Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

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

Lynn Galbreath – Conversations @ Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center

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On September 13, 2025

In Paintings

Lynn Galbreath starts off her exhibition at the BBAC with a painting that seems at first like an outlier from the rest of the work in the show. It depicts a stack of books — surveys, essay collections, and textbooks — authored by artists, critics, and academics that will likely be familiar to any student of art history: Arthur Danto, Robert Hughes, Lucy Lippard, Marcel Duchamp, the ubiquitous Gardner and Janson. Atop the stack is a bouquet of white tulips. The painting is titled 1000 Missed Dialogues, an odd opener perhaps for a show called Conversations. But the artist explains via email that this painting is just one of several that comprised a 30-foot-long linear installation, “created after chaperoning university students to Italy.” Included in that piece were portraits, still lifes, scenes from Italian piazza life, and more. The books depicted are, Galbreath says, “representative of the study of studio art at the university level,” and run the gamut from basic drawing and art history, to academic disciplines and theory, before arriving at Fairfield Porter’s collection of criticism Art On Its Own Terms. For Galbreath, art itself is the conversation, one that “has been going on since the beginning of mankind.”

Lynn Galbreath, 1000 Missed Dialogues

Juxtaposing objects puts them in conversation with one another, like one book on top of another, or one image next to another. It’s a technique Galbreath uses often in her quest to engender communication. “Today, no one talks enough,” she says. “Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is constantly online checking social media.” Her art seeks to remedy this: “Conversations with opposite points of view are very healthy. Diptychs, triptychs (any multi-panel piece) are great platforms to address conversation. They can portray varying views and feelings.”

Lynn, Galbreath,  artist,  (art in background)  Left, Pure Hope, oil on canvas Right, Can You Hear It Now, oil on canvas

 

Lynn Galbreath, Damn The Torpedoes

Conversations features 17 paintings from three different bodies of Galbreath’s work. An accomplished representational painter, she often tinges her work with a sense of intrigue by overlaying incongruous elements within her scenes. For instance, in one large painting a cascade of lemons, cherries, and blueberries flies up (or tumbles down) across a blue sky full of fluffy white clouds. That this cheerful image is given the warlike title Damn The Torpedos, Full Speed Ahead is a jarring juxtaposition indeed! (Perhaps this bracing burst of edible primary colors is a rallying cry to artists to rise and shine and get to work?) Another piece here with the curious title Can You Hear It Now is similar in concept: a column of tumbling rosebuds, succulents and sea anemones (!) in a range of pinks, reds and violets, rises in the foreground before what might be a blooming southwest landscape, painted with loose brushstrokes in a pink-and-green palette that Monet would have approved of.

Lynn Galbreath, Working Triptych L to R: Unsustainable Living – Bruna Javier Sustainable Living – Waylon oil on Baltic birch

Three paintings grouped together on one wall of the gallery represent Galbreath’s series Working Hard For A Living. On either side are images of workers preparing food for sale. Only their torsos and their hands are visible; their heads extend off the top of the canvas, and their legs are obscured behind outsized heaps of foodstuffs. The image on the left is Unsustainable Living – Bruna, in which the titular worker cuts open fish with a pair of scissors, revealing the pink flesh inside. She’s based on Galbreath’s photos of a Portuguese fishmonger. Her counterpart on the right is a kale seller at Detroit’s Eastern Market, shown bundling up leafy greens in a painting called Sustainable Living – Waylon. The central, largest painting is a Mexican beach vendor who lends his name to the painting’s title, Javier. He turns his head to peer at the viewer, his body all but obscured by the jumble of colorful woven baskets he’s carrying. Taken as a whole, the triptych almost feels like an altarpiece, dedicated to hard-working individuals the artist has encountered in her travels.

