Blog Post
WSG's "Sixteen Plus Sixteen" pairs gallery members & their selected artists
by christopherporter
The annual Sixteen Plus Sixteen features the work of WSG gallery members and their chosen guests. The 16 invited artists’ works are then shown alongside the works of WSG’s 16 represented artists.
Blog Post
Margaret Condon Taylor's photographs capture a lost Seoul
by christopherporter
Margaret Condon Taylor is not a typical photographer. The University of Michigan alumna gained a Ph.D. in psychology, which she currently still practices. So, in the spirit of Taylor's day job, the viewer may feel the need to ask probing questions about the photographs on display in An Accidental Photographer: Seoul 1969 at U-M's Institute for the Humanities Osterman Common Room, such as: What do they tell us? And why is the project “accidental”?
Blog Post
Contemporary History: Ann Arbor Art Center's 95th "All Media Exhibition"
by christopherporter
The 95th All Media Exhibition marks the continuation of a tradition established in 1922 when the Ann Arbor Art Center was known as the Ann Arbor Art Association. There are 29 artists’ works on display through January 13, with a large portion from Michigan and others from surrounding areas including Illinois, Indiana, New York, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Ann Arbor Art Center’s previous shows have illustrated its commitment to exhibiting an extensive variety of contemporary artwork, and the All Media show is no exception.
Alison Wong served as juror for this exhibition. Wong received her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is also the director at Wasserman Projects in Detroit's Eastern Market. Wong reportedly looked through 600 works of art in order to select the 36 works in the gallery. Four artists received awards, from best in show to honorable mention:
BEST IN SHOW:
Lisa Marie Barber's Brownish Girl is a large ceramic work depicting a seated figure. The female form, as indicated by the title, is painted with swaths of color that range from black, blue, and brown to pink and purple. The form is covered in a diverse palette; the skin and base adorned with pattern and painterly embellishments. The pedestal on which the figure is seated is adorned with flowers. Heart patterns are repeated in the centers of flowers, on the girl’s skin, and appear again on the painted layer of the pedestal. In her statement, Barber recounts her professional career, in which large-scale installations of “passive figures occupy dense arrangements as if centerpieces to improvised shrines.” The work in the gallery is a scaled-down version of her previous assemblages, which makes the work more easily transportable. She cites her inspiration as “imagined, decorative conceptions of home, gardens, peacefulness, playfulness, and celebration.” Barber’s interest in gardening is evident in the whimsical floral pieces that sprout from the surface of the sculpture, even from the girl’s skin. Barber grew in in Tucson, Arizona, and credits Central American folk art and Mexican Catholic shrines and her Mexican-American heritage as an important part of her aesthetic. Barber received her MFA from the University of Texas in Austin and has since worked actively as a teacher and artist. Her work has been featured in American Craft Magazine, Ceramics Monthly Magazine, and 500 Figures in Clay.
SECOND PLACE:
Rachel Pontius’ 6' x 6' painting was the first thing I noticed upon entering the gallery. It is large, vibrant, and engaging. The flat yellow background and shifting perspectival space gives the piece a strangeness, with some figures appearing in great detail, some floating on brown and purple swaths of paint that represent shelves, and other objects rendered flat and abstracted. The title references the artist’s intent to comment on the language of painting (as well as the content), combining diverse modeling techniques with pop-art abstraction. Pontius’ statement offers a humorous glimpse into the artist’s intent: “Like a good buzz, still life painting imbues seemingly valueless items with a sense of grandeur and the capacity to control and shift reality by saying opposing things simultaneously. My paintings physicalize absence through stand-ins, avatars and nostalgic objects -- both manipulative and sincere the images betray our own personal memories and impose false totems.” Her nostalgic objects combine with anachronous modern objects, phallic objects, and blank spaces that represent objects through their absence, as Pontius has done with the abstracted floral piece. Pontius received her MFA from Cranbook Academy of Art and her BFA from School of Visual Arts, and currently lives and works in Detroit.
