Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Category: Prints Page 1 of 7

System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art @ Oakland University Art Gallery

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On September 24, 2025

In Paintings, Photography, Prints

 

An installation image of System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, up at the Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 23. (All photos by Detroit Art Review)

Repetition seduces the human eye, tugging on it with irresistible attraction. The power of endless duplication is explored at length in System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, which will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery through November 23. Curated by gallery manager Leo Barnes, the 35-odd works on display take us on a kaleidoscopic journey through forests and thickets of ornamentation, sometimes used as a framing device, at others the dominating element in a given painting or photograph.

Jocelyn Hobbie, Floating World, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2024.

Curator Barnes said he’s always admired work by Brooklynite Jocelyn Hobbie, and how she “leans heavily on pattern and ornament in her work – I’ve always liked that. So I looked around for other artists who employ that theme in their work,” he added, “and that’s how the show grew.” As Barnes began to amass potential works, he was struck by how the artists, in one way or another, “were all having a similar conversation about family heritage or history that they were trying to portray with pattern as their work’s focal point, rather than just as background.” What’s striking about Hobbie’s work generally, and certainly with Floating World, above, is the juxtaposition of the subject’s expression – blank and possibly troubled – with the giddy patterns that surround her. It’s this sharp edge that Barnes zeroed right in on, the “contrast between this beautiful thing and a not-happy person.”

Nearby you’ll find Rachel Perry’s large Lost in My Life (Price Tags Reclining), which looks to be right in synch with Floating World with a female subject and dense ornamentation. But Perry’s taken these elements and pushed them about as far as they’ll go, in ways both captivating and amusing. In Lost in My Life, a woman’s head, turned away from us and apparently asleep, pokes out from beneath a comforter on a very large sofa.  Every single surface, her hair being the sole exception, is covered in a red, yellow and white repeating pattern of photographed receipt slips that the artist has turned into both fabric and wallpaper.

The issue at hand, says Barnes, is one of Bostonian Perry’s favorite themes – how consumerism overwhelms and envelopes all of us.

Rachel Perry, Lost in My Life (Price Tags Reclining), Archival pigment print, 36 x 26.25 inches, 2011.

 

Alia Ali, ‘Echo’ Glitzch Series, Pigment print with UV laminate mounted on aluminum Dibond in custom-built wooden frame hand-upholstered by artist with Dutch wax print sourced from Nigeria, 2024.

When Barnes came upon Alia Ali’s ‘Echo’ Glitzch Series, “it just clicked,” he said. “It embodied everything I was looking for, with a very much in-the-forefront, in-your-face pattern — yet there’s a human form there as well, making you focus on the pattern and what’s going on.” The human form Barnes refers to is completely wrapped in a strong, handsome pattern of what appear to be identical, stylized blue flowers on bright-yellow stems. In this case, no skin is visible – the fabric covers both face and head. The figure is silhouetted against another repetitive pattern that stars dark-blue, stylized spirals rather like nautilus shells. Growing up in Sana’a, Yemen, Ali writes that she got her passion for pattern on textiles from her grandmother, whose self-created fabrics, in Ali’s words, “documented our heritage.”

Spandita Malik, Noshad Bee, Unique photographic transfer print on khadi fabric, 64.5 x 47.5 inches, 2023.

Spandita Malik, originally from Chandigarh, India – the modernist state capital Le Corbusier created – works with an Indian organization that teaches abused women traditional, regional embroidery techniques, both to lend self-respect and give them an opportunity for a trade. New York-based Malik returns to India to photograph these survivors with their permission, and then transfers an individual’s image to fabric. That gets sent back to the woman in question, who then applies embroidery of her choice to round out the composition.With Noshad Bee, we have what almost looks like a wedding portrait, in which the apparent groom, but not his bride, has been partly obscured by a gorgeous pattern of maroon flowers and golden leaves that cover his entire frame. Given that these women have been abused, is it significant that the man’s face is half-hidden behind a flower? Perhaps. In any case, the woman who created the ornamentation appears to have utilized beautiful imagery to, as it were, blot out the man – a nice, ironic touch.

