May 16th-June 30th

The Scarab Club will host its annual Blooms, Bugs, Beasts exhibit, with noted artist and educator, Charles McGee, as the juror. The all-media exhibit is open to all Great Lakes and Ontario artists. It will be juried from actual work on Sunday, May 13th.

Intake of art for the juried exhibit: Sunday, May 13th, 9-noon
Jurying: Noon-2 pm
Jury results & pick-up of non-accepted work: 3-5 pm
For complete details, download the attached entry form.

The exhibit will be exhibited in the main gallery of the Scarab Club during the Detroit Festival of the Arts. Charles McGee's painting, Time Modules, will be used for the poster for the annual event and will be shown as part of the Blooms, Bugs, Beasts exhibit.

The staff of 555 Gallery, in partnership with artist Bryant Tillman and jurying artists Jack Johnson and James Dozier, wish to convey an open call for submissions to the metro community of artists for participation in the next installment of our well-recieved program, "The Ben Franklin Project". The featured component of this art show is that not only will all individual works will be priced for sale at only 100 dollars, but that each submission will be maticulously juried for quality; an insisted-upon detail made by leading collectors.

The exhibit, "Exhibition II", will open on Saturday, June 2 at 7:00 pm at Gallery 555 and run for a duration of only one week, with the closing reception being held on the following Saturday evening.

Submission window is between now and May 18th. You can submit up to five (5) jpgs, at a size no more than one hundred (100) KB. Each submission must be accompanied by information.....name of artist, title of work, media, and dimensions ( we already know the price! ). All submissions are to be made to me, at my addy and I will forward them to the jurors. You will be notified as soon as I get the determination from them.

Drop-off of accepted work will be during the fourth week of May up to the 26th. Those not yet processed by then will be allowed to bring their work in, upon notification, until June 1.

There will be a $10 submission fee.

bryant tillman, curator
the ben franklin project
bryanttillman@yahoo.com

Do terms like “glory hole,” “duckbill shears" "annealer," "Slumping," "punty," mean anything to you?

If so, come check out the Motor City Blow-Off and see some of the best in the area in action.

If not, then come to the Motor City Blow-Off and get a first taste for the art of glass blowing.

(Look for our story on the Glass Academy of Dearborn coming soon, but until then, here’s the press release for this fun and family friendly event!)

The first-ever “Motor City Blow-Off” event to celebrate Michigan Glass Month will be held at the Glass Academy in Dearborn from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 28, 2007. The public is invited to attend the demonstrations to be held at the Glass Academy’s 14,000 sq. ft. facility at 25331 Trowbridge in Dearborn.

Michigan’s “hottest” glass artists are scheduled to fill the day-long glass blowing demonstrations.

Michelle Plucinsky and Chris Nordin, glass artists and owners of the Glass Academy and Furnace Hot Glass Works, promise that this will be a “fun-filled” and “family-friendly” event. The Glass Academy is the only state certified trade school in Michigan for the glass arts.

“We have some outstanding Michigan artists who will be demonstrating both their technical and design skills,” said Plucinsky, who is also a member of the Michigan Glass Month committee.

Professor Herb Babcock of Detroit’s College for Creative Studies and a longtime member of the Michigan Glass Month committee will participate. Babcock’s work is world famous and has been commissioned by a number of countries for his unique approach to glass casting and sculpting.

Other well known artists providing demonstrations include Albert Young from Michigan Hot Glass which is located in Detroit’s Russell Industrial Center; April Wagner and Jason Ruff of the Epiphany Glass located in Pontiac; Jeff Mack, the master glass blower from The Henry Ford in Dearborn; Toby Upton, sculptor and designer from Ferndale; Eva Milinkovic and Kriston Gene from Tsunami Glass Works in Windsor, Ontario; Israel Nordin, a founding artist of the Detroit Design Center, and an instructor at the Glass Academy; and Annette Baron, owner of Baron Glassworks in Ypsilanti.

During each two-hour demonstration there will be drawings for blown glass pieces from the studio.

The Glass Academy will also host a follow-up event to be held on Saturday, May 5, to showcase all the creations from the Motor City Blow-Off on April 28. All of the design pieces will be available for purchase.

The studio includes four glass furnaces, three kilns and cold working equipment along with ample space and natural light for working on glass sculptures of all sizes.

The cost to attend the Motor City Blow-Off is free for children under 16, $5 for students with ID and $10 for adults. Guests are welcome to stay for as many demonstrations as they’d like. Light refreshments will be available throughout the day.

For more information about upcoming events, call 313-561-4527 or visit www.furnacehotglass.com.

About Furnace Hot Glass Works

Furnace Hot Glass Works was established in 1991 by Chris Nordin and Michelle Plucinsky to create original glass designs for a variety of clients including interior designers, architects and private commissions. Many of the studio’s works are available for public viewing in corporate headquarters, office buildings, restaurants and lobbies. Additional information is available at www.furnacehotglass.com or by calling 313-561-4527.

CPOP
Through May 19, 2007

Since we first could reflect on ourselves and our environment, humans have been altering the both of them at an ever increasing rate. The advent of the Industrial Age hastened this pace of technological encroachment into the natural realm. And with it came the persistence in popularity of cautionary tales concerning both the promise and the dangers of “playing god” as it were – from Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to today’s versions, the half-human, half-machine Borg of Star Trek.

Heedless of such warnings, we continue mostly unchecked on the steady march of the merger of man and the mechanical, though in perhaps more subtle yet no less insidious ways than in fiction. Witness external devices like cell phones attached to everyone’s head today, and less visible evidence of our becoming the Borg, from replacement organs to chemicals coursing through our bodies, all offering the promise of better living.

Such is the subject matter that feeds Topher Crowder’s insatiable appetite for visual expression, exploding in cinematic widescreen in black ink on white board. From a distance, human bodies splinter into cascading vortices of machine parts, bullets, pills, and more. His figures are part Aeon Flux, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part akin to the humorous and grotesque stylings of comic book artists R. Crumb and Basil Wolverton. They’re a bit like Gulliver, composed of Lilliputian machine parts and meticulously detailed line work. Small comic book-like panels are smattered across the composition, allowing for greater detail, additional characters, machines, and symbols – all expanding on the grander narrative. There is so much activity going on, yet Crowder also leaves enough quiet space to allow for brief periods of rest.

It’s a vision of a future gone mad, the dark side of the Matrix with miles of machines bound to the dreamers above. These are tapestries woven from the human and the mechanical – the boundary between figure and ground truly dissolves. The weaving in and out of one another is a metanarrative of our dissolution into the built, mechanized landscape.