Lynn Galbreath – Dusk On Cleveland

Lynn Galbreath,  Pontiac Morning Fog On Main Street, oil on Baltic birch

The most compelling of Galbreath’s paintings are the diptychs in which she pairs scenes of roads and freeways — mostly “widescreen” images emphasizing the far-off horizon — with swatches of flat color sampled from the color schemes of the paintings. For instance, Dusk On Cleveland Street, in which car headlamps and streetlights glow under a light-polluted night sky, is accompanied by a rectangle of deep midnight blue. In Pontiac Morning Fog on Main Street, the city’s downtown recedes into the haze until skyscrapers and even traffic lights are all but invisible; next to this is a square of misty pinkish-gray. A smaller work, Chelsea Grey, depicts cars parked outside a New York emissions testing site; its swatch is the hue of concrete, pigeons, and smog. Galbreath describes these as “atmospheric” studies depicting “the color of heat, humidity, time of day and year. They are compositions of location and materiality.” The color swatches might be seen as a sort of summing up of those conditions, a shorthand description of the atmosphere.

Lynn Galbreath, Chelsea Grey Lynn Galbraith, Chelsea Grey, oil on Baltic birch

Lynn Galbreath, Marlette Road Lynn Galbreath, Marlette Road, oil on Baltic birch

“Aesthetically,” she says, the road diptychs are “visual responses to extraordinary light characteristic and specific to a location.” Indeed, Michiganders will recognize the cold, clear conditions depicted in some of her highway paintings. The largest of the diptychs, Marlette Road, may appeal to the poetically inclined viewer, as it recalls nothing so much as Robert Frost’s most famous work. On a crisp bright day somewhere in Michigan’s thumb, two roads diverge in a wood, one paved, salted and plowed, the other almost indistinguishable from the snow on the shoulder. A yellow sign with a black arrow urges motorists to the left, while a diamond-shaped sign seems to warn them off from the riskier path on the right. Here as elsewhere in this series, Galbreath’s brushwork is deft and sketchy, impressionistic; closer inspection reveals splatters and drips of white, yellow and pink paint in the thickets of leafless trees in the background. The accompanying color swatch is a noncommittal light violet-gray, picked up from flashes of purple on the snow, a neutral statement with no advice on which path to choose. The relative merits of each road might be a worthy topic for conversation.

Lynn Galbreath –   Conversations,    Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Birmingham, MI Through September 18, 2025

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Nanci LaBret Einstein From Then Til Now’ @ Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn

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On September 9, 2025

In Assemblage / Collage, Sculpture

Nanci LaBret Einstein,  From Then Til Now’ Installation at Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn.

If Detroit art can be said to have a defining medium, it is assemblage. The city’s creatives have brought their own distinctive aesthetic to this venerable artform, its particular local character depending on the wealth of discarded detritus they have found in the city’s streets and dumps. Detroit artist Nanci LaBret Einstein, a connoisseur of urban dregs and vestiges, contributes her own particular sensibility to her three-dimensional constructs, drawings and collages in the current exhibition at Stamelos Gallery in Dearborn, “From Then Til Now.”

A graduate of the College for Creative Studies, LaBret Einstein brings an abundance of creative experience to her fine art from 20 years as a product designer, having licensed her images for use on children’s aprons, t-shirts, coffee mugs and even a line of wallpaper. This eclecticism has carried over into her studio practice, where she finds inspiration in unlikely places.

The artworks in the exhibition from “Then Til Now” represent a mini retrospective of work LaBret Einstein has created over the past decade and more. Formats range from low relief to fully three-dimensional sculptures, plus watercolors and digital photographic collages.  Her idiosyncratic methods leverage the eccentricities of her source materials to create artworks that both surprise the viewer and satisfy an itch for visual novelty.

Chaos and Confusion Align, 2025, mixed media low relief assemblage, photo K.A. Letts

Typical of the many painting-adjacent low reliefs in the exhibition, Chaos and Confusion Align is built on a Dibond substrate which LaBret Einstein then builds up with industrial foam. Using salvaged bits of vinyl flooring and paper mosaic, she creates a lively, predominantly gray, black and white composition to which she adds unifying splashes of red and yellow paint. As in other wall reliefs in the exhibition, and differently from many other artists who work in assemblage, the artist exercises formal control over her often-unwieldly components through deconstruction, rendering the parts unrecognizable in service to the larger whole. (Although a few notably handsome abstract wall assemblages like Holes (2013) and It Starts Over Here (2014) allow slightly more identity to the constituent parts, while still presenting a unified compositional front.)

