general are reminiscent of Mark Ryden’s work. Elsewhere, Bernal’s paintings bring to mind the crazy scenarios of Robert Williams, but those artists’ polished pop wackiness have nothing on Bernal in the content department. Religion is a frequent target of Bernal’s work, specifically its role in indoctrinating and dismantling Native American cultures. In Cuauhtlatoatzin Having an Ocular Migraine, Bernal suggests that the Catholic church’s first Indigenous saint, who allegedly saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, might actually have been suffering from a painful optical disorder (Bernal himself has experienced such migraines). On the other hand, Bernal lays claim to Catholic imagery in two paintings, both entitled Santa Marta La Dominadora. In one, the titular saint, who devoted herself to caring for the sick and the poor, carries a large snake that plucks a combat drone from the sky. In this painting, she is shown in her native Dominican Republic; in an earlier version, she’s seen in hospital scrubs with the Detroit skyline behind her.

Santa Marta La Dominadora, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2020

Firecracker, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

There are moments of gentle respite in the show. One is a tender portrait of the artist’s wife, Ellen, seated before a dark backdrop with their black cat, Wilhelmina von Kratzleben, curled up on her lap. Another is Firecracker, in which a smiling Indigenous girl runs with a sparkler in one hand. Beside her runs a smaller figure, an animated sculpture of an Aztec warrior, flicking a lighter. Back in the main gallery, over the entrance, Marshall Fredericks depicts the march of progress in a plaster relief sculpture, a timeline of technology showing Native Americans on horseback inevitably supplanted by covered wagons, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Bernal knows that technologies like the gunpowder in the child’s sparkler can be harnessed for good, though much of the rest of the work in his show reiterates that progress, to put it entirely too mildly, is a double-edged sword, and its history cannot be whitewashed.

Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage @ Marshall Fredericks Museum. Work by Peter Bernal. Through May 24, 2025.

Leif Ritchey @ David Klein Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On March 10, 2025

In Assemblage / Collage, Paintings

An installation image – Sky Studio at David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, up through April 5, 2025.

Creating the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface has always been one of the great challenges of the painter’s life, and the development of successful techniques for this was one of the great accomplishments of the Renaissance. Consider, for example, the flat, 2-D look of medieval art, and even works from the early Renaissance where, for all his genius, Giotto’s angels hovering mid-air don’t really look like they’re inhabiting space – they look as if they were pasted on. But 100 years after the Florentine’s 1337 death, artists had made considerable strides in communicating depth and perspective. Among the tools they employed to suggest distance was the use of architectural elements, like the receding arches of the pavilion sheltering the Madonna in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation from 1445.

Leif Ritchey, On the Beach, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 84 x 72 inches, 2025

Unsurprisingly, abstract painters have always had a greater challenge in this regard, one that Ann Arbor colorist and musician — he and his father perform in a group called Shades — Leif Ritchey has mastered with unusual finesse. His newest exhibition, Sky Studio at the David Klein Gallery, up through April 5, gives us a series of mesmerizing, multi-hued impasto collages, all created this year, that pull the viewer deep into unexpected dimensions and space.

Consider, for example, On the Beach, a striking work whose vertical black slashes seem to exist in a violent foreground all their own, framing a confusion of elements beyond, ranging from a soft green to a magenta tinged with gray and brown. Everything else on this canvas is at the dull end of the color spectrum, apart from the immensely appealing green that acts a series of exclamation points, drawing one’s eye to various parts of the painting.

Leif Ritchey, Leaked Shadows (Keyed Up Color), Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 40 x 50 inches, 2025.

A number of Ritchey’s collages have what could be called a central organizing element, as with the black verticals in On the Beach. In the case of Leaked Shadows (Keyed Up Color), a large aqua detail just off center and a slanting “column” to the left with small, sharp-pink explosions, grab the viewer’s eye and won’t let go. Leaked Shadows is one of the most exuberant works on display, and, largely owing to the wide, skewed vertical, also one of the pieces with the most obvious structure to it. It’s a commanding work, one that looks like it ought to be the dominating element in the lobby of some classy corporate office building.

Leif Ritchey, Leaked Shadows (Keyed Up Color) – detail, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 40 x 50 inches, 2025.

Impasto, by definition, suggests textured layers of paint, but Ritchey, a self-taught artist who’s exhibited in New York and Europe, carries this to pleasing extremes in this exhibition group. “My process involves layering, imprinting, and excavating,” the artist said this year, “building and removing layers. In doing this, I can weave the collage materials and paint with the energy of the moment.”

Take the image above, that’s found at the very bottom of Leaked Shadows, just off to the right, where greens, dark magenta, tan and silver all collide and appear to buckle under the force of their contrasting tones. Many of these topographical eruptions involve bunched-up paper or fabric covered with thick brushstrokes. But these are almost always minor elements – not huge bulges, as with some artists, but visual footnotes that reveal themselves only on closer inspection.

Leif Ritchey, Plaza Scape, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 60 x 50 inches, 2025.

Another collage with obvious structure to it – indeed, almost architectural structure – is Plaza Scape, where a large, dark-crimson irregular square sits atop what could almost be a stone foundation, set in an olive and dun-colored background. The red is so striking, and such an exception to Ritchey’s usual low-key palette, that it virtually jumps off the canvas. Rising up from it is an expanding cloud of blues, greens and yellows that appear to dissipate at the top of the collage.

Leif Ritchey, Ave, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 54 x 40 inches, 2025.

