Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

James Barnor @ DIA

By

On July 25, 2023

In Photography

James Barnor: Accra/London – A Retrospective at The Detroit Institute of Arts

Ever Young Studio, Jamestown, Accra. 1953 (printed 2010-20) Gelatin silver print. Autograph, London.  All photos images: Ashley Cook

On May 28, The Detroit Institute of Arts celebrated the opening of Accra/London, a comprehensive retrospective of photographs by African photojournalist James Barnor. This exhibition illustrates his dynamic career as a photographer whose work documented the everyday life of Africans in Ghana and the diaspora as well as major turning points in the socio-political landscapes of Accra and London between 1950-1980. Born in 1929, Barnor was a first-hand witness to life under British rule on the Gold Coast. The influence of this experience on his view of the world undeniably guided his choice of subject and composition, and his perspective as a person of African descent led to particularly careful considerations of lighting, framing, and the use of tone and color. As the largest exhibition of his work to date, with over 170 photographs spanning three decades, visitors can now learn not only about James Barnor as an artist, but about the history and evolution of photojournalism as well as the impact that the medium of photography has had on social and political change on race relations between Africa and Great Britain.

Selina Opong, Policewoman No. 10, Ever Young Studio, Jamestown, Accra. 1954 (printed 2010-20) Gelatin silver print. Autograph, London.

The short film presented at the exhibition’s entrance introduces us to the artist as a 91-year-old man keenly recalling details of his life and career. He recounts his youthful experience learning how to use a camera to photograph his friends, family, politicians, and professional athletes. He reflects on his role in documenting the history of Ghana from colonial to post-colonial life, his involvement with DRUM Magazine, and the expansion of his practice from Accra to London. Barnor’s light-hearted disposition in the film helps us understand how he could easily access people of various backgrounds, a trait that has proven to be critical to his professional success over time. Joy is the most consistent emotion detected in his photographs, despite their being taken in a world troubled with political unrest and racial discrimination.

DRUM Magazine, Nigerian Edition, December 1967.

The story told through this retrospective begins with Barnor’s entrance into the professional world of photography. He started to work with the Daily Graphic newspaper in 1950 and established the Ever Young Graphic Studio in 1953 as an open-air studio on the streets of Accra. Eventually, Ever Young moved to a permanent location, and Barnor used his autonomy as the business owner to explore and develop his approach to taking portraits. He depicted African life on the coast of the Atlantic and its backdrop of colonial oversight. Indigenous fishing boats share a frame with James Fort, Barnor’s friends drive a car with an iconic lighthouse in the background; elsewhere, men and women are photographed in the studio dressed in their professional uniforms. His portraits of men, women, youth and children portray the successes of local people who he recounted in interviews as having been motivated by the excitement for liberation that was on their minds and in their hearts at that time.

Muhammad Ali preparing for his fight against Brian London, 1966 (printed 2010-20) Gelatin silver print. Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière , Paris.

Enlarged wall images, detailed placards, vintage cameras and copies of magazines are on view throughout the space to further support the storytelling efforts of the curators. Accra/London initially debuted at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2021. Organized by Chief Curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas in collaboration with Awa Konaté, the Assistant Curator of the Culture Art Society, Clémentine de la Féronnière, Sophie Culière of the James Barnor Archives and Isabella Senuita. The exhibition was presented at MASI in Lugano, Switzerland in 2022 before coming to Detroit. The Detroit Institute of Arts recently acquired 22 of Barnor’s photographs (now included in the Detroit-based installation of Accra/London) in an effort to diversify the museum’s world-renowned collection and to enhance its holdings of works by living African artists.  Nii Quarcoopome, the DIA’s Curator of African Art, and Nancy Barr, the James Pearson Duffy Curator of Photography, worked together to bring this exhibition to a Midwest audience as part of the Detroit Institute of Art’s ongoing effort to promote its representation of people of color.

Ring Road, Accra, 1974 (printed 2010-20) Chromogenic print. Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.