Crowder’s connection to the conventions of comic books is clear, besides Crumb and Wolverton mentioned above, there’s a bit of Geoff Darrow (who provided the conceptual imagery behind The Matrix films) and even a nod to Frank Miller’s trademark band-aids as negative space from his “Sin City” work. And while it’s true, his imagery and skills do lend themselves perfectly to that medium, as most obviously demonstrated in his line work and by the comic book panels within, (though these are more a way of “Crowder-ing” even more content into already mind-boggling scenes), these are not sequential art. They are a thing, a world unfolded in two-dimensions, and it makes more sense instead to talk about them in the way former Detroit painter Peter Williams described himself as a modern day Peter Bruegel observing and documenting the bizarreness of medieval culture. Crowder’s inclusion of the well written and informative texts that accompany each piece describing a particular drug, like Viagra or Prozac, or medical procedure, like the artificial heart or the frontal lobotomy, give greater depth to his visual observations of our dependency on the mechanical and the chemical.

As much as Crowder’s created his own world, it’s also very much the world we live in – it’s so much Detroit. Not the images of Detroit of cars, rust, or abandoned buildings, but of industrialization overrunning every aspect of our lives. In depicting this as glorious horror, he’s pointing out the absurdity of what we’ve let ourselves become – locked in our cars, chained to our work stations, automatons on the assembly line. We take a pill to fix everything, replace body parts with metal and plastic, and are plugged in to the Net all the time. It’s not a shining future of luxury and relaxation, but one where “planned obsolescence” means that even Viagra only picks things up for a little bit, while deadening desire at the same time.

If the subject matter comes across as depressing, the visuals more than balance that out with their sheer “Holy Cow!” nature. Crowder’s crammed layer upon layer of images, designs, all products of a mind that never quits. It’s a testament to an unbridled display of creativity that it seems that it may be impossible to ever take in all the little bits he’s encoded in each composition.

In the most recent work in the exhibition, Crowder shows off a softer side, with primary figures rendered with a more realistic touch, which works in contrast to the more cartoony elements that compose them. The integration of all the various elements is smoother and more seamless. Spaced throughout the larger pieces are prints of images from his sketchbooks, which served as the launch pad for his tackling of these more expansive and ambitious pieces. His paintings are on hand as well, off on their own little space, and although they aren’t on the same footing as his drawings, they do represent the compulsion for ideas that drew him back into the art world, and quite forcefully so.

Mark my words on this: someone will make a movie based on Crowder’s imagery. They’re that out of this world. But movie or no, the wildly imaginative world he’s created in ink, stand strong on their own, and request lengthy and repeated viewings. These are commentaries on where progress has taken us, but they represent progress in and of themselves as well. For too often progress is linked solely to technological advancement. This misses out completely on the growth in our understanding of ourselves and our capacity for expression – the realm of the arts. Crowder’s works are clear progress on that front. Check ‘em out. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com

Applications now online for 2007 Detroit Urban Craft Fair

The Detroit Urban Craft Fair will return to the Majestic Theater Complex in Detroit, on August 4, 2007. Hosted by Handmade Detroit, applications for the juried show are now available on the DUCF web site (www.detroiturbancraftfair.com). The deadline to apply is May 25, 2007.

The fair, which features over 50 Michigan and national DIY crafters, is entering its second year with the same sense of community that made it a must-attend event in 2006. For 2007, the fair has added a DJ, keepsake program guide and raffle. Portions of the raffle\'s proceeds will be used to set up a project grant for a local DIY business. This year\'s show will also tie into a Handmade Detroit art exhibit at the Majestic Cafe for the months of July and August.

The fair is currently seeking sponsors from independent businesses. For more info on becoming a sponsor, e-mail sponsors@detroiturbancraftfair.com

When: Saturday, August 4, 2007, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Where: Majestic Theater, 4120 Woodward Ave. Detroit
Admission: Free, all ages

For more info DUCF, check out www.detroiturbancraftfair.com or e-mail info@detroiturbancraftfair.com

Head to Toe creations by three metro Detroit artists
Jewelry by Sarah Kate Burgess
Dresses by Annica Cuppetelli
Shoes by Tom Carbone
Community Arts Gallery @ Paramount Bank

If we lived in some alternate reality where tennis shoes, blue jeans, superhero t-shirts, all topped off with hooded sweatshirts (blue) were the tell-tale signs of high fashion, then this writer would be an expert of the highest degreed. In fact, he’d not only be qualified to write about such things, but probably could consult other folks on how to be just as hip, and perhaps even have his own TV show on said topic. But we don’t live in such a place. Nope. It’s been recommended to me on an occasion or two, to seek the advice of the fabled “Fab Five.” I think not knowing who this referred to, probably set my hipster fashion bar a notch or two lower. Hence, the reason I tend to leave fashion writing to others, well, more fashionable.

However, the unique show put on at the opening by those behind “Materialistic” and the works themselves, make me more than compelled to share a few words of commentary on this exceptional exhibition.

The show features the complementary works of three different designers – Annica Cuppetelli providing dresses, shoes by thedetroiter.com’s own calendar man Tom Carbone, and necklaces by Sarah Kate Burgess. In addition to works by all three displayed throughout the perimeter of the space, the opening featured a fashion show with a twist. Four models wearing pieces from each of the designers stood, turned, and smiled on footstool tall, elegantly simple pedestals for the duration of the opening! This allowed viewers to casually observe the works as they’d be worn, without the hoopla of the runway event, and really spend time checking, umm, the designs out. What was special for the attendees cannot have been easy for the models. One must give them great for their stamina and patience – it’s one thing to sashay down a catwalk for thirty seconds, it’s a whole other thing to be on your feet for that long, and be pleasant to people staring up at your outfit the entire time. My hat (or rather my hood) is off to them.

Starting from the ground up (as Spike Lee taught us, it’s all about the shoes!), Carbone’s shoes curve and have presence like ray guns from Barbarella. These shoes are quite sculptural and certainly make their wearer statuesque. Fusing together wood wood, metal, leather, and more, he’s created something functional, yet with the appearance of jewelry for your feet. Carbone pays great attention to little details from the clasps to the material forming the significant sloping heels – they are objects of art whether worn or displayed foot free.

Cuppetelli’s dresses show off a strong command of materials, as within the same dress she juxtaposes a number of fabrics (in one a leather top joins a felt like, layered bottom.) Not only multiple materials but multiple layers of the material – at times layered like shingles and in others diaphanous materials floating above one another – in one dress she builds up opacity through many layers of window screen-like material. She wraps her figures like petals in an upside down flower. Despite the layered density of the dresses, these are quite light and lively.