Antonio Santin, Momo, Oil on canvas, 63 x 86.6 inches, 2024

With some of the works on display in System and Sequence, the ornamentation is so complex and precise that one is almost tempted to imagine it must be digital one way or another. But no. Everything in the show, broadly speaking, is either painted or photographed. Antonio Santin’s huge work, Momo, calls up this question almost immediately. At roughly five feet by seven feet, this portrait of a furrowed Oriental carpet seems impossible to craft by hand. But if you look closely, paint has been applied in identical small, rounded spurts – squeezed from a syringe, according to Barnes – to create this hyper-realist canvas.

How many tens of thousands of syringe squeezes must have been involved dizzies the mind. But what floors Barnes is that the artist, having created this meticulous tapestry out of minute blobs of paint, then goes back with black spray paint and adds shadowing that gives the work its astonishing 3-D appearance. “Talk about nerve-wracking,” he says, “all this intricate work, and then at the end you come in with a black airbrush and just spray over it!”

System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, @ Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 23, 2025

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms @ Toledo Museum of Art

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On August 7, 2025

In Digital Artwork

The digital artworks now on view at the Toledo Museum of Art in “Infinite Image: The Art of Algorithms” occupy the bleeding edge of new technologies that underpin recent developments in video gaming, animation, cryptocurrency generation, and artificial intelligence. As a museumgoer with only average knowledge of things digital, I wondered whether I would be overwhelmed by this newly sprouted and unfamiliar branch of the art historical tree. The answer to that question was both yes and no.

One can only imagine the amount of invisible electronic and digital infrastructure required to present the seamless elegance of the collection now gathered in the museum’s Canaday Gallery, with nary a wire in sight and not a single pixel out of place.  Most of the artworks, grouped in four sections, are arranged in a circle around the outside edge of the gallery, with a few room-size video displays at the periphery and another central structure housing several impressively monumental installations. The artists, designers, and curators of this up-to-date survey of technically complex and conceptually ambitious work tell a compelling tale of how we have arrived here, at the inflection point where visual art meets digital engineering.

The exhibition was organized by the Toledo Museum, with work chosen by Guest Curator Julia Kaganskiiy and exhibition design led by Richard The of Studio GreenEyl. I found the complexity and density of the exhibition formidable but not impossible to grasp, and I especially appreciated the informative wall text that accompanied each section. The ample supporting material offered on the museum’s website, including essays, images, and artists’ biographies, contributed greatly to my admittedly basic knowledge of the subject. A helpful little paper glossary of terms, available at the exhibition’s entrance,  also provided much-needed context.

Vera Molnar, Hungarian, 1924-2023, (Des)orders, 1974, Computer drawing in multicolored ink on Benson plotter paper.

The first section,  “The Imaginary Machine,”  is devoted to the work of forward-thinking artists of the twentieth century who rejected the cliché of the singular romantic genius in favor of a more rationalistic way of thinking about and making art. Sol Lewitt and Josef and Anni Albers, already well-known for their explorations in pre-digital rules-based art, are joined by lesser-known (at least to me) pioneers  Max Bill and Vera Molnar. Born in 1924, Hungarian media artist Molnar was an early adopter of the computer as a creative tool. Throughout the more than seven decades of her career, she explored the promise and limitations of human and machine collaboration.

Larva Labs, Matt Hall (b. 1974, Canada) John Watkinson (b. 1975, Canada), CryptoPunk #6649, 2017, custom software, still image, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

The next section, “Chance and Control,” introduces and explores algorithm-based art that incorporates randomness as a component of the creative process. Inputs introduced by chance determine elements of the image, resulting in outputs that vary, yet remain consistent with the overall design and concept. Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers provides a particularly clear, and to my mind, pleasing demonstration of the game-like nature of algorithmically derived images on view.

Dmitri Cherniak, (b. 1988, Canada) Ringers #1090, 2021, on-chain algorithm, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

Also created by algorithm, CryptoPunks, (2017), was among the first works linked to blockchain and one of the first prototypes for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The features of the 10,000 unique digital characters–hair, skin color, facial expressions—are determined by an algorithm with visual parameters established by Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs.