Despite the collection on view being only a small sampling of Barnor’s entire archive of more than 32,000 images spanning six decades, it acts as a marker of the global growth in representation between 1950-1980 of people of color. In Accra, the photographer witnessed Ghanian boxer Ginger Nyarku publicly defeat his British opponent which challenged contemporary ideas of European superiority. He witnessed nurses, accountants, teachers and lawyers on the Gold Coast working together to weaken Britain’s control from within their government positions. He witnessed the transition of power from Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain to Kwame Nkruma of Ghana. He witnessed a growing presence of African models on the covers of magazines in London and Barnor participated in all of this by presenting opportunities for them to be seen. His sitters were these mothers with their children, these models, these athletes, these politicians. They were carefully photographed with lighting that complimented their skin tone, and angles that framed their traditional hairstyles. They were positioned in ways that displayed the traditional patterns on their clothing. They were all shown to be confident and proud.

A woman holding a baby after the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Sackey, Balham, London, about 1966 (printed 2010-20) Gelatin Silver print. Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.

 Although Barnor found racism embedded throughout the United Kingdom and its colonies from the time he arrived in London until he left, the discriminatory laws and customs were not strong enough to prevent a growing appreciation for Black culture. People of both African and European descent crossed strict boundaries and protested discrimination by actively celebrating the intermingling of cultures and the exchange of knowledge it allowed. Because of this, white subjects became increasingly prevalent in Barnor’s work. Joyful dissent was recorded in everyday-life moments of interracial couples and multi-racial friend groups while a growing number of Black figures began to appear in roles they previously were not allowed to have and in places that they were previously not permitted to be.

Installation, James Barnor: Accra/London – A Retrospective at The Detroit Institute of Arts. Image courtesy of DAR

James Barnor: Accra/London – A Retrospective is on view at The Detroit Institute of Arts until Closing October 15, 2023

Mark Newport and Jane Lackey @ Simone DeSousa Gallery

By

On July 7, 2023

In Paintings

Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Correspondence  @ Simone DeSousa Gallery

Installation image out front of Gallery. All images courtesy of Simone De Sousa Gallery

Former Fiber Artists-in-Residence, Mark Newport (2007-2023) and Jane Lackey (1997-2007), who served long tenures at Cranbrook Academy of Art, have reunited in a two-person exhibition at Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit. Though both have developed singular practices and careers, their show, self-titled Correspondence, showcases underlying similarities in their art-making processes. Indeed, despite their physical distance from one another–Newport works in the Detroit area while Lackey has resided in New Mexico since 2009–they remain in touch and together initiated the exhibition concept.

Installation view of Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Correspondence

At first glance, observing their art on opposite walls in the main gallery, one might think the two clusters of art represent antithetical points of view and execution. Newport’s robust stitchery versus Lackey’s inclination to highlight the process of flowing; his darkling monochromatic palette, her startling cobalt blues; his army blanket supports, her meticulously hand-drawn grids on paper; his gnarly surfaces, her neat, calm meshes; his irregularly shaped compositions, her Spartan rectangles.

Yet correspondences, as Newport and Lackey remind us, emerge upon further viewing: their vertical compositions convey a kind of order and classical uniformity; asymmetric shapes and forms enliven and colorize the pictorial spaces; both employ open ended, ad hoc creative techniques; and repetitive titles emphasize the seriously serial explorations of mending and flowing, the common but enthralling modus operandi of these two makers.

Mark Newport, Mend 21, Wool, acrylic, cotton, 40 x 28 in., 2021. Photo: George P. Perez

Mend 21 (2021), a prime example of one of Newport’s ongoing Mending series, began, like most, with a cut into the wool army blanket material, indicative of the inevitable tears and abrasions in a fabric used to warm and protect a vulnerable body. The subsequent mending of the cut, via darning and embroidery, leaves a physical reminder of the repair or “scab,” as per the artist.  Executed with thick or thin thread, the circular or rectangular halos surrounding these wounds add subtle color and texture to the gray wool ground of the blanket.

Mark Newport, Swathe, Wool, acrylic, cotton, 83 x 59 in., 2023. Photo: George P. Perez

Swathe (2023), the largest and one of the latest Newport works on view, is boldly and brazenly colorful, sporting three swaths of yellow at the left, a squiggly yellow line above, green, black, and brown horizontal stitching within two amoebic forms near the top, plus an organic oozing of multicolor hues at mid-center countered by a punchy red and black plaid patch at lower right. Moreover, the scrunched and bunched ball of fabric right of center heightens tactility and tautens Swathe’s irregular shape.