THIRD PLACE:
Priya Thoresen contributed three pieces to the exhibition. One of the three works, Basket with Primary Colors, received the honor of a third place award. Thoresen’s dark baskets are adorned with small sections of color. This piece, as the title suggests, is sparingly decorated with red, yellow, and blue. One red “wire” on the side, one square of yellow along the top, and small patches of blue dot the bottom of the cage-like structure. In her artist statement, Thoresen describes her work process, in which she seeks “to contrast and balance control and intentions for working with the material of clay with the organic and unexpected results of the firing process.” She commonly builds grid forms, which reference wire baskets, and are executed in the scale of common domestic objects. When the work is fired in the kiln, “the clay begins to flux out and the carefully placed grid lines begin to move, sometimes with dynamic and precarious results.” Basket with Primary Colors is an excellent example of the serendipitous results of the firing process, its once-rectangular frame rendered strange by the heat of the kiln. Thoresen is based in Minneapolis, Minn. She has a BA in studio art and received an MFA at Arizona State University in 2017. She also currently works at Concordia University as an adjunct faculty member.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Zoe Davis’ abstract paintings, self-described as “hand to head size,” are made to reference everyday life. Davis suggests that in her paintings, the “images that fall into view are equally alive and mundane, yet no more climactic than the reflection of a tree in water. Snow shadows, sunsets, dead fish, a view between curtains, and the like prescribe the representational subjects of my work.” The works are “anti-monumental and introspective,” and exist by “celebrating their own making.” Despite these descriptions, which seem to suggest Davis’ painting is a celebration of modern or minimalist art practices, the artist intends the work to criticize modern painting with “a quiet reductiveness,” manifested through her palette choices, and “painting cliches.” Davis was born in Detroit in 1994. She graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2016, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 
Egan Franks Holzhausen’s large-scale painting Meat Boy is executed in house paint, lending to its flat, cartoon-like aesthetic. Holzhausen discusses his motivation in his artist statement, suggesting that his work is a reflection of his “desire to celebrate vernacular culture.” He uses “faux naive graphic imagery and colorful organic and geometric shapes” in service of portraying images of everyday life, from memory, family, community, and the artist’s dog. He uses “structural breakups in shape, imagery, and arrangement,” much like that of the graphic novel, in order to indicate an open narrative that leaves room for the viewer’s interpretation. Holzhausen lives and works in Grand Rapids. Selected Artists:
Morgan Barrie
• Jennifer Belair
• Carol Boram-Hays
• Christy Chan
• Winnie Chrzanowski
• Vineta Chugh
• Ilene Curts-Thayer
• Kaylee Dalton
• Aaron Deshields
• Autumn-Grace Dougherty
• Jesse Hickman
• Megan Hildebrandt
• Kathleen Kameen
• Rosemary Lee
• Sung-Jae Lee
• Ryan Lewis
• Grace Lin
• Maureen Nollette
• Elizabeth Panzer
• Glenn Rous
• Claire Stankus
• Paul Van Heest
• Vanessa Varjian
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
The "95th All Media Exhibition" is at the Ann Arbor Art Center, 117 W. Liberty St., through Jan. 13. Free. Visit annarborartcenter.org for gallery hours and more information.
Blog Post
Valerie Hegarty's "American Berserk" exhibit deconstructs the gloss of U.S. history
by christopherporter
Brooklyn-based artist Valerie Hegarty is known for site-specific installations. For her American Berserk exhibit in the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery, Hegarty created a rotting watermelon -- which isn't to say she saw the space and thought, "Hmm, this room screams, 'EXPIRED FRUIT.'" Rather, Amanda Krugliak, curator for Institute for the Humanities, suggests Hegarty’s works “speak to the morass, the schism, the cracked facade, and fruit rotten, the flowers drooping.” The tradition of representing fruit on the brink of putrefaction is long established.
Krugliak has also included a variety of sculptures by Hegarty that engage with American iconography, calling it into question and raising suspicions about the stories America tells about its past.
U-M’s event announcement suggests Hegarty has consistently engaged with “fundamental themes of American history and particularly the legacy of 19th-century American art, addressing topics such as colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism and environmental degradation.” Hegarty frequently employs images of George Washington, a symbol of American values, and an excellent example of how American history often glosses over unsavory aspects of its founding fathers’ lives.
The interesting thing about Hegarty’s vision, as Krugliak points out, is that “each work feels steeped in a brew of our collective history, an archive of distorted, iconic American imagery.” While Hegarty’s work represents this familiar American imagery, the icon is always altered. Krugliak gives the example of this alteration, stating that Hegarty’s “seashells and clipper ships begin to morph, strangely animat'ed, sliding to the floor.” The warped seashells are reminiscent of Salvador Dali's work, but as Krugliak suggests, these works are in context of “modern-day folly.”
In her artist’s statement, Hegarty labels the installation process a form of “reverse archaeology,” in which the gallery is transformed by adding and subtracting layers of paint, paper, and epoxy to create a “material memory of a space.” Material memory in relation to space within a museum or gallery setting is already implicit: it is shifting constantly. Hegarty’s frequent employment of stylistic references to early American art in her installations frankly reference and destroy the illusion of reality portrayed by museums, particularly in display practices of American art.
Hegarty employs a multitude of materials in the creation of her sculptures and installations. She has used ceramics (much of the work in the Humanities Gallery is ceramic), wood, paper, and epoxy. One of Hegarty’s signatures is playing with dimensionality and the discrepancy between a flat surface and a 3-D or 2-D object. This generally starts with the idea of the “flat” painting being projected forward into space, sliding off the wall, or apparently melting. In the Humanities’ Gallery, the most striking example of Hegarty’s signature installations is the jutting, 3-D, site-specific sculpture representing George Washington. George is also found represented in modestly sized ceramic topiaries, in which his features are distorted yet recognizable.
Hegarty's title of the show, American Berserk, is a nod to Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral. Roth defines the Berserk as the inverse of the American pastoral ideology. This installation is a “restaging” of the original show that contained these works, held at Burning in Water Gallery in New York, 2016. On her website, many of the works can be seen as they were in the 2016 installation. These images on her website illustrate the differences in each site-specific work. For example, in both 2016 and 2017 she created the George Washington painting, which a tree branch extending from the wall is impaling. The branch simultaneously punctures the “canvas” and becomes an extended nose, referencing Pinocchio, the liar, suggesting the iconic founding father’s wrongdoings.
Additionally, the installation at the University of Michigan’s Humanities Gallery differs from the original in that it appears more dramatic, the branches appearing to have done more damage to the wall. Though the artist’s intervention in the space is not as grand as some of her past installations, the work of art disrupts the normative gallery space. This, paired with the unsettling nature of the works themselves, creates a critique not only of American history and early American art but the practices continuously embraced by museums in displaying these works of art.
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
Valerie Hegarty's "American Berserk" is on display at University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer, through Dec. 21. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 9 am to 5 pm. Free. For more information, visit ns.umich.edu.