Burgess offers two types of necklaces: wearable and necklace-like compositions – both reference one another. In both there is an exploration of a curling motif, sometimes looping about itself, while in others representational of the very chain of the necklace magnified to become an element of the design. In one, buttons from a jacket or some such article of clothing, serve as the “jewels” of the necklace, and the chain and knot design on them mirrors the chain of the necklace they hang from. The non-wearables are collages cut from the gold and silver bits from greeting cards, which also pick up on the chain elements. Smaller versions of the paper jewelry can in fact be worn (and were by Burgess and the models). Attached with spirit gum (of the same sort used to hold string-less domino masks on superhero sidekicks) they float on the neckline, simple and like a painted on composition. By focusing on design as the most essential element here rather than what precious metal or jewel they’re made from, Burgess has made the accessory accessible, both in terms of material and concept.

This was an exciting opening, to say the least, offering a fresh look at fresh fashion. Paramount Bank is making good choices in what the exhibit, showing off a diverse range of programming. The success of the gallery in a bank is a model perhaps other businesses should consider to enrich their environment, all while providing more much needed homes for the arts. - Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com

February 14-March 31, 2007
Crone Celebration
March 23rd, 6-9 PM
The Scarab Club

In 1997, Rose Dalessandro proposed and curated the exhibition, “Goddesses,” at Center Galleries. She was inspired by the publications of Marija Gimbutas, an archeologist whose work in Southeastern Europe was responsible for the resurgence of interest in the feminine divine. Goddesses seemed to be in the air…books, calendars, postcards…everyone was capitalizing on the phenomenon. Dalessandro sensed that it was time to initiate a visual discussion; to go beyond commercial exploitation. She invited a select group of artists, both women and men, to present their interpretations of the goddess. I was invited to write the gallery statement.

As a neophyte in the world of the goddess, I absorbed information like a sponge and came to understand the three aspects of the goddess: virgin, mother, crone. The terms are linked to the phases of the moon: waxing, full, and waning; which in turn reflect the three stages of a woman’s life: birth to the onset of menses; fertility to the cessation of menses; post-menopausal activity to death. I thought of my daughter, myself, and my mother; of myself, my mother, and my grandmother; of my mother-in-law who had no daughters…of the cyclical nature of the relationship of women in particular, to one another. I talked to all the artists, Marilyn Zimmerman, among them.

Zimmerman is the consummate teacher on feminist, gender, racial and economic, that is, all social justice issues. She is not interested in the information for her own personal edification. She wants to share it with everyone who will listen. Every experience is to be mined for an elemental truth and every encounter is a teaching opportunity. She is self-revelatory, consciousness raising, and liberating.

I was not surprised that she would collaborate with Gail mally-mack, a feminist artist with similar interests, in co-curating the Women Image Women exhibition. What piqued my interest was that they presented themselves as Co-Crones and included a Crone Celebration with the exhibition.

American marketing culture makes much of the stage of virgin (youth, beauty, sex appeal), acknowledges the mother (Mom, laundress, cook, shopper, business woman) but completely ignores the crone. The word itself is seldom used and has developed a negative connotation: an unpleasant, shriveled, old woman; a hag.

“Women Image Women” became a multi-dimensional exhibition of 40 works by 14 women and an event that attempted to singularly change our perception of women, particularly crones.

Pi Benio, who has traditionally worked with natural materials, brought forth her familiar pod shaped pieces but made them of clear plastic tubing and tie wraps. In Eternity Cell she included gut stretched across a small steel armature to support stones that sat like fragile eggs within their cocoon of tie wrap silk. This nod to new materials is eerie. The plastic tubing is all too familiar in hospital settings as conduit for bodily fluids; similarly, tie wraps are ubiquitous, holding together everything from luggage locks after homeland security inspection to water pipes in crawl spaces. The implication seems to be that new materials/technology are as capable of nurturing creativity as organic matter in the hands of women; or that women are adaptable to working with any, even the most quotidian of materials.

Jeanne Bieri is known for her hand-stitched two and three-dimensional work. Familiar and Unknown, a mixed media work of stitched organza pockets on an old linen kitchen towel, was designed as an interactive piece. Like a toy closet organizer, the 20 pockets were filled with the detritus of a woman’s life. Sepia-toned family photographs, worn cards of various sewing notions, a felt pincushion, letters, map fragments, birthday and vacation postcards, 3x5 address cards, calling cards for Mrs. Angus S. Gray as well as for Angus S. Gray himself were randomly inserted into each pocket. Drawings of older adults, middle-aged adults, teenagers, and children done on etched glass plates were wrapped in organza and stitched closed so that the image was visible but softened by the fabric. It was a touching memorial to the experience of going through a box or drawer after the death of a parent or relative and finding bits and pieces of their life story…some of it familiar, much of it unknown. Equally satisfying were her two small paintings: Woman with Goat and Woman with Duckling. Both paintings had the spontaneity and intimacy of snapshots that contrasted with the attention to painterly technique and detail.

Sue Carman-Vian had her Mirror Dress on wheels awaiting her vivification of it in performance. The sleeveless, A-line dress has a flexed mirror exterior the full length of it on all four sides. It reflects its environment as well as anyone standing in its line of sight. Empty, it allows you not only to imagine yourself, be you a man, woman, or child, in it and strolling around the room but also to see yourself reflected in it. It is a simultaneous inside/outside view. You can ponder how you see yourself as woman, how restricted a woman’s place can be, how a woman can reflect the world around her, how distorted your self-image or your background might be. In Support Dress, Carmen-Vian gives a nod to the individuals who provide support for women, no matter what hat the women choose to wear. In it, a woman wearing a full-skirted dress is trying on a hat. On the skirt of the dress are miniature portraits in gilt frames.

Two untitled, 30” x 30”, black and white photographs by Judy Eliyas, give you goose bumps and make you laugh at the same time. Meticulously costumed and staged, Eliyas takes on the persona of the perfectionist housewife of the 1950s. In one photograph she is dressed to the nines: dark lipstick, white earrings and beads, black cocktail dress, white gloves with black polka-dots, while standing in front of a Sub-Zero refrigerator or freezer. (Sub-Zero is the premium, built-in, brand of refrigerator that was first produced for home use in the mid-1950s.) She stands holding out a plastic container, staring you in the eye, lips puckered in that “Come on honey. You better take this. I did it all for you,” look. On the table in front of her are more plastic containers labeled with contents from pickled herring to cupcakes. In the other photograph she wears an alluring housedress poised between living room and dining room. She stands with the vacuum cleaner hose draped over her arm like a serpent…a desperate housewife of a previous generation. Today we shudder at the perfection that was expected of/projected onto the housewife in the 1950s; the denial of self that it engendered. At the same time we can laugh at the familiarity of it with the ease of those who have survived it because we know that crumbling imperfection is the human condition.