Walking on the Sand in No Man’s Land, 2018, mixed media low relief assemblage, photo K.A. Letts

Abstraction is La Bret Einstein’s primary mode, but occasionally she drifts into more referential waters. Walking on Sand in No Man’s Land suggests a topographical map and takes its inspiration from U.S. military deployments. Muddy colors—blacks, browns and olive drab–predominate. Computer components stand in for military structures, packing cardboard evokes tank treads.

Over the last ten years, LaBret Einstein has adapted her creative process as it relates to assemblage into a related body of work in digital photographic collage, with the assistance of her husband, professional sports photographer Allen Einstein. The photographs, taken at her direction, form a digital library of images which are then altered and combined in photoshop to generate what the artist calls “conglomerations.” Ms. Frilly, a digital print on paper from 2014, is a relatively modest early product of the procedure, but over time the digital collages, such as Flower Palette (2016) have become more ambitious in scale and theme.

Ms. Frilly, 2016, limited edition digital collage photo, photo K.A. Letts

Scattered throughout the gallery, the three-dimensional pieces that speak to LaBret Einstein’s spirit of experimental play make up the remainder of the exhibition.  Here, the artist allows the components to retain more of their original identity within the structure of each work, and as a group they are more loosely conceived and improvisational in effect.

Several of the free-standing assemblages give distinct carnival vibes. Ride ‘Em Cowboy  features cheerful primary colors and the circular composition of an amusement park ride, with the black silhouette of a cowboy positioned midway up the contraption.

Ride ‘Em Cowboy, 2008, mixed media three-dimensional assemblage, photo K.A. Letts

The man-size sculpture Fire When Ready  can’t seem to decide whether it is a satellite or a gun (or possibly a space laser?) Here, LaBret Einstein effortlessly combines improbable components into a convincing approximation of something otherworldly.

Fire When Ready, 2015, mixed media three-dimensional assemblage, photo K.A. Letts

 

 

Fantasyland, 2010, mixed media three-dimensional assemblage, photo K.A. Letts

 

Fantasyland, another toylike construct that amusingly includes beads, pedicure toe separators, glue nozzles and many elements that must remain unidentified, casts an intriguing shadow on the gallery wall.

Like other talented Detroit artists currently working in assemblage–Larry Zdeb, Valerie Mann and Shaina Kasztelan, to name only a few of many–Nanci LaBret Einstein has found inspiration that gives meaning to her work in salvaged components gleaned from the city of Detroit. These elements, unique to her, make up a visual language with which she hopes to engage the viewer in conversation:

  I create a language in varying mediums and invite you to come along with me into another plane. It is a dialect that you may learn and translate into your own vernacular. These are my means of expression that will carry you into an experience. It allows you to visit a different space in which you are invited to spend time seeing, and encounter things you perhaps wouldn’t have thought of.

Nanci LaBret Einstein From Then Til Now’ @ Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn

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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Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings and Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Foundations @ David Klein Gallery

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On July 28, 2025

In Printmaking, Sculpture

An installation view of Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings at the David Klein Gallery’s new space in Ferndale. The foreground figures are from the companion show, Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Foundations. Both will be up through Aug. 23. (All photos by Detroit Art Review.)

 The David Klein Gallery chose a knock-out exhibition to celebrate the opening of its new home in Ferndale, just down Livernois from the former Susanne Hilberry Gallery, which Detroit art-lovers will well remember. Within the new space, you’ll find eight breathtaking prints, each mounted about a centimeter from the wall, casting a small and essential shadow, that make up Soundings by Susan Goethel Campbell. Arrayed in front of these are three hulking, stylized ceramic sarcophagi by Ebitenyefa Baralaye — faceless figures that don’t appear much interested in the luminous prints surrounding them. Both shows are up through Aug. 23.