Blog Post
Pop-Up Patriarchy: "WORLD LEADERS" exhibition by Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen
by christopherporter
The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities’ pop-up exhibition WORLD LEADERS showcases the work of photographer Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen. She has an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA in social science and history of art from the University of Michigan. Currently based in Los Angeles, Von Habsburg-Lothringen has curated projects at Los Angeles Museum of Art, Detroit Design Festival, the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead, and Cranbrook Museum of Art.
The exhibit consists of one large photograph, printed on a vinyl banner, and hung on the back wall of the common room, adjacent to three small, framed still-life photographs of presumably designer clothing. The exhibition announcement states that Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s newest series, Conditions, “continues to examine the position of the woman in neo-liberal society as both object and agent. It reflects on the slippage between aspiration and desperation in the face of the vanishing American Dream.”
The site-specific installation “explores disparate geographical and emotional landscapes, and the ever-shifting identities of women within American society.” With a total of four works on display, the pop-up offers a look at some of Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s newest works. The large size of the photographic print that consumes the majority of the common room is a typical scale for Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s work. On her website, Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s previous exhibitions and gallery shows are archived, illustrating her frequent use of juxtaposition in image size within a single space, particularly in the series Conditions.
Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s photographic works engage viewers with concepts such as “American notions of aspiration, systems of power, and the new image economy.” (I wonder, is it a new economy, or just an altered, intensified economy?) She takes a research-based, systematic approach to her work, and has created, and continues to develop, a stock photography database of her own work from which to pull images. The process by which Von Habsburg-Lothringen creates this work already reflects the methodologies of the “image economy” that she seeks to critique. Within a single work, she pulls from her own archive and collages images of glamour, fashion, and anachronous items/surroundings/objects that create a surreal landscape, rendering the images strange and often unsettling.
Arts curator Amanda Krugliak writes that Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s “alluring images confront us with our own built-in biases about our bodies, our sexuality, the prescriptions of femininity, and ultimately our judgments. Beyond the flat ‘Colorform’ cutouts, ready to wear, the photographs expose the odiousness beneath the glamour.” Krugliak also suggests that Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s work is an investigation into the history of patriarchy, which is “embroiled in fabrication, truth and lies, inundated with images of women in a cyclical state of contextualization.” Then, she asks “for better? Or for worse?” Many artists deal with this uneasy line between appropriation and critique. Do the images take on a new meaning in a different context, or simply reinforce the ideas that they seek to critique?
In the large-scale work on display for the Institute of Humanities, Skin suits and saddle shoes makes a mamma want to rage, a female figure collaged into the image multiple times seems to move across the frame from the right to the left, with her back facing the audience. Von Habsburg-Lothringen has combined three images to form the background, over which various figures and objects lie. In the top left corner, a hand holds a knife in front of a large white house. Directly beneath is a cropped-in image of the female figure’s waist. Her electric-colored two-piece floral jumpsuit, the same worn in the full-body cutouts, frames her waist, which she squeezes between her hands, causing her skin to gather in a way inconsistent with glamorous fashion photography that the image obviously references.
The female subject’s face is never shown in the various cutouts that comprise the final image, commenting on the objectification of women’s bodies, particularly in fashion photography and clothing advertisements. But Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s inclusion of anachronous objects and images, such as the kitchen knife taken out of context, the skin is shown in a way that does not connote beauty, and the awkward movements of the figure throughout the frame, bring to mind the referent while suggesting that it is absurd.
The three small pieces in the space hang above the piano, each a still-life style photograph of articles of clothing piled up in various appealing Pantone-colors. On the left, a pile of cool-toned clothes is represented as a pile floating in a pastel-blue background. In the center, a pile of red clothing similarly floats on a red backdrop and, finally, on the right, pastel-pinks and whites float on a pink backdrop.
Each image has formal contrast within the mounds of crumpled clothing, a pattern here, a dark or light color there, but the amorphous shapes are reminiscent of a dirty pile of laundry (these are probably pictures of expensive, dirty piles of laundry). Though the figure is absent, these images are meditations on consumer culture, and, like her other works, defy the typical glamour associated with fashion photography by taking the beautiful objects and showing them as discarded piles, essentially resembling trash.
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
"WORLD LEADERS" by Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen is at the Institute of the Humanities, 202 S. Thayer, through Nov. 30. The exhibition is free and open to the public 9 am-5 pm weekdays. The exhibition is an installment in the ongoing Institute for the Humanities' Year of Archives and Futures, which is part of the celebration of the U-M Bicentennial.
Blog Post
trustArt Gallery's "Studio Works" exhibit encourages community engagement
by christopherporter
The trustArt Gallery's Studio Works exhibition (Nov. 11-19) will display multi-media works by artists and designers who work in rented studios at the venue. The exhibit features works by Larry Cressman, Liz Davis, Elizabeth Barick Fall, Rose E. Gomez, Barbara Hohmann, Allen Samuels, Laura Shope, and Lissie Williams, and it also offers an intimate look into the studio space and how it relates to the artists’ practices and everyday environments.
In addition to the more common gallery exhibition, the added opportunity to see the artists’ studios and working spaces aims to create community engagement with the arts, according to trustArt Gallery's statement: “We are connected through our location and environment as we pass through the shared open space of our gallery: it provides an opportunity to intersect; to cross paths; a place for our studio works to be shared and reflected upon; a chance to interact with each other and the community.”