Carol Jacobsen combined her compassion and service to unjustly imprisoned women with March being Women’s History Month in the two pieces: Conviction: Harriet and Conviction: Emma. These portraits of Harriet Tubman and Emma Goldman were presented in Jacobsen’s signature, large format, dramatic, black and white style. In this case, each work looked like a negative of a conviction document with a black and white photograph attached. The document included details of each woman’s “illegal” activities and subsequent judgments and sentences. The most prominent fact about Harriet Tubman was the $40,000.00 reward writ large beneath her photo. Since money is a common measure of power in this country, and in Tubman’s case a measure of the threat she posed to the Southern establishment, I decided to try to determine what that reward would be worth today. Using the consumer price index, it would be close to $1 million. Using the unskilled wage, however, because it is the most consistent means of measuring the value of money over time, that reward would be the equivalent of over $6.5 million dollars today based on statistical data currently available.

The diminutive Emma Goldman, was defined by her string of convictions: for inciting riot, for inciting assassination of President McKinley, being a suspicious person, attempting to distribute birth control information, and many more until she was finally deported for having a questionable immigrant status in 1919. As a social terrorist, anarchist, of her day, her deportation based on her “questionable immigrant status” is only too well understood today.

Shaqe Kalaj prepares to embrace the crone stage of her life in Crone Awakening, a work strongly influenced by the symbolic style of Frida Kahlo. Along the top of the assemblage, Kalaj juxtaposes a photo of herself with that of a 90 year old friend.

Gail mally-mack wants us to think about the earliest perception of the earth as mother, source of nourishment and its subsequent division into parcels of land as we look at her drawings of female figures and vessels done on surveyors reports for subdivisions in Birmingham, Farmington Township and Waterford Township. It presents us with the conundrum of our times: how to honor Mother Earth while continually carving her up.

Teresa Peterson cleverly takes old mechanical devices like time clocks to create visual puns that point to the stages of womanhood. Time Clock is a time clock from Detroit Edison. A diagram of a woman is superimposed over the glass in the center and a tiny diagram of a woman with her ovaries colored in is in the lower left corner of the glass. The piece gives form to the idea that the woman’s ‘time’ for child-bearing is running out.

Jo Powers’ Three Lizzies repeats the same tiny portrait of Lizzie Borden in a frame made from a triple switch plate cover and painted red. The center portrait is done in shades of blue and is flanked on each side by ones done in red. Is the implication is that we have immortalized Lizzie Borden as an ax murderer until she is blue in the face…when in fact she was acquitted? The murder remains unsolved. Speculation continues because evidence was handled poorly, townspeople’s testimonies were conflicting, Lizzie’s father and stepmother were not well liked in the community, and Lizzie herself suffered from epileptic seizures. Nonetheless, Lizzie’s reputation remains, thanks to a playground rhyme and Powers’ choice of colors, bathed in blood.

Claudia Shepherd’s Support pays homage to the lipstick; the magic wand that spruces up a woman enabling her to go out into the world ready to speak, smile, kiss, shout and scrawl graffiti across the women’s room mirror or stall doors.

Rita Shumaker’s detailed and complex pencil drawings, Artemis and Conjunctio are so soft as to be overlooked. They quietly speak of the mythical goddess and her multiple aspects and the beliefs and practices surrounding her.

Linda Soberman, in an untitled paper quilt-like mixed media piece, pays tribute to Jewish women of Eastern European extraction. The repeated, female face speaks of the stereotyping, the anonymity of these women. Yet their individual stories are typed and repeated over these faces as if to implant them in our memory through the act of repetition. Closer inspection reveals a male face repeated a number of times. Both of these faces, that fill the frame of the small panels on which they are printed, appear to be mannequin faces. Layered over these, here and there, are small pictures of actual women…pictures taken as mementos perhaps, about the size of passport photos which they also call to mind.

Marsha Wright in Insight gives us that moment of enlightenment in a photographic self-portrait in which her face is illuminated from the outside as if by the knowledge within.

Marilyn Zimmerman not only pays tribute to her mother, in Sarcophagus for Maxine (My Mother, Myself) but also acknowledges and embraces her own eventual death. Maxine is presented as an Egyptian queen but with several important differences. The sarcophagus is cut away. The body is not enhanced or mummified to make our viewing more palatable. Maxine’s cadaver is presented in its natural state of rigor mortis with cheeks caved in and wearing her plastic medical bracelet. In her arms is a final bouquet of flowers as a send-off to a friend taking her final journey. On her abdomen is the view of the interior of the cremation furnace consuming her remains. The life size, color portrait is mounted horizontally on the wall below the chair rail drawing our eyes downward to the underworld. Zimmerman does us a great service in this memorial. She does what good crones do. She teaches us not to fear the last of life’s experiences, death.

As mistress of ceremonies of the Crone Celebration, Zimmerman provided some “serious, great fun” with her horn blowing, and foot stomping introduction with Co-Crone, Gail mally-mack. She also informed us that she was now officially Marilyn Zimmerwoman. She interspersed bits of feminist history with four different costume changes as well as with performances by Sue Carman-Vian, Jan House, Ellen Hildreth, and Audra Kubat. She also devised a ritual in which all the standing-room-only crowd could feel comfortable participating. Together with Treena Flannery Ericson, Zimmerman promises to bring us all back for another rousing all-inclusive, multi-ethnic, trans-generational community Crone Celebration next year. Be ready.

Dolores S. Slowinski: A crone who learned her most important lessons from her mother, and grandmothers; father and grandfathers too.

Liberal Arts Gallery
Through April 28, 2007

ARTISTS TALK: Saturday April 14 at 2pm

As our tagline states, “unearthing a great American city one story at a time,” one of the most satisfying parts of covering the arts in Detroit is the perpetual journey of discovery. In places off the beaten path and out of sight, Detroiters have carved out some truly unique spaces and made them vibrant despite their surroundings. Such is the case with Duane Belin’s Liberal Arts Gallery on Gratiot not far from the Eastern Market. I’d heard rumors of it for some time, but so far it’d escaped being covered in these pages. But what a pleasant surprise to finally walk through those doors and be greeted by a beautiful and spacious venue. While Belin’s been at this for about 15 years, exhibitions have been somewhat infrequent. We hope that greater attention is drawn upon this space he’s created and it begins to play a more consistent and prominent role in the Detroit arts scene.