Jane Lackey, Almost being said, flow 3, Acrylic, ink, graphite, paper, 35 x 23 in., 2022. Photo: Addison Doty

Lackey’s Almost being said, flow 3 (2022), one of her identically titled drawings (with numerical designations), establishes the format for a quartet of spare, asymmetric arrangements of flowing cobalt forms encroaching upon precisely drawn paper grids. Like Newport, she too begins with consistent support, his an army blanket, hers a grid, that each artist then disrupts or interrupts. Here, in flow 3, two cobalt forms appear to be advancing toward the center, one on the left edging in slowly, the other at the upper right moving (hurtling?) comet-like toward the center. As Lackey’s lyrical titles imply, something undefined is being said, thought or felt, but provocatively, what that is, is only “almost” laid bare.

Jane Lackey, Almost being said, flow 4, Acrylic, ink, graphite, paper, 35 x 23 in., 2022. Photo: Addison Doty

Similarly, in Almost being said, flow 4 (2022), the slowly descending blue form appears to be on the verge of enveloping the tight, orderly grid. The tempo varies from composition to composition, evoking states of mind, emotional ups and downs, shifting moods and, as Lackey observes, “assertions of self within a plaid of connective tissue.”

Hence, Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Together and apart, singular but connected, Midwesterner and Southwesterner, two makers linked across the miles via stitching and flowing. Correspondence, not competition, as they’ve confirmed, is the order of the day.

Correspondence is on view at Simone DeSousa Gallery, 444 W. Willis St., Detroit, MI, through August 12, 2023.

Abstraction @ David Klein Gallery

By

On June 28, 2023

In Paintings, Sculpture

Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction at the David Klein Gallery, Detroit.

An installation shot from the opening of Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit, up through July 22.  All images courtesy of David Klein Gallery

The abstract revolution that rocked New York City and the art world in the late 40s and 50s was, famously, a mostly male affair — in the popular narrative, at least, a testosterone-fueled explosion of masculine energy and creativity.

Except, of course, there were women working in abstraction and producing epic work at the same time, like Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson or Helen Frankenthaler. They just didn’t get the headlines, a phenomenon Mary Gabriel explores at length in her 2018 book, “Ninth Street Women.”

Rebutting the notion that abstraction and machismo are connected at the hip, the David Klein Gallery in Detroit is hosting Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction, which will be up through July 22. The Klein show spotlights four artists – Elise Ansel, Caroline Del Giudice, Alisa Henriquez and Rosalind Tallmadge. (The title, Together and Apart, comes from a Virginia Woolf short story from 1925 that explored artistic affinity among several women friends.)

“In the history of American art,” said gallery director Christine Schefman, “the New York school is where abstraction happened, with all those macho guys – DeKooning, Pollack, and so on.   There were women there, and some of them became quite successful,” she added, “but they were definitely secondary to the men. The men were the geniuses.”

The women on display at David Klein pursue very different paths, from painting-and-collage to welded steel geometric forms, to name two. Drawing from different genres was, of course, part of the fun of pulling the show together, but Schefman says the women work well in unison, with their differing visions bumping up against one another. “They all have,” Schefman said, stopping for a second to pick the right phrase, “a feminine take. When you see their work together, there’s a certain harmony.”

Rosalind Tallmadge, Oberon, Mica, glass beads, sumi ink, Caplain gold leaf and sequin fabric on panel, 60-inch diameter, 2023.

Brooklyn artist Rosalind Tallmadge works with the most-exotic materials in the show, including mica, glass beads, Caplain gold leaf and sequin fabric. The majority of these works-on-panel are round, giving the distinct impression of alien worlds seen from outer space — deeply fissured and cratered landscapes with a dull metallic glint, both otherworldly and surprising.

A 2015 graduate of Cranbrook, Tallmadge was featured in that institution’s 2021 retrospective, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn. She was the subject of a solo show, Terrain, at David Klein in 2021.

Elise Ansel, Obsidian Butterfly II, Oil on linen, 50 x 44 inches, 2022.

 As an undergrad at Brown University, Elise Ansel fell back in love with Old Master paintings of the sort she’d seen as a child at the Frick Collection in New York City, and their drama and grandeur inspired her contemporary abstract oil-on-linen canvases – albeit reinterpreted and stripped of all figurative and narrative elements.

All the same, these canvases pack much the same emotional and visual drama, which Ansel, who got her MFA at Southern Methodist University, pumps up with deft use of color, and gestural forms that often appear to be in motion.

In editing out stories from great masterpieces, Ansel universalizes the pieces, broadening their possible meanings. She also, perhaps, feminizes the great masterpieces of yore, at once creating images both subtle and evocative – with not a Great Man in sight.