Generally speaking, Ritchey avoided geometric shapes in these paintings, preferring amorphous forms with no firm edges. However, on Ave, although the central organizing element is a pock-marked splotch of pink just off-center, two features outlined by straight lines stand out. At the upper left is a sharp right angle defined in shades of blue, while just below it is a slightly slanting grayish-green vertical with a ruler-straight right side. If you’ve walked through most of this captivating show before you come upon Ave, the sudden appearance of these sharp details is likely to startle and surprise.

Leif Ritchey – Sky Studio will be up at Birmingham’s David Klein Gallery through April 5, 2025.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening @ Oakland University Art Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On February 12, 2025

In Paintings

An installation shot of Nightshade: The World in the Evening, at Oakland University Art Gallery through March 30, 2025. All photos courtesy of OUAG except where noted.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening at the Oakland University Art Gallery explores the shadowed world as light declines to dark. It’s a liminal space – not quite here, not quite there — that ushers us into the absorbing night and the “emergence of otherworldliness,” as the introductory panel tells us on entering the gallery. This group show of 18 international contemporary painters will be up through March 30.

Gallery director Dick Goody says he wanted to touch on the ways in which twilight and darkness are spiritually and emotionally different from daylight. “If you’re working during the day, at 11 a.m., you’re not going to start thinking about metaphysics and existence,” he says. “You do that at night. So I introduced nighttime to the gallery as a way to reflect and connect to yourself.”

Sean Landers, Wildfire (Mendocino National Forest), Oil on linen, 2022.

One of the delights of Nightshade is the broad range of painters and painting styles Goody has assembled, ranging from highly realistic to the marvelously simplified or distorted. Probably the most realistic canvas, and certainly the most depressing, is New Yorker Sean Landers’ Wildfire (Mendocino National Forest), a panorama of incineration roaring on both sides of a highway, a thoroughly freaked deer frozen in the middle of the road. Indeed, both Wildfire and the next work below, Willy Lott’s House by Ulf Puder, seem to gesture towards a darker, more metaphorical twilight than just the routine passage from day to night

Landers’ canvas packs special punch right now, just after the Los Angeles fires were mostly contained. But the painting touches on the gloomy, more-disturbing twilight we’re entering, whether we know it or not – the dimming of the mostly generous world humanity has known, give or take, for 10,000-plus years, and its possible replacement by the far more hostile realm of fire and flood.

Ulf Puder, Willy Lott’s House, Oil on canvas, 2022.

Hewing more closely to the show’s focus on the literal shift from day to night is German artist Ulf Puder’s Willy Lott’s House, a much simplified and abstracted portrait of a house with a wrap-around porch under glowering gray twilight. The sky and trees feel vaguely menacing, as does the rowboat and apparent debris pushed up right against the porch. Horizontal reflections running up to the house all around suggest flooding. Somewhat at odds with this downbeat possibility, however, are large blocks of color on the wall running along the porch, which form a small, sublime composition in themselves. Goody calls Puder “a painter’s painter — he really reduces things to simple brush strokes,” resulting in works that Goody characterizes as “austerely elegant.”

Danielle Roberts, Tomb of a Time, Acrylic on canvas, 2024

The previous two works are each essentially landscapes. For something completely different, spend a few minutes in front of New York artist Danielle Roberts’ Tomb of a Time, a glimpse through large windows of a party of young people. Goody notes the voyeuristic quality of the composition – we’re peering in at the party-goers, all of whom are blissfully unaware, cans of beer in hand, that they’re being studied. Adds Goody, “and nobody’s meeting our gaze.” Color-wise, this canvas is almost German Expressionist in its lavish use of aqua and purple-pink on faces and bare arms. The last thing to say about this gathering is that nobody appears to be having a good time. There’s a somber, hip pall hanging over everything that runs against the very notion of party – though, truth be told, we’ve all probably been there.

Goody is bullish on Roberts’ future: “You’re going to hear a lot more about her.

Marcus Jahmal, Illuminated, Oil on canvas, 2023.

And now for something completely absurd – take Marcus Jahmal’s Illuminated, an almost cartoon-like juxtaposition of odd elements: a woman’s leg stuck straight out, horizontal to the floor; a black cat about to hiss; a chandelier and a colorful grandfather clock. Goody suggests that the leg belongs to a Halloween witch, an interpretation that fits well with the black cat who’s arching its back menacingly.

Jahmal, who lives in Brooklyn and is entirely self-taught, also pulls off another nice color study in rectangles of black, mustard and violet that set off the composition’s four elements – leg, cat, chandelier and clock — very nicely. “It’s such a simple painting, but evocative of something a bit like Matisse, with his simplified, reductive forms,” says Goody, adding, “and a little bit of slapstick.”

Hein Koh, The Dark Sea (detail), Oil on canvas, 2024. Photo by Detroit Art Review.

Hein Koh, also Brooklyn-based, gives us the only black-and-white work in Nightshade, as well as the most abstract and geometric. The Dark Sea stars a small, prone figure confronted by the rushing sea. “Koh’s work,” says Goody, “is usually one person or character facing some sort of ordeal,” which would fit this. Constructed in parallel or concentric wavy brush strokes a bit like dark-grey icing, The Dark Sea is a pleasurably mesmerizing visual experience. There’s a rhythm to Koh’s lines. The canvas almost seems to vibrate.

One of the smaller paintings, The Dark Sea is the last in the exhibition, at least if you walk the gallery in the most-obvious way. “It’s not very big, and I think it’s a nice coda for the show,” Goody says, and in that he’s correct. The work is surprising and engaging, and an astringent contrast to all the color that preceded it.

Anna Kenneally, Nocturnal 1, Oil on canvas, 2022.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery until March 30, 2025.