Sprawling over the bi-level space is a two-man show featuring Donald Anderson and Victor Pytko, who’ve shown together often before. Perhaps, it’s best described as being more than a two-man show, as Pytko is ever the chameleon, never appearing as the same artist twice, often within the same exhibition. (For past words about Pytko and his constant reinvention and exploration see here and here.) In aping the styles and techniques of his peers and mentors, and incorporating them into his own ever-fluctuating one, he is always enriching his own education as a painter, and it seems is capable of having his own group show. Here we see traces of fellow painter Jack Johnson through the incorporation of writing, trash, and dripped painting in the work. Another distinctive body of paintings offer a nod to Marvalisa complete with an almost puzzle piece abstraction of people and cityscape drawn with heavy outlines and each piece composed of bright, primary colors. There’s even an homage to his teacher Charles McGee with works referencing biomorphic forms composed with a strong sense of rhythm in their design, built through a collage of multiple layers of drawing, painting, newspaper and other fibrous materials. The diversity of the work can come off as uneven, and perhaps this range never allows the viewer to settle in enough to really engage with the individual pieces. If there’s a statement to be had for Pytko here, it’s always about the exploration – and learning. As the viewer, part of the intrigue is in awaiting just what he’ll tackle next.

Anderson’s approach to painting is more consistent, though his bodies of work float between observational and more abstracted, expressive works. Here he works with abstraction, with circular, flowing design patterns, somewhat reminiscent of Gilda Snowden’s tornado paintings. Fish serve as the guiding theme as pattern – with eyes, scales, spines becoming elements of composition, as well as a series of puns for titles, “stream of consciousness”, “bait and switch.” “Catch of the day” is a similarly painted sculpture made from trash – the piece and the cleverness work. He exhibits a nice use of color – picking up on the iridescence – reds, purples – of fish scales, good movement through movement through the work, and consistently expressive use of paint, whether working loosely and quite painterly or when leaning toward more cartoonish painting. It’s a solid theme, that while perhaps not yielding Anderson’s strongest paintings to date, as with Pytko, the avenues of exploration they offer will bear rich rewards going forward.

These are two active and strong Detroit painters given a great space to showcase a large body of work. Check it out, catch their talk on April 14 to find out what makes them tick, and look for more shows in this space soon. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com

Exhibition: Raising Voices: Mental Illness Inside Out
May 4 – June 1, 2007 WORK exhibition space, 306 S. State Street, Ann Arbor

Call for entries:

This exhibition hopes to raise awareness about the realities of mental illness. How does mental illness change the life experiences of those with these diseases? And how do these individual experiences ripple out into the community — families, health care systems, social services organizations?

Artists are encouraged to submit work that addresses these questions in any media, including text.

Deadlines:

Submission drop off is April 28 – April 30 at WORK, 306 S. State, Ann Arbor, between 10:00am and 4:00pm. All submissions must include the artist’s name, title of work, material, email address or contact information, and installation requirements, as well as affiliated school and grade level, if appropriate. Artwork should be ready for installation.

Opening Reception: May 4, 6-9pm

For questions, please contact Darren Jorgensen dmjor@umich.edu

Imagine Detroit in the year 2025.

Do you picture a desolate wasteland of broken-down cars and dilapidated buildings?

Or can you see vibrant, successful neighborhoods linked by convenient, high-quality rapid transit?

If you envision the latter, the Transportation Riders United design contest is for you. Detroit in Transit: Visions of a Region on the Move seeks exciting designs of Detroit’s future transit and transit-oriented neighborhoods.

Given the value of effective visuals in sparking public imagination, these designs will help to launch a broad regional dialogue and build public understanding of the role of rapid transit in urban revitalization and the creation of vibrant walkable communities.

For National Transportation Week, we invite artists, designers, urban planners, architects, students and others to submit designs of what Detroit’s transit and transit-oriented neighborhoods could look like in 2025.

There are three contest categories:
• Designs of transit vehicles on a streetscape
• Architectural designs of transit stations in a streetscape
• Urban planning designs of vibrant neighborhoods or intersections around transit stations or stops
Designs are due to TRU by April 30. Finalists in each category will be selected and displayed at a gala event during National Transportation Week, May 13-18.
For design parameters and contest details, register online for the contest. You will receive an email within 3 days with contest details.
Please forward this announcement to any person, email list or website that might be interested in this contest.


Megan Owens
Executive Director, Transportation Riders United
500 Griswold, Suite 1650 MOwens@DetroitTransit.org
Detroit, Michigan 48226 www.DetroitTransit.org
Phone: 313-963-8872 Fax: 313-963-8876

DETROIT METRO CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU TO AWARD $10,000
FOR BEST DETROIT VIDEO PODCAST THAT REFLECTS ITS NEW BRAND

Create a video podcast to help promote the “D” and
you could win $10,000.
The Detroit Video Podcast Contest is part of Detroit’s new Tourism Brand
Identity launched by the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (DMCVin January.
The Detroit video podcast must be between two to four minutes long, and the creator/s must be 18 or older. Most importantly, the podcast must creatively and positively capture at least one of these five major categories: cars, culture, gaming, music and sports.

“Today’s travelers rely on the web and iPods, so by creating podcasts about Detroit, we can better reach the 21 to 34-year-old audience that our new branding campaign targets,” said Larry Alexander, DMCVB President & CEO.

The goal of the contest is to create a video podcast that shows metro Detroit in a positive light that is intriguing and will catch the attention of the new target audience.

To enter your video podcast, complete the online registration form at
visitdetroit.com and follow directions for uploading your video entry on YouTube.com by April 20, 2007. A panel of judges assembled by the DMCVB will select one winner by May 4, 2007, and that winner will be notified no later than May 18, 2007. The winning podcast will be incorporated in the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau’s marketing campaign.

To view complete contest rules, go to visitdetroit.com and click on the podcast contest tile along the left side of the homepage. Questions should be directed to: contest@visitdetroit.com

The Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau is a private, not-for-profit organization whose mission is to market and sell the metropolitan Detroit area on a worldwide basis as a destination for leisure and business travel including conventions, tradeshows, corporate meetings, tours and incentive travel to maximize visitors, visitor spending, tax revenues, and job opportunities. More than 800 businesses are represented in the DMCVB's membership. The DMCVB was founded in 1896 as the world's first convention and visitors bureau. For details, go to www.visitdetroit.com, or email: contest@visitdetroit.com.

Last fall, the talk of the night during the Russell Industrial Center’s open studio event was the work of Adnan Charara. Like so many folks who happened upon this artist and his work, thedetroiter.com was awed by the sheer volume and range of creativity on display in that mammoth studio. Since then, we’ve been planning to return to interview the man behind it all in conjunction with his solo show currently up at the Arab American National Museum. (For more on the exhibition, see the corresponding review by contributor Dolores Slowinski here.) Arts Editor Nick Sousanis sat down with Charara in his studio to learn more about the artist and his work.