“I realized that these exquisite paintings were presented from the male point of view—as if that was the only one that mattered,” Ansel told Boston Magazine in 2022. With force and delicacy, the Maine-based artist succeeds in subverting the art-historical male gaze.

Caroline Del Giudice, Twirl III, Powder-coated steel, 24 x 29 x 25 inches, 2023.

 Caroline Del Giudice, another Cranbrook grad, is a Detroit-based artist with a metalworking studio in Redford where she crafts a range of welded-steel sculptures. The three brightly colored distorted arches that greet you as you enter read as massive, heavy objects – even though they’re actually only two feet tall and just a bit wider.

Each sports a great colored, slightly reflective surface  – crimson, purple and yellow, respectively – that’s kind of magnetic, looking very much like some industrial product of the highest order. And while their shapes describe a rounded arch of sorts, the geometry has been stretched, as it were, with one leg of the broken circle a step behind the other.

This contradicts your first assumption that these must be circular forms, at the same time that the staggered legs invest the structures with much greater visual stability. You could knock over a regular arch. Not these constructs. They stand their ground.

Alisa Henriquez, Sweet Nothings (detail), Acrylic, oil, digital prints, fabric and glitter on canvas, 63 x 53 inches, 2023.

Alisa Henriquez, who teaches at Michigan State University and got her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, in some ways gives us the most obviously feminine works in the whole show. At least, that’s the case with Sweet Nothings, in which a woman’s eye and fingers with painted nails play starring roles in this absorbing collage. The eye, in particular, is hard to avoid – just off-center and nicely done up in mascara, it stares out at the viewer with a questioning gaze that feels just a little sad.

In all six of her painted collages, Henriquez mixes colors with abandon, sketching out geometric objects and oddball shapes that often overlap or bleed into one another. These are crowded, active works – each quadrant, cut from the rest, could be a freestanding painting. In that sense there’s no real center, more of an intriguingly disordered visual universe.

Elise Ansel, Rosy Fingered Dawn, Oil on linen, 44 x 50 inches, 2022.

Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction will be at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery through July 22.

Jennifer Harge and Devin Drake @ Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

By

On June 17, 2023

In Film, Installation

Jennifer Harge comes together with Devin Drake to present a clearing, a 13-minute film that was created as part of the five-chapter series called FLY|DROWN. This collection of films is a multiform project involving performance, film and installation. The artists’ consideration for context sets the stage as the chapters of the series are screened within installations that resemble a post-Great Migration home in Detroit. Harge is an artist, a teacher of dance and a 2017 Kresge Arts in Detroit recipient who is recognized for her focus on Black feminist thought, spirit work and folklore. The long-time collaboration between Jennifer Harge and Devin Drake has culminated in this project that plays a part in the larger conversation concerning ongoing erasure of tribal histories and our contemporary relationships with nature and time.  The film a clearing is a fable. Its exhibition text acts as a forenote that engages us like a story-teller introducing their tale. This text provides stepping stones to navigate the abstract waters of the film, linking it to previous works by Harge, and highlighting her ongoing investigations into the capabilities of our imaginations and what it means to construct and occupy dreamscapes. We learn about the film’s main character, elder, and her challenges with shame. We also learn about nyeusi and her role as elder’s disembodied spiritual guide. This story of supernatural communication has the potential to evoke discussions surrounding mental health, spiritual health and the daydream as a necessary component in the process of healing.

All images are stills from a clearing., 2023, photo: Ashley Cook

The darkened room in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit encompasses four gold cushioned chairs on the right side, placed as if they are gazing up at the film projected on the left wall. This decorative seating possesses an animistic quality, imbued with an adoration for the moving images and the story they are about to tell. The chairs invite you to relax and comfortably enter the dreamscape of elder. Opening with a shuffling of an 8mm film, scenes of the skyline, an old telephone, an ice cream truck and inner-city nature transition to elder’s unnaturally accelerated and mechanical body movements. She arrives as an embodiment of restlessness and anxiety, showing vulnerability through a presentation of fear and pain. She then re-arrives as a dreamer.  In a chair that mirrors those mentioned above, elder lands, sleeping. Viewers of the film take the journey with elder. Our simultaneous experience becomes activated and sustained through a delicate weaving of abstraction and familiarity. Mystical humming sounds overlay birdsong and waves on a beach, and transparencies dance around each other, entering and exiting the frame at varying intervals as we sit in the same chair as she does. Our hearing, sight and touch are activated to not only tell us the story but to mentally and physically transport us into it ourselves.