Sarah Meyohas, (b. 1991, U.S.) Infinite Petals, 2019, custom generative software.

By the time I arrive at the third section of the exhibition, “Digital Materiality,” I have the queasy feeling that the complexity of digital design, the variety of coding systems and the sheer quantity of data have outrun my ability to comprehend and describe what I am seeing. Images of innumerable rose petals, some real and others created by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in the installation Infinite Petals by Sarah Meyohas, leave me dizzy and disoriented. In another darkened room, I encounter the constantly moving, stylized and choreographed figures of Human Unreadable by Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti.) As I watch, the artists endeavor to “dissolve the boundary between flesh and data,” a process I find mesmerizing and, at least in that moment, persuasive.

Emily Xie (b. 1989, China), Memories of Qilin #7130, 2022, on-chain algorithm, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

The three medium-sized works by Emily Xie ( 2025 Digital Artist-in-Residence at the museum) are more intuitively digestible. Memories of Qilin 345, 676 and 713 are three in a series of 1024 unique images generated entirely by code and influenced by Xie’s Chinese heritage.

Sam Spratt, The Masquerade, 2025, digital painting made with custom generative software.

In a side gallery that he has to himself, poet and painter Sam Spratt blends analog technique with digital process. He has created The Masquerade, a baroque wall-size digital painting of writhing figures acting out a mysterious, crowd-sourced narrative.

I finally arrive in the fourth and last section of the exhibition, elated to have more or less survived the avalanche of new information and sensation.

Jared Tarbell, (b. 1973, U.S.) Entity #14, 2022, custom generative software, digital video (edition of 100), sound (Tonepoet,” Infinity Machine”) NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

“Coded Nature” is devoted to artworks created by generative software, a new frontier in digital art that mimics systems found in nature. Generative artists compose the instructions for an artwork and a machine learning model then extrapolates from the provided data set to create new content, independent of human intervention. Or, as the curatorial statement puts it, “what generative artists create are not just representations of nature but systems that simulate biological and physical processes.”

During my last minutes in the exhibition, I am captivated by Jared Tarbell’s Entity #14, a video animation created with custom generative software. Artificial creatures resembling microorganisms proliferate, ambulate and subside in an imaginary environment. They are born, respire, decline and die, then the sequence repeats–with variations ad infinitum.  The generative system, based on simple, predictable rules, produces unpredictable and complex results. You can watch this exhilarating dance of the microbes here

As I leave the museum, I wonder what audiences of the future will make of increasingly complex digital artworks like the ones in “Infinite Images.” No doubt technologies of the future will make even more demanding creations possible.  Possibly our powers of comprehension will grow to meet the cognitive demands of the art, or perhaps our cyborg descendants will be better equipped to fully appreciate these future masterpieces.

No matter what, it looks like we are committed to heading down this challenging path to an unforeseeable destination. But as the science fiction novelist and visionary Arthur C. Clarke observed in his novel Childhood’s End, “No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”

Infinite Images artists: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Max Bill, Dmitri Cherniak, Sofia Crespo, Deafbeef, Entangled Others, Tyler Hobbs, Larva Labs, Sol LeWitt, Zach Lieberman, LoVid, William Mapan, Sarah Meyohas, Vera Molnar, Operator, Quayola, Sam Spratt, Snowfro, Casey Reas, Anna Ridler, Monica Rizzolli, Jared Tarbell, and Emily Xie.

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms  Toledo Museum of Art – July 12-November 30, 2025

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Ethiopia at the Crossroads @ Toledo Museum of Art

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On October 8, 2024

In Ceramic, Paintings, Photography, Prints, Sculpture

House of Yatreda (est. 2021), Abyssinian Queen, 2024, 1/1 NFT single-channel video. “Beneath the dense canopy of an ancient forest that divides her realm and blurs the line between history and legend, the Abyssinian queen journeys from one kingdom to another within historic Abyssinia, carried with solemn grace by her devoted attendants.” All photo images by K.A. Letts unless noted.