Born in Lebanon in 1962, Charara lived his first few years in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He then attended boarding school back in Lebanon, before returning to Sierra Leone to live during the civil war in Lebanon which began in 1974. Despite virtually no art being taught in the schools where he lived, Charara was always interested in art and even at a young age, actively pursued it all on his own. Everybody knew him as “the artist.”

His parents were always cautiously supportive of his need to make art. During the summers in Africa they set him up with a studio to paint, but during the school year, he had to work in secret as his parents didn’t want his art making to distract from his studies.

This drive for making art led Charara to taking the University of London’s art exam, which resulted in an odd, brief stint teaching art to his fellow high schoolers! But his thirst for learning more about art could not be satisfied in Sierra Leone, and so he looked to come to the United States.

At 19, Charara arrived in Seattle, where he initially studied at the University of Washington and then Yakima Community College. After two years on the west coast, he headed east to Boston to study architecture at the Massachusetts College of Art, because “the idea to survive and make a living as an artist was far from my imagination.” His parents wanted him to have some education, and architecture seemed like the closest thing to art. After completing an undergraduate degree, he began work on a Masters in urban planning.

With the resources now available to him in the States, he was exposed to more about art and taught himself as much as he could. As a teenager back in Africa, family members had encouraged him to work more abstractly, which he did. At the time, he ran into an artist who looked at his work and told him, “`Oh, you copied Picasso.’ I was insulted because I had no clue who Picasso was.” It was only upon discovering Picasso himself in America, that he understood what “a great compliment it was.” Charara felt a strong connection to the artist, “First, he looked like my father, and that would make me fall in love with him immediately.” But he found he could really understand and relate to his work freely. He often discovered that the ideas that he was coming up with, which seemed new to him, had already been explored by well known artists before him.

He would marry his wife Margaret, herself a metalsmith schooled at Massachussets School of Art, and then work as a regional planner for the State of Massachusetts. Over this time he continued to learn and make work, drawing, working in his sketchbooks, and also exhibiting and selling to individual collectors. The need to be doing more never abated. His employers at the state knew he was an artist and kept offering him a more flexible schedule – at one point he was down to three days, with the rest of the week to do his artwork, but this was not nearly enough time.

After ten years, something had to give. “One day, I was going to Boston on the train, I realized two things: One, that somebody else needed my job more than I did. Secondly, I realized it was as if I was living my life as one day, and repeating it over and over. It was very stagnant and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an artist.”

And with that, Charara left the security of his job to pursue a career as an artist full time. His parents had retired to Michigan, so he packed up his family and moved to Dearborn. This was a big step forward, but he still had to adjust to a new environment and just being an artist full time for the first time.

His move into a space at the Russell Industrial Center in 2003 would really open a lot of doors. Initially he’d been working in the garage at his house for the first five years in Michigan – it was a cramped space, with hardly any room to work – he was frustrated. His wife encouraged him to take the space. “It freed so much to come here, I could explode! I had so many ideas bottled up, I need to explode and move in every direction possible.”

And explode he has. Today this studio is filled with works in a range of mediums including paintings, drawings, prints, collage, cast sculptures, jewelry, found object works, it’s all here. “My work habit is not confined to one thing.” The setup at Russell allows him to bounce from medium to medium throughout the day – each body of work informing and feeding the others. It’s a terrific playground of possibilities. “Whatever I can use and whatever comes to mind, I’m sure I’m ready to give it attention.”

Two years ago, Charara realized that his work had reached a level where he had to take a different direction. “I had to start polishing my resume, to start selling to collections.” The DIA has purchased work as has the Boston Public Library. After a show at the University of Michigan Dearborn, the Arab American National Museum approached him about a show when the museum was completed, which is being realized now. It’s the first living artist one-man show for the fledgling museum. With growing recognition, he’s more actively pursuing representation, as he says, “Since hitting 40, I’ve become very mature with ideas how to pursue my career of art.… I want to be recognized as an artist with time – because the best judgment is time.”

Charara’s imagery is cartoony, allowing them to represent any one, though their trademark long noses refer to his own – a feature kids made fun of and he’s reclaimed as a part of his signature. The cartoon figure “signifies not the outer self, but the inner self.” He relates them to the way in which political cartoons can be funny yet articulate something important about daily life.

That they’re often funny is essential. “I love humor.” “To me [the cartoon] could convey the message in a very pleasing way. I’ve always been attracted to cartoons since I was a kid.” As he points out that people tend to dwell on the differences between one another, which creates friction between peoples, the non-specific nature of the cartoon figure, allows them to speak to our commonality.

There are a number of recurring symbols throughout Charara’s diverse bodies of work, including buildings in people’s heads, which he describes the idea as being, “that a human being is what is in his head – the knowledge, the experience, it’s this empire that you build through time, and this dream that you seek through time. … You walk with your knowledge, which is your secret.”

The wheels in people’s feet are intended to address the role of destiny in our lives. Flowers too, play a significant role. “Flowers start popping out, showing moments in time that can grow but yet have certain life expectancy: like a rose that you pick from nature – you put it in a vase, you can put in all the water you want, but you know it’s not going to last forever.”

Charara comes from a family of writers and poets. Early on he attempted writing, but learned that, “Language is not my strong suit.” While he couldn’t adequately express his imagination in words, he found he “could draw it very easily.” Now he refers to himself as a visual poet, “My work has its own philosophy or its own language and it’s all visual…. I feel art is just a tool for me to reach audience and try to speak. It’s also why I keep maturing my style. I feel I can switch to any style I want.”

The idea of writing is picked up in more literal form in his series of drawings on the backs of old, used envelopes. The envelopes are travelers and are stand ins for the immigrant experience. Charara’s own journey is reflected through this work, a way to “narrate history through my own understanding in a visual way.”

The envelopes come from estate sales, flea markets, and EBay, and the stacks of hundreds of them are a sign of a larger habit. “I am a collector. I love to have things around.” He’s been saving things since he was a kid, when he used to collect foil from candies he bought. He’d use these to make sculptures and then trade those to get more candy, and hence more foil.

Now he goes to flea markets to get his objects and, “transform the disregarded object and give it a new life. Put it on a pedestal and it becomes fine art…. “I have a hard time throwing anything away…. Being in the environmental field also made me very aware to leave a better place for the next generation.”

“Recycling was important to me,” even his art supplies, discarded brushes and tubes of paint become anthropomorphized puppets and small sculptures. “You see how a child always looks freely at things – a child draws a little scribble and tells you it’s a horse or an alligator or something. It’s easy for me to look at objects and see suddenly that they become alive.”