a clearing., 2023, photo: Ashley Cook

The sudden arrival to this dream-space, where time is limitless and pacing is personal, emphasizes the stark contrast between her waking life and her dream. The chaos that is illustrated through dark lighting and rapid motion shifts to natural lighting and a slowed-down pace. The visualization of a place to comfortably exist is a common practice for artists. It is a way to take into account our current situation and produce alternative solutions in order to impact the future. While her observation of the world from an abandoned boat in the middle of a field hints at surrealist compositional techniques, her white mask and architectural headdress alludes to afro-futurism. Both creative movements actively work to bring things together in unexpected ways to challenge the norms and expand the boundaries of what is possible. Relative to the fast pace world that we live in today, another aspect of the film that feels quite unreal is the ease at which time passes. In her dream, elder is allowed to be unhurried in her gentle exploration. Jennifer Harge’s appreciation for relational ecosystems is visually communicated through elder’s curiosity and admiration for this world around her. With permission to be in reverie, elder plays with a tiny ladybug, embraces a large rock on the beach, wades in the water, and writes in the sand. She pulls pedals and leaves from a tulip and submits it to the tide. Her interaction with these things is serenely empathic, her choices seem symbolic and mystical and the barrier between her and everything else seems thin.

a clearing., 2023, photo: Ashley Cook

The distinct emphasis on pacing is established in the exhibition text accessible at the entrance of the dimmed room, and is reiterated through the natural repetitions found in the film. Wave after wave hits the shore, birds repeat their call, wind faintly shakes the brim of her hat, seasons change. As a continuation of the FLY|DROWN series, we are encouraged to think about pacing as a practice that allows us to take the time we need, listen to our bodies, our minds and the land. A verbal and written narration concludes the short film with an introduction to a fictional tribe called the “air people”. This final commentary establishes their connection to the true legendary people of Igbo Landing1 who, like the people of the Great Migration, made extreme sacrifices on their journey to achieve self-sovereignty. 

a clearing., 2023, photo: Ashley Cook

The FLY|DROWN series was created over the span of six years with the first chapter being premiered at Detroit Artists Market in 2019. Subsequent chapters premiered as part of larger exhibitions and festivals at institutions including the Wexner Center for Arts, Sidewalk Detroit and the University of Iowa.

The film a clearing, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is supported by the John S and James L. Knight Foundation. The film opened on April 14, 2023, and is on view until September 3, 2023   https://mocadetroit.org/a-clearing/

1 Igbo Landing at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island in Georgia, USA, is a historic site that marks the location of the largest mass suicide of enslaved people. In 1803, captives from Igbo (now Nigeria) rebelled against their captives, taking control of the ship and drowning them before marching into the water themselves, choosing death over slavery.  Samuel Momodu, “Igbo Landing Mass Suicide (1803),” January 9, 2023,

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/events-african-american-history/igbo-landing-mass-suicide-1803/.

Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco @ MSU Broad

By

On June 11, 2023

In Assemblage / Collage, Installation, Photography

Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) Stephanie Syjuco, Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019. Wooden platform, digital photos and printed vinyl on lasercut wood, chroma key fabric, printed backdrops, seamless paper, artificial plants, mixed media. Overall 20 x 17 x 8 feet. Photo: Dusty Kessler. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

While I chatted with Rachel Winter (assistant curator at the MSU Broad Art Museum) about the artistic practice of Stephanie Syjuco, Winter described her as a “force of nature,” and given her many accomplishments, it’s easy to see why. Syjuco’s work has been displayed at the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Recently, she was featured on the PBS series Art21.  Born in the Philippines, Syjuco has spent most of her life in the United States, and currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Using America’s colonization of the Philippines as a frequent reference point, her archival and research-based artistic practice addresses the ways photographs and objects can be used to construct skewed narratives.

Through July 23, the Broad presents the exhibition Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco, a collection of Syjuco’s work which traverses across photography, sculpture, craft-based media, and installation. This is a diverse body of work with a focused intent, addressing the ways individuals from the Philippines were represented in America during the years of American occupation (1898-1946). America’s history in the region is not given much attention in our history books, and is a “blind spot” for many of us. But these works also speak to colonialism and representation in a broader, more generalized sense.