Ethiopia’s long history as an important but often overlooked center of world art is getting a sweeping survey in the Toledo Museum of Art’s newly opened exhibition, “Ethiopia at the Crossroads.” From now until November 10, images and objects from the horn of east Africa illustrate the region’s importance as a point of contact for trade and cultural exchange beginning in the 7th Century BCE.  Myths and stories derived from a wealth of sources, from indigenous religions to archaic Judaism to Byzantine Christianity and Islam, form the basis for a composite culture that is uniquely coherent and remarkably complex.

In antiquity, the Nile provided Ethiopia’s traders and envoys with access to Egypt and the civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea. Contact with the Byzantine empire brought eastern orthodox Christianity, which then developed, in conjunction with other local mythic influences, its own idiosyncratic religious identity. Ethiopia was only the second country—after Armenia–to adopt Christianity as its state religion in the 4th century CE.

(l. to r.) Cross with St. Blaise, 10-11 c., copper alloy (Walters Art Museum), Processional Cross, 10 c. – 12 c., brass alloy, (Dallas Museum of Art), Processional Cross, 13 c. bronze, (Institute of Ethiopian Studies Abbas Ababa)

“Ethiopia at the Crossroads“ can be described as two exhibitions in one, actually. One collection of artworks, along with extensive photo documentation, centers on the country’s rich and lengthy art history. Another strand of the exhibition, woven seamlessly into the historical record, presents the work of contemporary Ethiopian artists and makes a convincing case that these living creatives are successfully carrying their unique cultural identity into the 21st century.

After entering through the circular rotunda at the beginning of the exhibition, museum visitors will journey through a complex narrative of the region’s cultural patrimony that includes more than 225 artifacts stretching over 1750 years. Devotional painted icons, manuscripts, coins, textiles and basketry, metalwork and carved wood crosses of various scales from periods from 7 century BCE through the 19th century CE form a beautiful and emotionally resonant parade that marches down the center of the main gallery. The exhibition design features a long, purpose-built terracotta-colored display structure that organizes what could easily be a baffling collection of diverse influences and objects.  On the outer perimeter of the central structure, smaller groupings of objects amplify elements of Ethiopia’s long and complex story. Included in these collections are small, glazed black terracotta figurines characteristic of the Ethiopian Jewish community and wooden Waakaa memorial figurines from the Konso people of South Ethiopia. Illuminated manuscripts of both Christian and Islamic provenance are represented as well as magic healing scrolls that illustrate the hybrid beliefs characterizing Ethiopia’s Orthodox  Christianity.

Folding Processional Icon in the Shape of a Fan, late 15 c., tempera with ink on parchment, wood handles, 24 ¼” x 154 1/8” x 4 ¾” (Walters Art Museum) photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The gallery holds a particularly rich trove of religious artifacts from the liturgical history of Ethiopia. A standout is the rare Folding Processional Icon in the Shape of a Fan, created in the late 15th century and one of only 6 known to exist. Illustrating the influence of European artists in icon painting are two side-by-side pictures representing the Madonna and Child. The two paintings demonstrate how European religious tropes were routinely translated into Ethiopian visual language. One is by Ethiopian artist Fare Sayon (active 1445-1480,) and the other is from the workshop of Venetian Bartolomeo Vivarini (ca. 1485.) Using the vivid colors characteristic of the Ethiopian palette, Sayon makes the image his own by adding two flanking angels important in Ethiopian Christianity, Michael and Gabriel, and interpolates elaborate textile patterns into the figures’ garments.

(l. – r), Fare Sayon (Ethiopian) Diptych (right panel) Virgin Mary and Christ Child with Archangels Michael and Gabriel, ca. 1445-1480, glue tempera on panel Workshop of Bartolomeo Vivarini, Venice, Madonna and Child, egg tempera on panel.

