Category: Paintings Page 36 of 45

Caledonia Curry @ Library Street Collective

On November 14, 2016

A Light at the End of the Tunnel- Caledonia Curry (Swoon) at Library Street Collective

“…You can start to create little cracks in the façade of possibility and inevitability that overlays all of our lives.”-Caledonia Curry at her TED Talk, 2010

Swoon, Installation Image, All Images Courtesy of Clara DeGalan and Sal Rodriguez

Caledonia Curry (tag name Swoon) seems intimately aware of the ephemeral, fragile nature of both the human body and human endeavor. This sensibility weaves through all of her bodies of work, which make up for the degradability of their materials with iron-clad social consciousness and fierce political engagement. Curry first gained attention on the global art scene for her large scaled, lyrical street art prints, which, like her work at Library St Collective, engage with the figure overlaid with gorgeous lacework of iconic decorative flourishes and symbols. Curry would scout out locations for her prints, then install them, on walls, lamp posts, and other architectural surfaces, using wheat paste. These delicate cut-paper and print collages are not meant to last forever- they fade away, gently and gradually, like distant memories. To Curry, physical immortality of work is beside the point- this seems unusual, given the highly formal, decorative nature of her constructions. What such highly developed technical skill and labor intensive process is meant to foster is less reverence for the made object itself than a holding of space for a new perspective, a chance to recontextualize one’s relationship with place, with symbolism, with one’s own identity.

The same curious mixture of preciousness and ephemerality finds its way from Swoon’s street art practice into Curry’s site specific installation at Library St Collective. As lovingly wrought and beautifully realized as Curry’s life-sized figurative prints and elaborate cut paper confections are, they are installed with no greater measure of preciousness or economic value than her wheat pasted public works. Curry’s figurative cut out prints hang suspended from strands of fishing line, freed from the relative safety, and canonical indexing, of traditional wall installation. They move in the breeze- they’re equally visible from front and back. Curry’s incredible paper cut-outs, executed in black and white and resembling every beautiful, lace-like form a viewer can call up, from snowflakes to double helixes to Celtic knot work, drape freely from the gallery’s ceiling and dangle, like the figure cutouts, from strands of fishing line, inviting touch, uncannily mimicking the slight movements of sentient life.

Swoon cut paper intallation-detail

The heaviness of Curry’s concept for her site specific install at Library St is what grounds these floating works. Taking the narrow, tunnel-like structure of the front part of the gallery as inspiration, Curry is attempting, with The Light After, to recreate for the viewer her own narrative of a phenomenon known as “the empathetic death experience.” Curry encountered this phenomenon in a dream of a space filled with falling snow and “blossoms of light,” during which she felt that her mother had died. Upon awakening, she discovered that her mother had, indeed, passed away.

The snow-blossom motif of Curry’s installation occupies Library St.’s space as a tunnel of atmospheric light similar to those described by people who have had near-death experiences. Dispersed around this bright, ungrounding fairyland are Curry’s life-sized figurative prints which, despite their ephemeral construction, nail the viewer with quietly appraising or imploring gazes, each taking the form of a step on the initiation path toward death. Curry’s figures are iconic- an old, bearded hermit leaning on a walking stick, his lower body morphing into ramshackle architecture which crumbles, at his feet, into a profusion of skulls. A heartbreaking double image of a woman filled with youth and vitality, holding a baby, while her forward-projected shadow looms behind her, emaciated, rigged up with oxygen tubes, her eyes engaging the viewer’s in abject, human terror of proceeding down the very tunnel that surrounds her.

Swoon, Memento Mori, 2016, block print on hand cut mylar,edition3 of 12, 84-x-67″

Curry takes the viewer through this legendary tunnel, which leads into a stark hallway painted in black and white geometric and organic forms- a nice visual metaphor for the space between the end of the tunnel and what comes after- into the gallery’s larger, airier back room or, as Curry titles it, “The Meadow.” The figurative prints in The Meadow aren’t allegories of death, but of rebirth- the color scheme of The Meadow is warmer, more organic, the 3D elements more tactile and sensual- piles of green velvet take the place of the ethereal cut-paper hangings within the tunnel. Mother-child pairings and figures surrounded by simple, ancient symbols of life and birth- paisleys, triple knots, spirals- gaze invitingly out or, more often, appear turned inward, eyes closed, in a private ecstasy of union with the life-power of the universe.