Syjuco frequently uses chromakey green in her works, a reference to the green-screen used in digital video post-production. And the grey and white checkered pattern she often uses is a reference to the transparency background in Photoshop which fills the negative space in an image after something has been deleted. These allow for both superimposition and erasure, and their prevalence in her work speaks to the omnipresence (particularly in the internet age) of manipulated images and narratives.

Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) Stephanie Syjuco, Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019. Wooden platform, digital photos and printed vinyl on lasercut wood, chroma key fabric, printed backdrops, seamless paper, artificial plants, mixed media. Overall 20 x 17 x 8 feet. Photo: Dusty Kessler. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

The exhibition’s namesake, Blind Spot, is an evocative digital reconstruction of photographs taken during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. In addition to showcasing new technologies and scientific innovations, the fair also Included what was described at the time as a “human zoo,” featuring more than 1,100 individuals who were trafficked from the Philippines and who, for the duration of the fair, inhabited a Disneyland-style mockup of a village.  It was conceived as an educational display, but the exhibit also served to propagate notions about racial inferiority. Photographs of these individuals, taken as they posed in front of backdrops and dioramas suggestive of the South Pacific, helped disseminate these problematic ideas. Blind Spot is a digital intervention for which Syjuco manipulated these images in Photoshop, removing the people and leaving in their trace ghostlike, blurry apparitions. In the 40 images that comprise Blind Spot, all we see are the backgrounds that these individuals were posed in front of, and in removing the people from the photos, Syjuco symbolically liberates them from the ethnographic gaze. Begun in 2019 during a Smithsonian research fellowship, Syjuco completed the project specifically for this exhibition, and afterward it will enter the Broad’s permanent collection.

Blind Spot Stephanie Syjuco, Blind Spot, 2023. Pigmented inkjet prints mounted on aluminum. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, purchase, funded by the Nellie M. Loomis Endowment in memory of Martha Jane Loomis, 2022.33

Although the installation Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) is sculptural, like Blind Spot it also directly addresses photography and representation. The title references the photographic darkroom technique of lightening or darkening certain parts of the image, though Dodge and Burn can certainly be read in more literal ways. The ensemble presents a large stage crammed with images and objects associated with the Philippines. Many of these are cut-outs of stock images (watermarks clearly visible) that are displayed as prop-like objects. The centerpiece of the ensemble are sculptural representations of two women from the late 19th Century, one in traditional Filipinx dress, and one dressed in more Western fashion. It’s an intentionally busy sculptural collage which the artist likens to having too many tabs open on a computer. While the work reminds us of America’s colonial history, contemporary references in the ensemble (emojis, photographic color calibration charts, and MAGA hats) encourage us to think about the extent to which America is still a colonial power (Puerto Rico and Guam remain U.S. territories, after all, an enduring legacy of the 1898 Treaty of Paris). Subtitled “Visible Storage,” the work serves as a critique of how objects in museums have often been used to construct problematic narratives.

Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) Stephanie Syjuco, Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019. Wooden platform, digital photos and printed vinyl on lasercut wood, chroma key fabric, printed backdrops, seamless paper, artificial plants, mixed media. Overall 20 x 17 x 8 feet. Photo: Dusty Kessler. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

While several bodies of work in this exhibit specifically address Filipinx representation, Syjuco’s work also addresses representation and constructed narratives in more generalized ways. One work in the show features 20 digitally printed flags suspended from the ceiling; their presence evokes the United Nations, and initially they seem to be an expression of unity. But these flags come from fictional rogue/enemy states portrayed in American and European movies; none of these states existed in reality. Most of these are from films produced during the cold war, and are stylized to evoke certain parts of the world; together they speak to a generalized fear of a foreign enemy.

Syjuco’s work is heavily based on archival research, and it raises questions about how archival holdings are acquired, interpreted, and displayed. In support of this exhibit, the accompanying booklet includes brief essays by the directors and registrars of Michigan State University’s varied collections across the arts and sciences (such as the herbarium and the university archives).  They discuss their holdings while acknowledging the “blind spots” that exist within these collections, underscoring the cross disciplinary relevance of Syjuco’s artistic practice.

The show takes full advantage of the Broad’s Zaha Hadid designed exhibition space. It’s both conceptually powerful and visually rich. And while the colonization of the Philippines occurred on the other side of the world, Syjuco, particularly with her Blind Spot project, reminds us of some of the ways that the enduring impact of America’s colonial legacy comes close to home.

 Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum

Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco is on view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum through July 23, 2023

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