Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition

May 8th-31st 2008

Selected sculptures will be on display during Art Detroit Now and will be placed outside around 555 Gallery and Studios’ building visible along Grand River Ave. and Warren Ave., located at the southwest entrance of the historic Woodbridge Neighborhood.
Specifications:
• Sculpture design should be original. Artists may work alone or in groups.
• Recognizing the public installation nature of its display, sculptures must be sturdily constructed. Consider safety features to protect the public i.e. no rough or pointed edges, etc. Entries will be reviewed by a structural engineer.
• Design must include an anchor mechanism for securing to a cement base-WHICH WILL BE PROVIDED TO YOU ON SITE AT NO COST.
• Suitable for outdoor exposure over an extended period, i.e. be “weatherproof.”
• Once accepted the design may not be significantly changed without the written agreement of the Outdoor Sculpture Committee.

To Enter: Email, mail, or deliver drawing, sketch, model, or jpegs with dimensions, design detail, anchor mechanism, and artist/builder comments if any, to:

Submission Fee- $25 per entry, artists may submit multiple entries if they desire.
555 Gallery/Studios, P.O. Box 8173, Detroit MI 48208
OR deliver to:
555 Gallery/Studios, 4884 Grand River Ave., Detroit, MI 48208
Or email to: sculpture@555arts.org
to arrive by April 14th, 2008. Entrant’s name, mailing address, telephone and email address MUST accompany proposal.

March 1-April 5, 2008
paulkotulaprojects
23255 Woodward Ave.
Ferndale, MI 48220
(248) 544-3020

We live in denial of the brevity of life, the indignities of illness, and the constancy of death. Brenda Goodman paints these things we prefer to leave unmentioned. She holds them up to us like a mirror that bores into our soul.

Goodman’s lush, organic “song” paintings delight us with their operatic voice. A figure sings and calls out to the landscape, the trees, the air, the sky, and fields. It calls out to the universe of which it is so much a part and to which it will eventually return.

Her newest works I think of as “balance” paintings. They are mythological, Sisyphean, in the way they present the balance between life and death over and over again.

In one painting a tiny red ball threatens to upset the balance between two figures poised on a beam, even as a third figure, like us in denial or unable to face the difficult task of confronting mortality, crawls out a window. Goodman the painter is all of those figures. Her canvasses are piled under the fulcrum of the balance beam. Something wispy is pinched in the pile, perhaps the soul of her work caught by the impending disaster. One canvas is starting to slip, destabilized by the escapee…pointing out the danger of denial…the risks of running away from our problems rather than confronting them.

She uses thin glazes and complimentary colors of red and green (stop and go) to mute the tone in another painting. A figure stands at the bottom of an incline with a long line of black boulders rolling toward it…like the problems we all encounter in life that threaten to crush us. Sheer will power of the tiny figure is all that keeps them at bay.

In another work, a tiny, lone figure hangs by one hand from a trapeze that is slipping off a huge hook being pulled straight. A coffin covered with a pile of canvasses is below it and off to the right. This composition speaks to our delusions in thinking we can conquer something that is not only beyond our control, but may even be beyond our awareness. We put off death by working, working, working when perhaps we should just let go and leave our work as our legacy.

In a predominantly red painting a solitary figure again barely hangs onto a long bar by one hand and looks down at a gray circle on the floor below. How often have we suspended our dreams to perform in someone else’s ring in the circus of life?

A dark blue painting speaks of determination, timelessness and peace. The obstacles of life are gone; the figures of denial have vanished. A lone individual ascends an incline to penetrate the wall to the star streaked universe beyond it: a simple portrayal of the final walk up the incline of life. Death has never looked so peaceful.

In all the paintings, Goodman demonstrates her facility with paint. Her glazes are sheer translucence enhancing the depth of the surface. Her impasto areas bloom with luscious colors too rich to be used in larger amounts. Her figures, thinly drawn and tiny in cavernous spaces, droop under the exertion of living. They pull us into these intimate works in oil on paper, which measure only 15 x 20 inches each.