The opening-up of studios to the community will allow for many people to interact with art and art making in an expanded capacity. It allows unique insight into aspects of the creative process and creates a chance for discussion and dialogue between the artist and the community.
Featured artists/designers:
Larry Cressman
Artist and University of Michigan professor at the School of Art & Design, Cressman’s work has been featured in previous exhibitions in museums such as Ross Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, to name a few. According to his profile on the STAMPS website, Cressman’s work has changed in the past 25 years, in which he has explored “drawing as a three-dimensional form of expression.” Cressman’s “drawings,” which resemble sculptures in some sense, are generally made from twigs and other natural materials, which evolved from themes in his earlier works. His drawings are generally created from three-dimensional materials and installed on the gallery wall, bringing the process of “drawing” and what can be considered drawing into question. (Related: John Carlos Cantú reviewed his 2016 Land Lines exhibit at U-M's Rotunda Gallery for Pulp.)
Liz Davis
Davis, a local artist, works with oil paints on canvas. She has a BFA from the University of Michigan and has studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Davis is also the past recipient of the grand prize at the Michigan Fine Arts Competition. Her work employs gestural lines, shapes, and ranges of muted and bold colors in her abstract compositions. (Related: Check out this Ann Arbor Observer 2013 article for more information.)
Elizabeth Barick Fall
Fall is the founder and director of trustArt Studios. In a statement from the gallery, Fall’s work is described as the result of the artist’s exploration of mixed media. She is particularly interested in juxtaposing photographs of everyday places and things, many of which are materials that she “compulsively collects.” One of her works, shown above, includes an object placed on a bed of pine needles. The object resembles a flat shovel, spatula, and is clearly a tool of some kind, but it has a print on the surface that resembles a forest floor in a deciduous area. This spatula-like object, juxtaposed with the pine needles, draws attention to the natural versus the manufactured, though this object appears old enough to have escaped cultural memory as an item of functionality.
Rose E. Gomez
Gomez is a ceramic artist and also shares a company, RnR Ceramics, which promotes ceramic arts by bringing in visiting artists for lectures and workshops.
Barbara Hohmann
Hohmann is an artist and art teacher and has been curating shows and performance art at trustArt Gallery. She will have mixed media work in the show.
Allen Samuels
Samuels is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan where he taught art and design until 2008. In his artist statement, Samuels asserts:
I have designed products for 50 years. Currently, I design products for those who are often underserved: the elderly, the poor, the differently abled and for disaster relief. My work is aimed at providing simple, low cost, easily manufactured and understandable products. They deal with mobility, personal safety, personal hygiene, infant care, specific diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, etc. I find this work to be challenging, interesting and one hopes of some use to real people.
Samuels' work thus seeks to improve the lives of the community and does not reside within the typical realm of “fine art.” He has designed products for 29 corporations, including “glassware, dinnerware, microscopes, ophthalmic instruments, other scientific instruments, public transportation, heavy industrial equipment, furniture and more.” Like many of the other artists working in these studio spaces, he has received numerous awards, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and another from the National Science Foundation.
Laura Shope
Shope is an artist returning from a 13-year hiatus, in which she raised two sons and devoted her time to managing family-run businesses. In her artist statement, she describes her work as “an exploration of the creation of things ... the push and pull, opposing tensions, soft and hard, liquid and solid.” She elaborates, stating that she starts with an idea, which she calls the initial “pull” from the raw materials she works with. She asks, “How hard can I squeeze before it breaks? How far can I move the stone to become something else?” Shope is concerned with the intersections of the play of the artist, material, and “something greater,” which she calls the “sense of ‘spirit’ or aliveness that is present in all things.” She mentions three materials that she enjoys working with, each for a different reason. First, stone is one of her favorite mediums, particularly because it feels more “alive” than other materials, and it involves a slower process that requires both “force and gentleness.” Second, Shope enjoys working with weaving, particularly for its historical connection to craft, traditionally practiced by women. Finally, she enjoys working with plaster, as it is more “immediate,” allowing only a short time to work before it hardens. She enjoys the mystery and the sense of tension from uncertainty about the finished product. For example, she points out that the latex forms she uses could break from too much pressure, or, for no apparent reason. Process, therefore, is a foremost concern for Shope in her work.
Lisse Williams
Williams creates watercolor paintings, representing stylized figurative works with a very distinct hand. The artist has many small series available to browse on her website. One of her most recent series, Fall Thinking Vessel, will be shown in Studio Works. On her website, Williams describes the series: “The last four images for this series are finished. I realized at my last show, that I have been working with this idea/figurine for a while. I believe the last group encompasses the feeling I wanted to portray the best. Warm, like a small fire, something to hold in your hand, and close.”
The figurines in Fall Thinking Vessel are painted in earth tones, and warm palettes, but they also recall Buddhist sculptures, the flatness of art nouveau, and employ symmetry in their execution. Williams’ style is recognizable and unique. She describes this series, focusing on the intent behind the work, stating: “the pieces that I have created recently are focused on figures, dreamers, and spirits. When I step into the woods or into a patch of sunlight I have never felt alone, rather full and at home in a way that can't be felt with others. In each piece I want the viewer to create their own story, a personal mythology, that deepens their connection to the natural world.” Furthermore, Williams describes these bodies as being “buoyed up by a vessel, holding their simplified structures, hands to hold and create life, and our mind to see and understand, to think of the world outside of how and what we assume it is.” The symmetrical qualities, combined with the serene, but the bold color palettes and small scale create a meditative simplicity that is recognizable and consistent throughout her work.
