Detroit Art Review

Dark Matter: Tylonn J. Sawyer at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

Installation, Tylonn J. Sawyer, Dark Matter, 2023,   All photo images by Ashley Cook

The scope of Afrofuturism is vast. It has served as a primary foundation for the creative expression of Black culture for decades before even having a name. The term was coined in 1993 by Mark Dery in his essay Black to the Future and has been used retroactively and moving forward to encompass philosophical applications that depict visions of the future through a Black lens. The dreams and concerns of an Afrofuturist world transcend the real-world struggles of disenfranchised people, particularly those of African descent, in order to imagine a place where their power and contributions are undeniably recognized, appreciated, and valued. Often looped into the genre of science-fiction, it is not uncommon to see images, read stories or hear sounds that seem unusual to us in our contemporary world consumed by oppressive issues of race. Like many Detroit-based artists, the work of Tylonn J. Sawyer actively participates in Afrofuturist conversations surrounding new representations of Black greatness and reclamations of lost agencies. On March 17, 2023, his newest exhibition Dark Matter opened at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit.

Tylonn J. Sawyer, Embellishment Study: Man on a Black Horse, Charcoal, pastel, and glitter on paper 2022.

Here, some of the genre’s common motifs are revisited in order to remind us that imagining a future and building a world is a practice that requires maintenance. The effort to carve a place where one was previously not allotted is a process that involves looking forward to the future and looking back to the past. The artist exercises this through classical compositions like portraiture on horseback or in Victorian dress. Embellishment Study: Man on a Black Horse and For Small Creatures Such as We the Vastness is Bearable only Through Love position Black figures in roles traditionally held by white royalty. They are large-scale charcoal drawings that evoke other artists like painter Kehinde Wiley who is known for his naturalistic Old-Master-like portraits. This, of course, falls closely in line with Tylonn J. Sawyer’s history as a student at the New York Academy of Art, a school renowned for its figurative program.

Tylonn J. Sawyer, For Small Creatures Such as We the Vastness is Bearable only Through Love, Charcoal, pastel, pearls, and collage on paper 2022.

Forward-thinking and backward thinking certainly do still take into account contemporary challenges, treating them as critical jumping-off points to open discussions of potential in these world-building efforts. The title Turf War was given to two different oil paintings, each depicting a group of people holding up masks to block their faces. This has been common in Sawyer’s work; many of these masks use the faces of important public figures held often by the artist himself. These paintings in this exhibition are installed directly across from each other, communicating to each other, and challenging each other, white on one side, Black on the other. There is a significance to the hand gestures in each as well; the body language communicates seemingly sinister intent on one side and a fight for power on the other.

Tylonn J. Sawyer, Matriarch, Charcoal, pastel, and collage on paper 2022.

The use of gold leaf returns us back again to the decorated lifestyle of kings and queens in Moonlight while The Space between Adam’s Reach and God’s Unrequited Love has a background that mirrors the glitter in the aforementioned work of a figure on horseback. These materials and drawing techniques echo visual aesthetics often used in depictions of outer space, uniting the relics of the past with dreams of the future. Matriarch and Royal II are surrounded by the cosmos; there is an homage and dignity being paid to the women in these drawings, their contributions to the world, and the potential they represent. Like Tylonn J. Sawyer, there is and has been for decades, a consistent focus on space travel while imagining a new world and inclusive future for the Black community. From George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic to Sun Ra to Jeff Mills, the feeling of being “alien” or “other” is widely expressed and explored as a healing mechanism that, on one level, could act as a form of escapism while on another, a tool for empowerment. Dark Matter asks us what is needed to push even further out of our boxes and reach even greater heights. Time and place are some of the most important aspects of our conscious reality to consider when deconstructing and reconstructing our identities, an act that continues to be essential to the resilience of the human spirit.

Dark Matter by Tylonn J. Sawyer is on view until June 19 at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, 52 E. Forest Avenue in Detroit. Information:   https://nnamdicenter.org/

The Foreign Intimacies exhibition by Mel Rosas is at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on the Wayne State University campus.

An installation image of Mel Rosas’ “Foreign Intimacies” at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery. Image courtesy of DAR.

While teaching in Canada decades ago, Wayne State professor emeritus Mel Rosas found himself struggling to stay awake just before dark as he was driving across Saskatchewan. But he snapped right to when he came upon the obstacle in the middle of the road.

Rosas, a painter whose show Foreign Intimacies is at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on Wayne’s campus through June 2, initially assumed the creature was a cat. But as he leaned on the brakes, he realized the animal was far too big. It was a mountain lion.