These are works worthy of meditation. Published in book form, they would be a 21st century book of hours. To read them again and again would inspire us with their courage and comfort us with their power.

Dolores S. Slowinski, artist/writer, living/dying in Detroit.

Ann Arbor Art Center
Through March 28, 2008

There’s something more than a bit magical about a two-dimensional surface being transformed through only a series of bends, folds, and cuts into a three-dimensional form. Witness Origami, pop-up books, and the works of Buckminster Fuller. Such is the terrain of Matt Shlian and Graem Whyte, who bring their related geometric approaches to art-making to the Ann Arbor Art Center. For those familiar with the two artists’ works, this is a perfectly complementary pairing, a long time in coming.

For this outing, Whyte offers up a creative explosion of ideas and diverse works realized in cast bronze, wireframe, paper, and mapped onto existing objects. What began as forms based more purely on an exploration of the geometric give way to manifesting forms that become environments in themselves. (Though some become recognizable forms – for instance his humorous tribute to Bruce Lee in tiled triangles.) There’s a wonderful playfulness on display as these surfaces become something habitable, akin to the various worlds visited by the little Prince. There’s a touch of Escher as well, not only in the mathematical sense, but in this creation of worlds with their own rules, as up, down lose their meaning, and humans and monkeys hang out, graze, and roam on the environments he’s created for them. Whyte’s wry sense of humor is ever present, and it seems in much the same way that the folding increases the possibilities for form from the flat, this means of working too has become a way to expand and continually feed his work. He can explore the geometric in numerous ways – in one instance a paper grocery bag is turned into one of his forms and cleverly installed high in a corner of the gallery, in another, he forms a loose wireframe titled and clearly representing “The Structure of Clouds.” Riffing on the landscape front, he meticulously covers his planar and more curving creations in faux lawns and other surfaces, and inhabits these manicured worlds with suburban and surreal imagery. They all end up working well together, and while there’s great similarity between the forms – they have a distinct “Whyte-ness” about them – they are all distinct worlds, something we can visit and enjoy individually, again, much as the little Prince toured his planetoids.

Shlian’s primary piece in the show is a large folded paper construct. It sits on the floor, piled flat on top of itself, waiting for visitors to raise it ceiling-ward on an elegant pulley system. In raising it, it’s a graceful, spiky caterpillar, growing and stretching, delicate (it’s paper after all) yet with great presence, quite an achievement of craft and aesthetics. In its hands-on pop-up nature, it captivates, and its scale in relation to Whyte’s miniatures works well. We get one other taste of Shlian’s three-dimensional works, small, wonderfully curved paper forms – also offering a terrific sense of the possibilities of folding paper. The rest of what Shlian shares here consist of drawings. The primary body of which are cut-through or exploded views of architectural renderings whose densely layered nature draw inevitable comparisons to Julie Mehretu’s work. On their own, this would be just fine, but in this context, where there’s such delight to be had in his pop-up works, the drawings, though imaginative, extremely involved works, don’t add to the sense of play on hand throughout the space. One set of drawings stands as an exception to this, intensely – obsessively – detailed, a network of lines dividing up the space, but all laid out flat, not layered on the surface, they seem to function like incredibly complex folding diagrams, or a view into how Shlian is able to conceive the flat becoming the three-dimensional. One can almost imagine patiently folding it up upon itself along the lines he’s plotted out, and come up with some wildly concocted form. These works serve as a welcome bridge to his three-dimensional works and are quite stunningly achieved.

All in all, this is a great pairing, and the Ann Arbor Art Center should be commended for bringing together these two artists whose works inform one another – great for each of them and the audience, as well as intersecting two regions – Shlian of Cranbrook and now Ann Arbor, and Whyte of Detroit. It is an engaging, imaginative, and ultimately joyful expression of creativity, definitely worth checking out. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com