The process, function, and media differ vastly among the featured artists in Studio Works. Some artists featured do not have an online presence, making the gallery space and the open-studio an important opportunity for them to share their work with the community.
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
Opening reception is Saturday, Nov. 11, 6-9 pm. Gallery hours are Nov. 12, 18 & 19 from 1-4 pm and Nov. 13-17 by appointment. Artists’ open studios will be Sunday, Nov. 19, 1-4 pm at trustArt Gallery, 7885 Jackson Rd., Suite 1, Ann Arbor. Visit the gallery website at trustartstudios.com.
Blog Post
Ann Arbor Art Center's "Millennial Pink" explores a generation through color
by christopherporter
What, exactly, is “millennial pink”?
This term is now used to identify the aesthetic of an entire generation, the often-reviled millennial. This generation is defined as being born between 1981 and 2001. Whether you love or hate millennials, the color pink, or the term “millennial pink,” this exhibition delves into many issues at the forefront of contemporary cultural discussion.
The Millennial Pink exhibition is comprised of multi-media arts and will be on display at the Ann Arbor Art Center through Nov. 4. Artists in the show explore a variety of themes, including “gender identity, pop culture, sexuality, politics, and shades of Pantone pink.”
“Millennial pink” as a physical color that's represented in various works in the gallery seems to be any number of subdued shades and tints of pink. Its complement, which can be any number of tints and shades of green, is also found throughout the gallery space. Can any pink be millennial? The answer seems to be yes, especially if it is donned by someone fitting within the accepted age range of a millennial.
On the exhibition page, the Ann Arbor Art Center quotes Sady Doyle from Quartz Media, succinctly summarizing the ubiquitous quality of the color trend: “In practice, millennial pink is whatever shade of pink you want it to be.” In 2016, rose gold was the color, or was it simply a variation on the all-encompassing “millennial pink?” A quick Google search reveals articles with headers like "'Millennial Pink' Has Lost Its Cool. Prepare for the Return of Red," "The Real Reason No One Can Shut Up About Millennial Pink," or one seemingly written for the unaware millennials themselves: "WTF Is Millennial Pink, Anyway?"
The gallery asserts that within the show, “dichotomies are Carson Davis Brown’s photograph Mass_012 takes a critical stance toward consumer culture while employing that culture’s own tools. In the photograph, a large pink display made of an amalgam of consumer products stands in the center of a supermarket aisle, contrasting against a pale green complementary background from another consumer display. The work is self-described as “an installation project about creating visual disruptions in places of mass.” His statement delves into the project, explaining that the artist believes “the way we consume images perpetuates the abyssal production-consumption cycle. This has contributed to a flattening of space and culture into ‘non-places,’ as evidenced by the proliferation of the ‘Big Box’ store.”
Brown’s works intervene in the “already existing ecosystem” of these “big box” stores, or supermarkets, culling products in the store and re-arranging them in relation to the store’s environment. He looks for repetition in color, form, and type, evident in Mass_012, in which the large pink display contrasts against the bright, pale green display in the background. The photograph does not appear to be extraneously staged, and to back up this point, Brown states: “The products are altered only in their relative position, their actual context remains the same ... this disruption has a very short lifespan before being dismantled and restocked by store staff ... dissolving back into the consumer goods lexicon they emerged from.”
After the intervention is complete, he photographs the installations and prints them in the store’s photo department, displaying them in a for-sale frame straight from the store’s shelf. The print in the frame seems, to the general public, to be an intentional move by the home decor department, and is then purchased by a consumer (the artist states that the longest-running “show” of this kind was 30 minutes, before someone purchased the framed image).
When I saw the image in the gallery, I assumed it was another spring display to advertise the watermelon-filled summer days ahead, and did not consider the artist’s intervention in the space. I have seen so many similar, intentional displays, that it simply passed by unrecognizable to me as an artistic intervention. However, even if the interventions are covert, the finished product in the gallery space will undoubtedly raise the same pertinent questions about consumerism and aesthetics within that system.
Another attention-grabbing work, and one that embraces tropes of the millennial, Gabrielle DeCaro’s video Forget Your Kitten can be found in clips on the artist’s website, and is currently on display in the gallery. DeCaro works as an artist, actor, video-maker, and writer. She lives in Los Angeles and contributed to alternative variety shows, screendance shorts, and comedy sketches, as well as created her own monologues. All of these experiences translate into her work in Forget Your Kitten, a blend of these styles that seem utterly millennial and certainly very pink. The videos focus on female relationships and bizarre costuming and play, with the girls in the video doing “girly things” and performing choreographed dances in cat costumes. The video premiered in 2016 at University of Michigan’s Mind Your Head: The 2016 Stamps Senior Show and was described as:
Largely motivated by 1960’s variety show acts, questions of group identity/uniformity, and Cher’s female autonomy, FYK celebrates humor and expression through monologues, scenes and select performances recorded in front of a live audience. This show demands the kind of viewership that encourages women to be vocal, critical thinkers when it comes to inequality gaps. Nodding to her own development as a woman, centering the piece on intimacy and confabs of trust, DeCaro places her female friendships on the forefront.
The suggestion that this video demands a conscious effort by viewers seems to me a good observation. While I relate easily to the semiotics of the purple and pink hues and costuming of what might be considered a stereotypical millennial girlhood, many will likely find the performances baffling.