Taking the former first, Campbell’s color-drenched works on Japanese paper command this airy new space. The jewel tones employed here mark an interesting digression for a printmaker, videographer, and sculptor who’s mostly worked with natural dyes in muted earth tones. That palette always made sense, given Campbell’s visceral empathy for nature and its accelerating decline – a moral and philosophical outlook that underpins all her output, and one that Essay’d critic Sarah Rose Sharp termed Campbell’s “eco-connectedness.”

The artist, who got her MFA at Cranbrook and was a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow, has spun out an oeuvre across her career ranging from elegant, walnut-stained abstract prints to Detroit Weather: 365 Days (2011), mesmerizing time- lapse videos that tracked Detroit cloud patterns over an entire year, recorded by cameras placed on a high floor in Detroit’s Fisher Building.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aegean Narrative No. 2, Procion dyes, embroidery, collage, hand-cut perforations on Japanese paper, 38 ¼ x 58 inches, 2025.

With Soundings, Campbell explores the dazzling hues she encountered while on an artistic residency last summer in Greece on the island of Skopelos. Reached in England, where she’s currently visiting her daughter, Campbell emailed that she had indeed been inspired by the visual riot flourishing under the Mediterranean sun. “I wanted to use vivid, saturated color to reflect my experience of the Aegean and flowering plants in Greece,” she wrote, “so I worked with Procion dyes,” a cold-water type that yields intense color, “instead of natural muted dyes.” The results are striking abstracts — elaborate hand-crafted works on artisanal paper from Japan,  with repetitive perforations created by a Japanese drill punch, and small, sharp, geometric elements sewn delicately into the paper.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aegean Narrative No. 2, (detail) Procion dyes, embroidery, collage, hand-cut perforations on Japanese paper, 38 ¼ x 58 inches, 2025.

In Aegean Narrative No. 2, Campbell fills the top half of the “canvas” with what appear to be radiant, abstracted sunflowers hovering above a sea-green lower half overlaid with a grid of small squares, many in dashing colors. These tiny geometric intrusions are ineffably beautiful, and read more like digital code than anything drawn from the living world. Campbell acknowledges such shapes are inspired “by patterns found in nature, data, and technology.”

Susan Goethel Campbell, Sounding No. 3 (Diptych); Procion dyes, embroidery, paper cuts on double-layered Japanese paper; 55 x 60 inches, 2025.

The grid Campbell’s embedded in some of these prints is most visible in Sounding No. 3 (Diptych), where just a scattering of aquamarine squares highlight an expanse of gridded sea-green, and work in sharp, if diminutive, contrast to the mauve and purple circular blobs that appear to be floating well under the water’s surface, like clouds of… something. There’s an undeniable suggestion, as with so much of Campbell’s work, of things elusive and unknowable.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Standing Figure IV, Terracotta, slip, stain; 64 x 19 x 17 inches, 2025.

Detroiter Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s monumental, faceless figures read like wood or metal, but are actually ceramic constructions built using a coil method that’s traditional in Nigeria, where the artist was born. The figures were fired with glaze and assembled in three parts, since few kilns are large enough to accommodate five-foot-tall stylized human forms. So while this tripartite division is inevitable and practical, there’s also a pleasing suggestion of ancient statuary à la Greece or Rome, where figures were sometimes constructed of stacked, carved elements.

Baralaye’s family migrated first to the Caribbean, and then to New York City. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2016, he got his MFA at Cranbrook and now teaches at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. The “standing figures” may invoke similar forms he knew as a child, says gallery director Christine Schefman, but are seldom rendered at such a grand scale.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Standing Figure III, Terracotta, slip, stain; 65 x 22 x 16 inches, 2025.

 

Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings, and Foundations by Ebitenyefa Baralaye, will be up at the David Klein Gallery through Aug. 23, 2025

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