That twilight encounter, he said, was both “surreal and other-worldly.” Remarkably, it’s an experience he’d repeat, in much the same fashion, years later while driving through his father’s homeland, Panama. Again, the first glimpse down the road suggested a cat. But on closer examination, it turned out to be something entirely different and far more spiritual and thrilling – a black panther.

Mel Rosas, The Day of the Panther, Oil on panel, 48 x 48 inches, 2015. All painting images courtesy of Mel Rosas.

These brushes with mythic felines materialize in a 2015 work, The Day of the Panther, that’s well worth seeking out if you go to the exhibition. Here we find ourselves on a nameless street well south of the border. Centered dead ahead, right in our line of sight, is the panther — a black silhouette against a rich green background – who’s carefully making his way across a dirt road. We’re looking through a doorway in a wall, a device Rosas uses frequently and to great effect — an opening that ushers us from this stained and peeling world to a more lyrical place. On our side of this threshold, all is every day and a little grimy. Contrast that with the verdant countryside on the other side, where the cat’s pacing and the image is nothing short of transporting.

Rosas’ work straddles the line between a waking dream state, on the one hand, and soiled reality on the other, albeit rendered in the rich hues of the Caribbean.  It would be easy, given the material, for the artist to romanticize – or worse yet, exoticize — these urban vignettes. But Rosas works in unsentimental realism, at least when he’s sketching out the walls and streets that constitute the foreground, or scrim, of these compositions. The colors may be lush, but the walls are pock-marked and streaked. There is, of course, an undeniable pathos to decay, but the real romance here lies in the distant vistas espied through windows, doorways, and apertures of all kinds. It’s as if the work operates on two levels – a flat picture plane facing the viewer and portals that give way to hopeful worlds beyond.

The paintings in Foreign Intimacies were mostly worked from drawings or photographs Rosas has taken on his travels over 40 years through Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, and Cuba.

At first, the colorful streetscapes in Foreign Intimacies might look to be empty, but that’s not the case. Many sport an individual, but never more than one — and that singularity, as with Edward Hopper’s under-populated canvases, makes the relative emptiness echo all the louder. Rosas, who studied art at Drake University and Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, attributes this in part to his own nocturnal storylines: “When I dream,” he said, “I find myself alone, walking around a semi-familiar environment.”

Which, in a way resembles Rosas’ take on being a foreigner abroad in Central and South America. As a “half-gringo,” he said, he still feels like an outsider looking in, never mind his family connections in Panama. Indeed, as he notes, the show’s title, Foreign Intimacies, underlines this paradox. “These experiences were foreign,” he said, “but strangely familiar.”

Mel Rosas, Pare, Oil on panel, 30 x 42 inches, 2012.

 A number of the paintings on display clearly come from Cuba – a fact given away by the awesomely preserved American cars from the 1940s to the early 60s that figure prominently in them. One good example is Pare (Give way), a particularly handsome color study starring what looks to be the back half of an early-Sixties, two-tone Ford Falcon painted a gleaming mustard yellow with a white roof. At the far end of the frame are two walls, one a matching mustard, juxtaposed with a neighbor in exuberant pink. Uniting the whole composition is a large wall in the middle, rendered in mottled shades of soft green. Mustard yellow, hot pink, sea green, and back to mustard — it’s a gorgeous, balanced composition.

Mel Rosas, Memory, and Artifact, Oil on panel, 24 x 36 inches, 202

The 2021 Memory and Artifact looks to be from Cuba as well, with its mint-condition four-door from the Forties. And once again, it’s a color study of sorts, although this time in monochromatic shades of brown and dark beige. The only exceptions are a few splotches of light blue on walls framing a neo-classical doorway, which look as if posters have been ripped down. For its part, the automobile is pristine, the architecture old and distressed.

Mel Rosas, El Policía Muerto, Oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches, 2016

Learning on another trip down south that the Panamanian term for speed bumps is “dead policemen,” Rosas knew that, by hook or by crook, he had to work that into a painting somehow.  The result is El Policía Muerto from 2016, which in many ways hits the political reality in some countries harder than the other paintings here, with its portrait of a heavily armed and flak-jacketed member of the Guardia Civil standing guard by a doorway near a car parked just short of a speed bump. Once again, the color is well curated. The wall behind the soldier is a fading turquoise, while the car – with a hood that doesn’t quite close – is an off-putting shade of dull, lemon yellow. It’s a brilliant choice for a work with undercurrents of politics and fear. The tension set up between the turquoise and the ugly yellow knocks the whole painting slightly off-kilter, which works to great advantage.

Mel Rosas, La Gentrificación, Oil on panel, 36 by 36 inches, 2016.

Installation image, Latin percussion with dancers at the opening. 2023 Courtesy of DAR.

“Foreign Intimacies” by Mel Rosas will be at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on the Wayne State University campus through June 2.