Finally, Chelsea Lee’s works Kim Kardashian Body Pillow and Kim Kardashian Mini Face Pillows ambiguously celebrates media culture by referencing one of the millennials' most notorious obsessions. The pink pillows that comprise this installation rest together on a gray-scale couch in the center of the gallery floor. The pillows are not, however, ordinary pillows (you may have guessed from the titles). One large pillow resembles a human form and depicts Kim Kardashian’s full body printed on the pale pink fabric. Next to the pillow-form of Kim Kardashian, which sits in the center of the couch, two piles of smaller pink pillows sit on either side. Each of the smaller pillows is printed with Kim’s face, identical to one another, and cropped in close.
The Kardashians appear to be of utmost concern to millennials, evidenced not only by this work of art existing, but also in the gallery statement: “Pink is the color of candy, but pink is also the color Kendall Jenner paints her walls to suppress her appetite.”
Kendall Jenner, for those unaware, is a famous model and half-sister of the Kardashians. Chelsea Lee’s artist statement suggests that the works are a result of her self-described obsession with a popular culture she wants to believe is not harmful, stating: “I get a sick feeling in my gut when I see the way people look at me once they know what/kind of culture I’m into. I’m tired of feeling ashamed. I’m tired of pretending that I’m intellectual in the same way that other people are.” Chelsea Lee’s pillows illustrate the dichotomous nature of many of these works, which exist in a fine art context, but embrace and suggest that “low culture,” media culture, and millennial culture belong there as much as anything else.
Ann Arbor Art Center’s website has an important question posted on the exhibition page: “One question we ask at the Ann Arbor Art Center, ‘By October, will Millennial Pink even be a thing?’”
It is October, and with the exhibition running through November, Millennial Pink is “still a thing!”
Artists represented:
Ash Arder (Detroit, MI) | Heidi Barlow (Detroit, MI) | Emmy Bright (Detroit, MI) | Carson Davis Brown (Los Angeles, CA) | Anna Campbell (Grand Rapids, MI) | Debbie Carlos (Lansing, MI) | Gabrielle DeCaro (Pasadena, CA) | Nicole Dyar (Houston, TX) | Riley Hanson (Philadelphia, PA) | Shaina Kasztelan (Detroit, MI) | Jeff Kraus (Brooklyn, NY) | Chelsea Lee (Richmond, VA) | Elise Mesner (Los Angeles, CA) | Victoria Shaheen (Detroit, MI) | Sophie Yan (Detroit, MI)
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
"Millennial Pink" is at the Ann Arbor Art Center, 117 W. Liberty St., through Nov. 4. Free. Visit annarborartcenter.org for gallery hours and more information.
Blog Post
Technological Delineation: "Moving Image: Portraiture" at UMMA
by christopherporter
Moving Image: Portraiture at the University of Michigan Museum of Art aims to address portraiture through the lens of contemporary media. As the third and final component of a series drawn from the Borusan Contemporary collection in Istanbul, including Moving Image: Landscape and Moving Image: Performance, each of the three artists included in this small exhibition uses technology to convey complex ideas, not only about the history of portraiture and representation but how technology can change our ideas of what constitutes portraiture.
Hannu Karjalainen’s installation Towards an Architect is the largest-format video in the gallery. The work is a homage to the color palettes used by Swiss wallpaper company Salubra, which was employed by Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect. UMMA describes the work as a portrayal of a “fictional architect who is experiencing the response of people living in the structures he designed.”
The video, while based on the work of Le Corbusier, also references the story of French architect Guillaume Gillet, the designer of the 1960s prison Fleury-Mérogis. Influenced by Le Corbusier’s modernism, the prison was intended to produce a harmonious environment to produce “happy convicts,” but it did not live up to its promised ideals. Instead, dissatisfied inmates attacked the architect, destroying his office and holding him at gunpoint.
Karjalainen’s video references this event through the use of paints that evoke Le Corbusier's favored colors, but the gooey liquids are dumped mercilessly over the male subject in the video. The man is seemingly drowning under the thick layers of paint, leading to a claustrophobic aesthetic. A minute and 30 seconds into the video, the yellow/ochre paint begins dripping over the right side of the subject’s shoulders. Starting with a few shades, the paint is not immediately suffocating or overwhelming. But once the pale fuchsia is introduced, the palette begins to take form; then a pale blue is dumped over “the architect’s” head, lending to a sense of claustrophobia as it drips down his face.
Finally, a vat of black paint obscures the rest of the face, covering the other colors almost entirely. As the paint drips in the final 30 seconds of the video, underlying colors come through the black, leaving an eerily skull-like appearance on the lower portion of the architect’s face.
Daniel Rozin's Mirror No. 10 is a software-driven “reflection” in which the museum’s surroundings are generated on-screen. Rozin works as an artist, educator, and developer working with interactive digital art. Many of his works, like the one on display at UMMA, are interactive sculpture and installations that respond to the surrounding stimuli, particularly the presence of the viewer.
This is true of Mirror No. 10, in which the viewer is depicted on-screen in a “live sketch.” No photographing is allowed, though it was tempting to document myself sketchily represented on the screen, with other museumgoers standing next to me, equally impressed with their likenesses. Framed by the architecture of the museum, it was akin to being in a virtual reality in which I was represented with my surroundings as an artist’s sketch. This is a portrait -- and it is not, as it fades from view when the subject leaves.
