Space Affair and Drawing You In
MONA
located at 7 N. Saginaw, Pontiac
248-210-7560
regular hours: 12-6pm Thursday through Saturday
November 26 – December 30
Opening Saturday, December 10th, 7 to 10pm

“Space, the final frontier.” Yes to a Detroiter, Pontiac can seem as if it’s light years away, but MONA has been consistently offering exploration into strange new worlds of art making that has made it worth the trek.

In “Space Affair,” Narine Kchikian and Jacque Liu collaborate to transform MONA’s main exhibition space into artwork itself. On the walls, which have been (and perhaps always are) painted deep blue, they’ve painted bright sky colored window shaped rectangles. These serve to accompany existing true window mostly higher up in the former theater space as well as a couple at the same orientation as the painted ones. Each of the rectangles is lit by its own individual light as a painting in a gallery might be. The adjoining rooms, which have windows looking out into the space, have been lit with intense blue light. Everything about their decisions has been carefully considered and quite purposefully done. And then there’s the centerpiece of the exhibition, blue chairs usually used for, well, sitting, arranged in a square all facing inward. With backs outwards, the mass of chairs becomes an impenetrable, unenterable, and truly untraversable labyrinth. The chairs cease to exist as individual, functional objects (and as arranged are nearly impossible to get into as it is), and become instead elements of composition. Kchikian and Liu use the chairs like marks in a drawing. In the same way the entire space has been pressed into service to the overall exploration of the perception of space. Overall it is somewhat inscrutable and might seem more than a bit ridiculous, this is a creation purely for its own sake, and in that way, it’s beautiful – it’s art.

Also on display in a room off to the side are individual drawing works by Kchikian and Liu. Kchikian’s drawings are delicate, detailed works filled with elements of architecture, faceless masses of people, Islamic patterns, and more. The work has a dreamlike quality to it created by the juxtaposition of seeming unrelated imagery couple with transparent layers. The very space she creates warps and bends into itself. Up and down have little meaning, and the viewer is adrift to explore the impossibilities of these enigmatic landscapes and arrive at one’s own understanding.

Where Kchikian’s drawings are lavish and filled with content, Liu’s drawings are minimal in the strongest sense of the word. He draws with folds, creases, and cuts in the paper (and one single drawn line on one piece). Like the blue room, these works are quite simple and subtle in their appearance, yet totally sophisticated and deliberate in their construction. Drawing is not limited to pencil on paper, but to chairs and folds in paper, every element of the landscape when used purposefully can become a tool for creation.

These drawings by Kchikian and Liu serve as a segue to the show they curated on the floor above. This makes for a different sort of curatorial statement in contrast to the typical written statement, as the viewer uncovers their sensibilities through their work, and sees it played out in who accompanies them in the show. The show upstairs builds nicely on this foundation, all of which will be covered in Part Two of this review, next week. There’s a reception for the artists this Saturday, December 10, so check it out with them, and come back and join us right here next time for words about those artists. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com