An installation image: Matthew Hawtin, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine and Benjamin Pritchard at the David Klein Gallery in Birmingham. Image courtesy of Sylvain Malfroy-Camine.

You’d be hard-pressed to find three abstract painters with styles more radically divergent, but such is the charm of New Work: Matthew Hawtin, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine and Benjamin Pritchard, up through April 29 at Birmingham’s David Klein Gallery. It’s a refreshing exhibition – you may well find moving from one artist to the other an unexpectedly bracing experience.

Despite differences, there is an underlying construct. “The overarching theme is abstraction and the brushstroke,” said owner and gallerist David Klein, who adds that he’s really been trying to build the gallery’s abstract-painting program. “You go from Matthew Hawtin, who completely hides the brushstroke, to Ben Pritchard who’s all brushstroke and gestural energy.” His judgment? “Ben is the grand gesture; Matthew is no gesture.”

Employing that same scale, Klein locates Malfroy-Camine, who came to Michigan for Cranbrook and stayed after getting his 2021 MFA, somewhere in-between the other two artists in terms of the prominence that the brushstrokes enjoy. Unlike Hawtin’s solid-color exercises, canvases like Malfroy-Camine’s Construct/Construct read as textured works, dotted as they are by scatterings of small shapes applied with colored pencil on top of the dried oil.

Sylvain Malfroy-Camine, Construct/Construct, 2023, Oil and colored pencil on canvas, 28.5 x 48.75 inches. Images courtesy of the David Klein Gallery and DAR.

There’s an airiness to these quilt-like canvases that’s simultaneously child-like and sophisticated. Indeed, they don’t hang on the walls so much as hover, and radiate a deeply original vibe with their patch-work backgrounds and oddball annotations. “Sylvain’s got a unique expression that’s kind of the backbone of his work,” Klein said, who added that the young artist has come “a long, long ways” in a short space of time, carving out a unique visual personality. “Sylvain expresses himself,” Klein said, “in a way I haven’t seen before.”

Malfroy-Camine’s compositions in this show lean heavily on pastels and “thin” colors, and as a consequence, really pop when set next to one of Pritchard’s deeply saturated paintings, whose sinuous lines and landscapes feel almost sculptural. Based in Brooklyn, Pritchard maintains studios both there and, since he often returns to Michigan, in a shed on his parents’ Oakland County property. A Detroit boy through and through, Pritchard nonetheless graduated – rather exotically — from the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Benjamin Pritchard, Roz Painting, 2023, Oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches.

The pieces he has in New Works represent a sort of departure for Pritchard. For most of his career, Klein says, the artist worked at a very small scale – nothing like what’s hung on the gallery walls today. As it happens, Klein was able to get him some larger canvases, “and Ben just went to town and created a powerful body of work,” the gallerist said. “Being able to paint on that scale really brought him to another level.”

Size-wise, Roz Painting, which calls to mind two muscular ceramic tiles standing next to one another, is 60” by 72,” large enough to fill up an entire wall. Constructed of compressed twists and turns, Roz draws a contrast with Pritchard’s other works on display, like “Magnanimous Duality,” which feel considerably more organic in spirit. Maybe it’s the curves, maybe it’s the colors, but running through and uniting all the artist’s work is a strong, sensuous current.

Benjamin Pritchard, Floating Solution (After a Late DeKooning), 2023, Oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches.

As it happens, the word “sensuous” can be applied easily to Hawtin’s work as well, albeit in a completely different universe. Born in the U.K. and raised in Canada, Hawtin now lives in the Detroit area but is still, if you will, bi-national, maintaining a studio across the waters in Windsor. The power of these smaller canvases on display lies in their saturated, strikingly flat surface treatment — as well as the knife-edge geometry that cleaves and defines them. They’re both eye-catching and a little confrontational. Their remarkable precision, Klein suggests, calls to mind both Elsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold, two 20^th-century painters whose work, while very different one from the other, practically defined “hard edge.”

Matthew Hawtin, Binary, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 44 x 4 inches.

But the surprises here go beyond sharp lines. “Matthew’s color choices,” said Klein, “can be kind of radical, like the orange and black together in Binary. I look at that and think ‘Halloween,’ but he pulls it off really elegantly – particularly with the addition of a line to break up the monochrome color pattern.”

Disorientation plays a minor-key role here. Many of these acrylic compositions toy with triangles and trapezoids, breaking canvases – not one of which is a rectangle — into colored blocks that almost generate an unexpected but convincing illusion of three dimensions. Adding to that tantalizing confusion are Hawtin’s trademark “torqued” canvases, whose surfaces tilt and cant at slight angles to the wall instead of being completely parallel. The works in effect “lean” toward the viewer, but so subtly that you wonder momentarily – as with the apparent 3-D – whether you’re imagining things. You’re not. Examine the edges and you’ll understand the construction involved.