The co-location of work by contemporary Ethiopian artists alongside historical artifacts demonstrates how a coherent identity based upon shared myths and traditions has persisted over time.  Of particular interest is work by the House of Yatreda, a family-based artist collective now in a year-long residence at the Toledo Museum of Art.   At the entrance to the exhibition, a large photo portrait (Mother of Menelik) minted on blockchain combines the traditional folklore of Ethiopia with web-3 technologies. The House of Yatreda’s leader, Kiye Tadele, poses as Makadda, the legendary Queen of Sheba, pregnant with Menelik, the offspring of King Solomon and founder of Ethiopia’s Solomonid dynasty.  In a large gallery towards the back of the exhibition, a series of large-scale black and white single-channel videos by the House of Yatreda, entitled Abbysinian Queen, is on display. Described as “in the style of tizita (nostalgia or longing for the past),”  the narrative follows the journey of an imaginary  Ethiopian queen traveling through mystical forests to new kingdoms.

House of Yatreda (est. 2021), Mother of Menelik, 2023, NFT single channel video, photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The many creatives in the exhibition are a testament to the ongoing vibrancy of the region’s visual culture. Elias Sime of Addis Ababa, London-born Theo Eshetu, and Helina Metaferia of Washington, D.C., among many others, showcase the ongoing cultural significance of present-day Ethiopian art. Their work demonstrates that the artists share a strong stylistic correspondence between their art’s historical antecedents and their own work.  Elias Sime’s Tightrope, Zooming  (2012), now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, is an elaborate longitudinal mosaic made from discarded elements of digital technology—circuit boards, computer keyboards, and the like. Helina Metaferia has created her version of a traditional metalwork crown that carries a meaning that is both royal and religious. With it, she honors Empress Taytu Betul, a national hero of the resistance against the invading Italian army in 1896. The traditional crown installed next to it shows, once again, the common sensibility that unites these artists with their patrimony.

Elias Sime, Tightrope, Zooming (2012), reclaimed electronic components and assorted small ephemera on panel, 83 ½” x 313” photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The abundant and varied collection of artifacts that makes up “Ethiopia at the Crossroads” is deserving of multiple visits, but if you can make only one trip, the beautifully illustrated and scholarly catalog of the exhibition is highly recommended and available from the Toledo Museum. Ethiopia at the Crossroads, edited by Christine Sciacca, is a comprehensive introduction to this neglected yet significant sub-section of world art history.

(l. – r.) Crown, 18-19 c., brass (Peabody Essex Museum) Helina Metaferia, Crown (Taytu) 2023, brass sculpture with etching (Toledo Museum of Art).

Ethiopia at the Crossroads @ Toledo Museum of Art, on display through November 10, 2024.   https://toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/ethiopia-at-the-crossroads

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Lester Johnson @ Stamelos Gallery

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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.

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Doomscrolling @ Broad Art Museum

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On April 22, 2024

In Digital Artwork

Kayla Mattes – Doomscrolling Exhibition at the  Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MSU, Lansing

Installation view, All works by Kayla Mattes. All images courtesy of Sean Bieri  2024

“Doomscrolling” is internet-speak for the online equivalent of a death spiral: the act of compulsively flicking at the screen of a smartphone and trolling for bad news, absorbing the steady stream of tragedy, atrocity, injustice, and outrage that the algorithm floats past our eyeballs until we’ve lost track of time, and possibly our grip on reality. (The corollary habit of compulsively seeking out tidbits of lightweight entertainment to counteract such horrors is an issue in its own right.) “Doomscrolling” isn’t just a buzzword; googling the term brings up pages on the National Institutes of Health’s website that associate the phenomenon with anxiety, depression, and other disorders. Textile artist Kayla Mattes’ exhibition Doomscrolling (open now through August 18 at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Lansing) is an engaging and often humorous attempt to pull the viewer out of this virtual tailspin by transposing the web’s cacophony of video clips, headlines, memes, and emojis into the more tangible medium of woven tapestries, allowing us to examine them at a remove, the better to reflect on how the internet is rewiring our brains.