Marina Zurkow’s video Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK) is a 2011 algorithmic work in which the surroundings change and never repeats. According to the artist’s website, the “title Mesocosm is drawn from the field of environmental science and refers to experimental, simulated ecosystems that ‘allow for manipulation of the physical environment ... Lucian Freud’s painting of Leigh Bowery, an influential performance artist, designer, and drag queen in 1980s London. One hour of real-world time is equal to one minute on-screen, which means that one-year on-screen elapses in 146 hours.
The video shows an impressive range of animals (dogs, owls, squirrels, foxes, and even pixies), weather conditions, strange objects, and sounds throughout time. The video is not only meant to represent the passage of time on the moors of Northeast England; as Una Chaudhuri’s analysis on the artist’s website states:
In Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK),
Moving Image: Portraiture is on display until November 26, and while two of these pieces can be seen online, it is worth going to the gallery to see these works in the darkened space of the gallery. Karjalainen’s work, in particular, made an impact in the gallery space, because it is projected on a large wall, the colors and paint sleek and large and overwhelming in the dark room.
Related:
➥ Moving Image: Performance (Pulp review)
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
"Moving Image: Portraiture" is at UMMA, 525 S. State St., through November 26. Free. Visit umma.umich.edu for more information.
Blog Post
Fashion, Forward: "Looking Back: 20th Century Dress From the Historic Costume Collection"
by christopherporter
The idea that fashion is cyclical, and that “certain silhouettes repeat themselves with minor changes,” is not a new one. It is, however, an interesting starting point for thinking about articles of clothing throughout 20th century in America.
The exhibit Looking Back: 20th Century Dress From the Historic Costume Collection, curated by Jessica Hahn, can be seen at the Duderstadt Center at University of Michigan through October 6. The show displays a full range of garments from 1900 to 1999. The show posits that despite the use and re-use of certain styles and silhouettes throughout time, the textiles used and their production styles, as well as attitudes toward dress itself, changed drastically. The 20th century was an era in which fashion changed at a faster rate than ever before. There were a number of factors that contributed to this shift that are explored through the inclusion of objects and wall text.
Blog Post
Shifting Ideals: "GLOSS: Modeling Beauty" at UMMA
by christopherporter
GLOSS: Modeling Beauty is a thoughtfully curated exhibition that focuses on the impact of fashion photography on the history of photography. The show explores “the shifting ideals of female beauty” in American and European visual culture starting in the 1920s with the work of Edward Steichen. The exhibition examines not only fashion photography and images from advertising campaigns but features documentary photography by Elliott Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz, and Ralph Gibson, captured images of women and mannequins in urban environments. Furthermore, artists James Van Der Zee, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Nikki S. Lee “employ the visual strategies of traditional fashion photography, while offering alternative narratives to mainstream notions of female beauty.”
The works in the show are chronologically arranged, offering a cohesive narrative of the evolution of fashion photography and its intersection with fine art practice. The exhibition illustrates the progression from what we consider traditional studio portraiture to the edgy fashion photography that developed in the mid-late 20th century. Additionally, “beauty” becomes ambiguous in later works such as those by Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, and Guy Bourdin, in which everyday life is portrayed as banally juxtaposed with high fashion.
Color comes in to play in the later works, both from advents in technology and reference to Pop Art, as seen in the Paolozzi works. In his series General Dymanic F.U.N., he satirizes popular consumption not only through imagery but in the choice of title. In these works, women are often depicted alongside technicolor food, referencing both domesticity and mass consumption while creating a sense of irreverence. His work consciously critiques the mechanisms of advertising and mass media by culling images from broader culture and translating them into colorful photolithographs.
Bourdin’s images from the late 1970s were shot for a Bloomingdale’s catalog and feature a B-movie aesthetic. The series features women in hotel rooms, with dim lighting and a sinister atmosphere that exemplifies the transition in fashion photography from the studio conventions established by Steichen in which lighting was carefully planned, to the edgy, haute couture of the later part of the 20th century. Additionally, Warhol’s Polaroid images are snapshots that would later be used to create his iconic silkscreen portraits, and again show the departure from traditional studio portraiture while illustrating photography’s impact on Pop Art and contemporary art in general.
Gloss: Modeling Beauty was curated by Jennifer M. Friess, hired in 2016 as the first assistant curator of photography for University of Michigan Museum of Art. (Her first project was Ernestine Ruben at Willow Run: Mobilizing Memory. She will be working on a number of exciting upcoming exhibitions featuring the museum’s excellent photography collection. Below, my conversation with Friess explores some of the themes and narratives within the show and offers a glimpse into the next photography exhibit at UMMA.
Q: What was your initial inspiration for this exhibition?
A: I think when I first got here, and when I first took on the role of assistant curator of photography, I was in a position to be the first photography curator here at UMMA, and so I had this whole collection to dive into and research. It was really some of those early iconic images by Steichen and Philippe Halsman that started that conversation in my head. As I explored the collection more and more, there seemed to be a kind of narrative that emerged, not just about fashion photography, but how women are represented throughout the history of the medium. We have a fairly strong collection of images that just depict women in the service of fashion photography.
Q: So, women in fashion photography are often not considered the subjects of “fine art” or “high art”; were there any challenges when you were searching through the collection to gather enough subject matter to realize this exhibition?
A: That is a great question. There is, of course, always a speckled history of how different types of photographs are included in a museum collection. When Steichen was photographing Greta Garbo, his images were published, and not always concurrently, in Vanity Fair. So, to think of images that were consumed by a mass public, through a mass publication, thinking of those in 1928 as being in a museum collection was quite unusual and unheard of. Now, decades later, we see that the work they were doing, even though it was consumed on this mass level, is actually really significant to how fashion, culture, and even broader Pop culture evolved. These images are really quite significant to the narrative and history of the last 60 to 70 years.