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Swoon, Milton II, Diogenesis, 2016 block print on hand cut mylar edition, 3 of 6 89×66″

There’s an uncanniness, a formal directness, and a powerful combination of personal and political narrative to Curry’s work that makes it difficult to contextualize in contemporary studio practice. The bald allegory and mirror-image rendering of her figure-prints awakens the viewer to the power of such imagery as expressed in every layer of our society, from religious painting to Chuck E. Cheese animatronics- all of them evoke the same frisson. Curry’s work reveals why this is so. Confronted with our own image reworked into symbolism, we begin to examine the foundations of universal truths- birth, death, spirit, the afterlife, the sentience of so-called inanimate objects- with the understanding that these truths emanate from our own bodies. Our bodies are ephemeral. What we can do with them, change with them, what we can leave to succeeding generations, is eternal. It is this truth that forms the kernel of Curry’s work in every medium and context that she engages.

“Swoon- The Light After” is on display at Library Street Collective through November 26, 2016.

Jim Crawford @ Trinosophes

By Glen Mannisto

On November 1, 2016

In Installation, Paintings, Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Crawford at Trinosophes – Through December 23, 2016

Thomas Berding @ Oakland University Art Gallery

By Ron Scott

On October 29, 2016

In Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oakland University Art Gallery

Senghor Reid @ NCA Gallery

By Clara DeGalan

On October 26, 2016

In Paintings, Photography, Sculpture

A Diabolical Element – Senghor Reid’s exhibition at the National Conference of Artist Gallery

In the hallway outside of NCA Gallery, housed in a vibrant Community Center in Northwest Detroit, you encounter the first wave of Senghor Reid’s solo exhibition Diabolique. The imposing group of large-scale acrylic paintings depict shifting, shimmering surfaces of water in different weather conditions and light. Reid’s dynamic, disquieting treatment of the ever-moving element of water recalls David Hockney’s pool paintings. Both artists weave water as a substance in movements and marks that eerily echo the nature of the element itself- slashes, splotches, dense, doily-like layers of marks that begin to suggest forms even as those forms collapse and drain away before your eyes. Reid’s work evokes Hockney’s, also, in the strange, visually transmitted metaphor presented by both artist’s treatments of this element- that of the complete unknown, the otherworld that mirrors and impacts our own, that lies just beneath the surface.

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Senghor Reid, The Ice Storm 2, 48 X 60, Acrylic on Canvas, 2016

The title of Reid’s exhibition, Diabolique, references the 1955 French film Les Diaboliques, the plot of which revolves around the concealment of a corpse in a body of water. The water swallows the corpse and refuses to yield it up- it appears later, brought uncannily back to life, rising from the waters of a bathtub. The mysterious, treacherous capability of water to give both life and death, to absorb evil only to reveal it later in the most intimate settings, is examined with a plethora of materials and media, through scientific and aesthetic lenses, in Diabolique. True to the origin of its title, the exhibition features a series of self-portraits of the artist washed up on a vaguely tropical shore, an uncanny, amphibious humanoid, his face concealed behind swimming goggles and a gas mask that suggests both survival in a toxic environment and gills. The figure of the artist appears both resurrected and consigned to dwell forever in conditions his body was not designed for.

Senghor Reid, Freshwater Assassins, 12 X 18″, Digital Print, 2016

This could be seen as the fate of humanity at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century- our surroundings are now rife with invisible, and not so invisible, contaminants that have resulted from our misuse of the natural world. Reid uses the element of water as the aesthetic touchstone of his exploration of those harmful elements, and their insidious presence in our daily lives. The most sinister elements on the periodic table- mercury, cobalt, lead- are carried into our communities and bodies through the vehicle of water. These same elements, like water, are aesthetically beautiful- possessed of a seductive, ever-shifting sheen. That paradox of beauty, vitality, nature and toxicity is presented in every one of Reid’s works, the large-scale water paintings, the smaller water studies executed in oil pastel and paint marker, the sensuous prints on gold and copper paper, the installation of crystalline vintage bottles labeled with the acids and heavy metals they once held.

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Senhor Reid, The Element of Crime Shelves & Apothecary Bottles, 24 X 30, 2016

The shimmer, and Reid’s capture of it in almost every medium imaginable, wreathes an elegant, fragile dialog between art, science and nature in Diabolique. It is the surface of water, which has become so loaded (the Flint water crisis and Detroit’s ongoing scandal of water shut-offs are only two examples of the element’s presence in crises of health, politics, race, and class) with essential and unanswered cultural urgencies. It is the glint of heavy metals, and the faceted surface of glass, containers and transmitters for elements that delight our eyes and leave putrid, invisible traces. It is deep, lurid, sensuous hues that sing of our love of nature as they paradoxically poison our environment. The shimmer conceals the corpse that will, inevitably, rise up from the murky inheritance of our chemical-spewing forbears. The rest of us may not be so lucky- yet, Diabolique seems to suggest, where there’s beauty, there’s hope.

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Senghor Reid, Breaking Waves 4, Paint Marker, 11 X 14″ 2016

Diabolique, by Senghor Reid, at NCA Gallery through October 21, 2016.

35 Years @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

By Ron Scott

On October 5, 2016

In Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art