Born in 1989, Mattes is a “digital native,” a child of the information age who can scarcely recall a time before the internet. Some of the individual memes she works into her tapestries have become classics of the medium; a few are golden oldies that may be as nostalgia-inducing for younger viewers as Saturday morning cartoons are for a Gen Xer. Many visitors will smile with recognition when they spot the “Awkward Look Monkey Puppet,” a synthetic simian who nervously shifts its gaze in response to some uncomfortable situation; the “This Is Fine” dog, a cartoon canine who smiles contentedly while the room burns down around him; and of course the iconic “Keyboard Cat,” a tabby pawing at an electric piano who “plays off,” Vaudeville style, the victim of some catastrophic personal failure in a series of memes that dates back to the primeval year of 2009.

Kayla Mattes, Fun Fact, 2023, Handwoven cotton, wool, and acrylic

It’s fun spotting these familiar characters within Mattes’ tapestries, though it’s a bit like being a soup enthusiast at a Warhol show — focusing only on such details misses the larger point. Mattes collages all this digital detritus carefully to give each tapestry a theme. For instance, Keyboard Cat appears in a piece called “Fun Fact,” surrounded by warning icons, error messages, and a rewind button. The phrase “The internet was once a fun place for watching cat videos instead of monitoring the real-time collapse of late-stage capitalism” appears over the musical feline’s head so that he seems to be “playing off” the failed promise of the World Wide Web and the remains of our collective innocence.

Kayla Mattes, Better Help, 2022, Handwoven cotton, wool, and polyester

“Better Help” borrows its title from an online mental health service and features various images suggesting tension and anxiety: a finger poised over two red buttons labeled “hope” and “nope” (aka, the “Daily Struggle” meme); an hourglass icon; a smiley face hovering over a black hole. The “This Is Fine” dog — originally from a comic strip by KC Green illustrating our masochistic ability to acclimate to any “new normal,” no matter how calamitous — appears in a tapestry called “5%.” Surrounding the dog are images of flames, a rising thermometer, and the exploding head of the “mind blown” emoji, along with a “low battery” warning, suggesting that even as the global situation becomes increasingly heated, our ability to respond is dwindling. Another piece called “‘the apps’ (iykyk)” is strewn with the iconography of various dating apps, along with an image of Sesame Street’s Elmo engulfed in flames, and a map of the freeways of Los Angeles (Mattes’ hometown), both of which provide analogies for the frustrating hellscape that is the online dating scene. Other works in the show address climate change, commerce, and astrology.

Kayla Mattes, 5%, 2023 Handwoven cotton, wool, mohair, and acrylic

The juxtaposition of all this info-ephemera with the centuries-old handicraft of weaving may seem like an odd pairing at first (not as jarring as seeing attack helicopters and rocket launchers woven into an Afghan war rug, maybe, but the disconnect feels similar). It isn’t really as strange as it seems. After all, as Mattes points out, both computers and looms utilize a binary logic of sorts: the intersection points of warp and weft in a tapestry correspond to the on-or-off state of pixels on a screen. Plus, it was an early attempt at automating the weaving process, by one Joseph Marie Jacquard, that produced the punch card technology that made the first proto-computers — or “analytical engines” — possible.

Mattes worked with a modern Jacquard loom to create the centerpieces of the show, three vertical banners that hang down one wall and scroll out onto the floor. Each banner features a list of automated Google search suggestions prompted by the questions “What is…?,” “When is…?,” and “Why is…?” Not entirely random, the suggestions were based on searches trending on the internet at the time; they were then curated and arranged by Mattes. The resulting questions range from the existential (“what is wrong with the world today?”; “when is it time to move on?”) to the trivial (“why is comic sans hated?”; “when is an avocado ripe?”). Taken together, they paint a collective portrait of the internet community that’s reassuringly “relatable” — both humorous and endearing for the humanity that shows through the cold logic of the algorithm.

On either side of the gallery entrance, vertical strings have been hung so visitors can write their own “searches” onto strips of paper, then weave them — and themselves — into the fabric of the show. There’s also a demonstration video showing Mattes at her loom; at one point the artist’s cat appears, batting at balls of thread while Mattes tries to work, because how would an exhibition like this be complete without its very own funny cat video?

Kayla Mattes – Doomscrolling Exhibition at the  Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum through August 18, 2024.

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