Matthew Hawtin, Cool Green, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 x 4 inches

New Work: Matthew Hawtin, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine, and Benjamin Pritchard will be up through April 29 at the David Klein Gallery in Birmingham.

Christina Haylett: Revelations in Paint at the University of Michigan-Dearborn Stamelos Gallery Center

Boogie Woogie Polka, Mixed Media on Board, 2022, All photos: Ashley Cook

Michigan-based artist Christina Haylett has exhibited her work throughout the state and particularly throughout the Metro-Detroit area since 1980 when she graduated from College for Creative Studies with a degree in painting. While holding a position at Chrysler, Haylett consistently sought exhibition opportunities, balancing this full-time job with the intention to one day become a full-time artist. After twenty-three years working in the car industry, Haylett took the plunge and retired in 2008, dedicating all of her time to her studio and exhibition practice. The works on display in her solo show Revelations in Paint at the Stalemos Gallery span time and reveal the succession of her practice from 2009 until now.

Revelations in Paint – Installation View, 2023

The qualities of this exhibition are uncovered one by one, starting with the comprehensive text about the artist’s personal, educational, and professional background. Laura Cotton, the curator of Stamelos Gallery, worked closely with the artist to assemble these details as an educational resource for the public, serving as an access point to enter the work with ease. This text is complemented by the informational placards containing backstories to many of the works on display, written by the artist herself. As we review these placards, we learn about the numerous influences that were at play throughout the years. We learn about her exploration of portraiture and appreciation for the work of Alice Neel. We learn about her experience with a stink bug infestation, her journey through cancer recovery, her interactions with the spaces and people around her, like a cement factory along Macomb Orchard Trail, her young neighbor Piper or her professor Charles McGee. We learn about the ways that she approaches the development of a piece, which are ultimately informed by all of these life experiences.

Portrait Series, Mixed Media on Board and Paper, 2017

Her portraits of Starbucks baristas and physical therapists are relatively straight-forward figurative studies that explore form, color, line, brushwork and occasionally mixed-media collage. They contain an intimacy that underlines the remarkable relationships that Haylett has with her subjects, which is again defined in her plein-air landscape paintings depicting some of her favorite places in Michigan like Frankfort, Port Hope and Glen Arbor. Haylett’s practice has regularly oscillated between representation and non-representation since she began to seriously explore the world of abstraction in 2009. It is in abstraction that she is able to engage more directly with the spiritual and intuitive nature of creative production.

Days Gone By, Acrylic on Canvas, 2019

Haylett’s uniquely innovative approach to material application, color combinations, line work and composition is most confidently present in her abstract paintings. Her educational background in art comes through in the criticality of decision-making that references a multitude of modern artists without compromising her individuality. Christina’s Journey marks the early stages of her use of a particular methodology similar to automatism. Beginning with a loose thought, concern or inspiration, she marks the paper or canvas again and again, allowing them to guide her each time as she balances between conscious and subconscious resolutions. Elements emerge, and meaning is revealed as she participates in this process of discovery through painting.

Christina’s Journey, Mixed Media on Board, 2009

While paintings like Toy Box, Sometimes I Feel a Little Crazy, Progress and Where You Are Headed remain in a realm governed primarily by color and form, other paintings rooted in abstraction incorporate symbolism like animals, faces, numbers, peace signs, stars, silhouettes and shadows. A viewer’s interpretation can be guided by titles like Premonition, The Nature of Things, My Clear Eyes Can See Forever, Spirit Travelers or Boogie Woogie Polka as they navigate the show. These paintings have the potential to become therapeutic tools for anyone willing to get lost in them and find meaning in the chaos.

The Nature of Things, Mixed Media on Board, 2022

Revelations in Paint is the second solo exhibition of Christina Haylett’s career. In 2014, she produced a body of work for her first solo show, which took place at the Starkweather Gallery in Romeo, Michigan; she has never shown outside of Michigan, although the references elicited by her work are far-reaching. This exhibition, currently on view at the Stamelos  Gallery, consists of previously shown, along with many paintings that were never seen before now.The work in the Stamelos Gallery is complemented by a medley of glass pieces from the Art Collections and Exhibitions Department at the University of Michigan. The department offers dynamic programming to enhance the presence of art within the university overall. This is done through exhibitions as well as acquisitions to grow their collection and made it available for research as well as loans to other institutions.

Glass Works at Revelations in Paint, 2023

Revelations in Paint by Christina Haylett at the U of M Dearborn Stamelos Gallery opened on January 19 and closes on March 28, 2023

Learn more about the Stamelos Gallery