Collecting has also become a means for Charara to continue learning from other artists. After finally saving enough money to buy a Rembrandt etching, he studied it, lived with it, and then sold it, which paved the way for an ongoing cycle of collecting art, learning from it, and then selling the work to get something new.

Besides continuing to put on major exhibitions and be part of significant collections, Charara would like to eventually buy his own building in Detroit to convert into a museum centered around his work. This vision includes displaying works and an exploration of the art making process on the inside and a sculpture garden outside, where students and kids could come and learn more about making their own art.

Charara would like this to be in Detroit as he has really connected to this blue collar town. “I feel like I’m no different than an autoworker who is assembling this machine. That’s what I do – I assemble and create something just like these hard workers do their work.”

“Being in Detroit and having my own factory as an artist just fits.”

Charara has journeyed across continents and cultures steadfastly carrying his hidden dream in his head. Having come to rest in Detroit, that dream is blooming for all the world to see. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com

March 16-May 31, 2007
Arab American National Museum
(For an interview with Charara please see here.)

by Dolores Slowinski

All residents of the United States have an immigrant in their ancestry:

be it people who crossed the land bridge at the Bering Strait;
people who sailed from Scandinavia;
people who were crewmembers, passengers, or stowaways on the ships of the earliest explorers and merchants sailing to the Americas from Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Holland, England;
people escaping religious persecution, poverty, oppression in Europe;
people brought against their will as slaves from Africa;
people brought over as conscripted laborers from Asia;
people seeking freedom and opportunity unavailable to them in Eastern, Central, Southern Europe and the Middle East;
people seeking work, education from Canada, Mexico, South and Central America;
people seeking the American Dream from all over the world.

These people, our ancestors, came to the Eastern and Western coastlines of the United States, crossed the border in the North or South. Most arrived legally; some arrived illegally. Some came to work honestly; others to set up illegal trade in drugs and human lives. Some came under assumed names; others had their names changed or misspelled by immigration clerks. The methods and motives are as varied as people on the face of the earth.

Nevertheless, all of our ancestors endured unbelievable hardship, humiliation, illness, and danger in entering this country. But they all came. Had they not, you and I would not be here.

Adnan Charara understands this immigrant experience because it is his experience. He was the first member of his family to come to America. At the age of 19, he arrived in Seattle, WA from Sierra Leone to go to college. He’d never been to the US before; knew no one. He still speaks with excitement in recalling his arrival at the airport; his awe at the expansive streets, the buildings; his appreciation at being befriended by a fellow passenger who put him up for the night and helped him get to school the next day.

In his work he has universalized the anxiety, fear, resilience, adaptability, and growth that he experienced as a newcomer to the United States. He discusses his work, even his bar code signature, in a short introductory film on view in the gallery.

Juxtaposed includes sketchbooks, drawings on envelopes, paintings, bronze and steel sculpture and found object sculpture. Although the first impression is a fusion of the work of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock, Charara’s style is uniquely his own. The work is seductive with its bright colors and cacophony of forms. Whimsy, humor, anguish, heartache, love, energy, sacrifice, determination, pain, identity, vision, compassion, understanding, communication…all of these emotions and experiences come to mind upon viewing the work.

Small drawings on envelopes pull you close enough to hear them whisper the stories of the journeys taken. Although most of them seem to be addressed to the same person, sent from Costa Rica and Italy, it is the metaphor of the envelope as immigrant that Charara presents for our consideration. In an age of e-mail and cellular communication, the envelope is more tangible, more emblematic of the stress, the authentication of the journey via stamps, registration labels, security seals, and cancellation marks similar to the sorts of legalistic actions applied to passports, visas, green cards, immigration documents. The envelopes are old with some postmarks dating to the 1920s.

It is on these worn and well-traveled exteriors that Charara draws his paean to the immigrant experience. Every envelope is frantic with activity of figures walking, climbing, reaching, bending, and running all at the same time. Cartoon heads explode with ideas of buildings, flowers, machines, tools, as well as other figures. The drawings are intimate in scale, but grand in communicating the frenzy and confusion that newcomers experience as they try to keep their homeland, family, and purpose for immigrating in mind while attempting to adapt to a new culture.

In Man with Big Dreams a figure is seen from the shoulders up in the lower left corner. His tall rectangular head has round eyes that seem to vibrate with excitement. He is smoking a pipe that extends just beyond his long nose and has four clouds of smoke above it in close succession further emphasizing his excitement. The top of his head supports a skyscraper that gives way to a system of gears and mechanical arms branching off and ending in buildings, flowers, a child-like figure and a female figure in a polka dot dress and high heels. The left arm of the figure boasts a biceps in the form of a three-story building! Real estate, work, and family seem to be easily discernible in this piece.

The found object sculptures pay homage to the motivation and work done by immigrants. Well-worn tools are not only saved from the dump and the incinerator, but also transformed and given new life as objects that amuse, stimulate thought, and connect with the viewer. I Want It I Want It is a simple, spiral based wire whisk with a wooden handle. The paint or varnish has been completely worn off the handle. The top of the handle has been given wire hair, a pair of tiny, bulging glass eyes, and a long nose made from a small broken stick painted red on the end. An indentation that encircles this handle acts as the line of the mouth. Here we have a quintessential Muppet character in miniature. The resemblance is striking and draws a connection not only to perhaps the immigrant wanting it all for his children, but his children wanting even more thanks to relentless television programming and marketing. Further, if touched the figure bobbles and wobbles until equilibrium is restored, not unlike the immigrant trying to balance his inner values with pressures applied, via his children, by the world at large.

Charara also demonstrates an empathy with women and girls. PMS is a wooden handled, coarsely bristled scrub brush that forms a head. The bristle side faces the viewer to form the hair and add ferocity to the face. The eyes are two brass clockwork gears that cross over one another as eyes. The nose is a black walnut hull cut in half making the two chambers serve as nostrils. The mouth is a machine- embroidered patch of a watermelon slice: bright red with black dots for seeds and a thin green rind. Comments in the guest book and overheard at a reception confirm the accuracy of this presentation of the irritability and mood shifts caused by pre-menstrual syndrome.

Girls Can Do Everything Boys Can Do is a drafting compass sporting a skirt made of a clear plastic protractor and wearing a pair of pink Barbie doll pumps on its points. This piece is as much a word of encouragement to young girls as it is a reminder to teachers, parents, potential employers that geometry, math, design, engineering, and architecture fields need not be restricted to men.

Pioneer is a small bronze sculpture of a man wearing baggy trousers, a flowing coat and a top hat. He has quite a swagger as he throws back his head of curly hair. There is however, another figure attached to him whose head is level with his right shoulder. This hanger-on wears a bowler hat and reaches around the back of the taller figure, clinging to him. The top hat, a symbol of higher status, may mean that the “pioneer” rose up from the more humble beginnings symbolized by the character in the bowler hat. Or it may point to the fact that those who come first carry those who come after with them or perhaps have an obligation to remember to leave a legacy for those on whose shoulders they earned their wealth. The connection between the title and the composition of the figures leaves much room for thought.

Exodus (My Wings) is a painted steel sculpture with some collage elements. You read it from the ground up. The base is a large sturdy house. Sticking out of the roof is the numeral 1 representing Charara as the first born and the first to leave home. Like a weathervane, a horizontal arrow spins at right angles to the numeral. It pierces an envelope that is stamped Fragile (representing the fragility of the person leaving as well as the hopes of the family left behind) and Return to Sender (because the intent was that Charara return to his family) but the winds of change turned him in another direction. Beyond the envelope are leaves of letters (copies of actual letters that Charara’s parents wrote to him from Sierra Leone) that are glued onto curling plates of metal like wings. The letters from home served to hold him aloft during his studies in the US. The tip of the arrow is a head wearing a skyscraper on its head, representing Charara in his new location.

Charara’s paintings have much the same sensibility as his drawings but on a much larger scale. Between Two Cities measures 72 x 60 inches and has one figure’s foot and a skyscraper sticking out beyond the frame of the painting to each side. What is striking about this canvas is that you notice that many of the figures are looking down, as if discouraged, looking for something, bent over with exhaustion. This easily speaks to the immigrant experience of having to live in two places at once…a feeling that may never be resolved.

Charara provides an insight into the psychological impact of immigration as well with his two paintings: Conscious/City Dwellers Series and Subconscious/City Dwellers Series. Both paintings measure 92x66 inches each and are mounted side by side to form a wall that quite overwhelms the viewer. Conscious is painted in bright colors and is fraught with a myriad of figures and activities. The very bottom of the painting is empty, however, and the figures immediately above that area appear only in black outline form as if to imply that consciousness was still taking in information with room for more. This could certainly be said of anyone in a new situation. Subconscious, by contrast, is painted in shades of gray to represent the past experiences and impressions stored in the subconscious. The entire canvas is jammed to the edges with numbers, words, figures, buildings, and all manner of activity. It is cluttered almost beyond visual endurance no doubt to communicate the same clutter of experiences, impressions whether accurate or not that fill our own minds and cause us to perpetuate prejudices and errors of judgment unless we make a conscious effort to do otherwise.

Recently I heard Detroit poet, Vievee Francis, read her poem The Darkness Will Eat You. She explained that the title was derived from an Eastern European saying whispered to children to deter them from entering the forest. The phrase as it appears in her poem refers to the concrete forests of urban life. Adnan Charara wants us to look at the darkness within ourselves that will devour us: the darkness that magnifies our differences and manipulates our fears. With humor and whimsy, he illuminates that darkness to highlight our similarities, remind us that we have all come from somewhere else yet live in the same place. We are all immigrants on the cyclical journey of life, moving from birth to death; all different yet essentially the same. We are people juxtaposed: people living side by side.

For our feature interview with Charara, please see here.

Dolores S. Slowinski is an artist and erstwhile art reviewer. Her visual work has recently appeared in Dispatch Detroit, Vol. 8. Her writing has been published in American Ceramics, Art in America, Ceramics Monthly, Dialogue: An Art Journal, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The New Art Examiner, and numerous catalogues. One of her recent works for thedetroiter.com concerned the graphic novel, "Pride of Baghdad,” which can be found in our lit section here.

WSU: Community Arts Gallery
Kevin Ewing, Lindsay Satchell, Tom Pyrzewski
Through April 6, 2007

WSU Community Arts Gallery presents three distinct bodies of work from its graduating MFA class: Kevin Ewing, Lindsay Satchell, and Tom Pyrzewski. Each artist is given his or her own section to function as three quite whole solo shows.

Ewing’s work (last reviewed in these pages here) in a variety of media, are very much about exterior appearance and feel, and the idea of touching. This is most apparent in his faux fur pieces, more abstract in composition, but definitely invite the viewer to touch them, to rub up against them. His stuffed elephant, is a giant plush toy. Even with leg cut off and caught in a trap, it still looks like something to be curled up with. Its cuteness helps evoke sadness, which is reinforced by further captivating attention with a glittering red jeweled mass serving as a pool of blood. In vinyl, Ewing makes “Art Stars” a grid composition of square cushions adorned with stars, as well as a large American Flag like cushion encased in glass and lying, “In State.” The color and the texture trigger distinct feelings for a time and era in our collective memory. Finally, he presents some large drawings, of squishy body parts and such being pinched, pulled, kicked, squeezed. Disembodied fingers become intestines, and the whole becomes this sensuous, disturbing, mass of flesh. There’s nothing to physically touch, but it’s all about the sensation of being touched.

Satchell offers carefully crafted objects, drawings, and installations, all through the discipline of metalsmithing – the exploration of its materials and forms. Each image addresses the circle in some fashion – building it up with coils of wire, drawing it in gold marker, constructing cylindrical objects, installing half loops of wire to appear as if to penetrate a wall. She keeps looking at the circle from a different perspective, using a different metaphor – a piece called “Nimbus” refers to the halo over figures in religious iconography as well as circular cloud formations. In coming at this from numerous angles, Satchell eases the viewer into slowing down. What might be dismissed at first as overly simplified forms (think “Hudsucker Proxy” and the drawing of a circle, “You know, for kids!”), through her craftsmanship and deliberate expansion of this idea, the work becomes contemplative, almost meditative. And then we can approach them individually all over again, her forms and the materials, and see the beauty and wholeness in the simplicity of a line connecting back to itself.

Pyrzewski’s works prompt immediate response of unease, familiarity, and perhaps even disgust. The mass of his sculptures is created by odds and ends, junk parts, then covered with a “skin” of cloth, all dipped in monotone, pallid paint. The effect is organic forms with a hint of H.R. Geiger’s alien forms, but that definitely come across as human-like, despite their amorphous appearance. It speaks to the power of art to evoke and our minds to imagine, that these conglomeration of junk and rags have so much power. Without ever being specific or graphic – for some these hit a disturbing nerve as might be felt at viewing holocaust remains, while for others these brought comfort, reminiscent of fallen trees bringing up a memory from childhood.

Each artist has created a truly whole and engaging body of work, well worth spending time with. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com