In terms of what we had in the collection, these images, so many of them were not considered fine art when they were first made. There is a sense that their importance grows over time, and we have amassed a certain number of these throughout the decades that allowed for a cohesive narrative to be told. And of course, photographers like Nikki S. Lee and Josephine Meckseper are very purposefully working in a “fine art” milieu, and so they sort of bookend the narrative where photographers are becoming much more active and critical of past established techniques and subjects. It was a fitting end to this narrative, starting with someone like Edward Steichen, who basically made a name for fashion photography in the first half of the 20th century, and ending with women photographers who are challenging that narrative.
Q: Could you talk a little bit more about the Nikki S. Lee and the Josephine Meckseper, and how you used those to kind of counteract the narrative of fashion photography?
A: What’s so great is they are making that choice. For example, Nikki S. Lee, a Korean photographer, is actually inserting herself into these images, making self-portraits out of very constructed and staged tableaux. She is, throughout her career, inserting herself into situations and social groups in which she might not otherwise be privy. She dons these different personas, and then photographs herself in these situations.
The image in this exhibition is from her broader Parts series, and she is inserting herself into this upper-class, French, bourgeois environment. There are a few hints when you look at the image that things are constructed. For example, the perspective down on Nikki S. Lee is not as if we are looking at her walking the red carpet from a natural eye-level; instead, she is photographing from above so that you can really see not only her in the setting, but how the setting itself, the stairway and decadent gold-rimmed everything, plush carpets, and marble, it all envelopes her in the center of the image. In addition, you can tell by looking at the image there is a pretty thick white border around the photograph, and she is actually cutting away one side of the image in order to indicate that she had a very conscious hand in making it. In doing so, by cutting the image, she is actually cutting out the male figure, and that is where the meaning of the Parts series comes into play, in that she is only including parts of the male figure. He (whether it is one he or many) is always present in the periphery, she is just changing the focus of her images.
With Josephine Meckseper, she is doing something that has its basis in early Pop Art, in that she is culling images from mass media and altering them in a significant way. She is continuing that narrative begun by Steichen and Halsman, but by pulling images from fashion photography, from publications, and then altering them in some way. Whether by turning them upside down, painting on top them, but in some way she is reasserting her hand in the making of the objects.
Q: I am wondering after that discussion which piece, if any, or which series is your favorite?
A: All of them are my favorites really, it is hard to choose. The Guy Bourdin’s are my favorite. They are so bizarre and so dark, and really it is a simple premise. He is taking images that advertise Bloomingdale’s recent -- and by recent I mean 1976 or so -- lingerie line. That premise in and of itself is quite mundane and is not something new at all. People had been photographing each new season’s clothing line and lingerie line for decades. Here you have him putting models in these lingerie outfits and pajamas, and he is staging them in really curious settings, and in various groupings. They are often very poorly lit, in terms of how studio portraiture should be, like Steichen, photographing properly lit models in a very controlled setting. It is almost as if he has let the reigns off in how the models are staged and how they are arranged, and the setting they are in, he seems to tap into his psyche.
His images are often quite edgy. Some of his more iconic images involve Dobermans growling and interacting with models. There is often an aggressive vibe to many of his images. These are slightly more tame than even those, but there is a sense of magic and mystery that he is invoking in the images. The objects themselves are also quite glossy, they are printed on this very vibrant, glossy, color paper, and he just makes them irresistible. The narratives that he is suggesting are not ones that you would find in daily life, and I think that makes them pretty intriguing.
Q: These Bourdin images, aren’t they somewhat rare? They are not very well-known?
A: They are, this is one of his lesser-known series. Because he is publishing it for Bloomingdale’s, it was meant to be viewed in a catalog, not necessarily on the walls of a museum. It is kind of a rare glimpse for viewers to see these objects on display. They are part of a broader series as well, we just have a sample of six out here on view.
Q: Is that true for many of the works in the show, that they are kind of out of context from their origin?
A: Yes, it is kind of interesting, so often with photographs, any photograph really, especially earlier images, they are often taken out of their original context. That is true of many works of art that were made before 1950 or so, but the idea of these photographs having a real, physical life outside of the museum is pretty ubiquitous throughout the show. Some of the later artists are very consciously making art that is meant for a critical museum context, like Nikki S. Lee or Josephine Meckseper. People like Bourdin are photographing for Bloomingdale’s, and Halsman and Steichen, whose images were meant to be in editorials and magazines, for LIFE and Vanity Fair. Those images came from somewhere, those prints were made and used as proofs, so they have many, many lives before they came to the museum. Always remember when you are looking at a photograph in a museum, these objects had a physical life before.
Q: That’s really interesting! I am also curious, since you mentioned you are the first curator of photography at UMMA, how has this experience been so far for you, and do you have any exciting plans for the future of the collection?
A: That’s a wonderful question! I am taking the collection over from our former Western art curator, Carol McNamara, and she did a wonderful job exploring the collection. Even our photography gallery space was just created in about 2014. It is a fairly new space, and it is new to have me as the single steward of the collection. I am excited to get these objects out on view, there is so much in our collection that I am going to be bringing out in future exhibitions, and it is pretty exciting to both grow the collection and put it on view for an audience, frankly, that is quite interested in photography. Of course, photographs are so ubiquitous now, and everyone has a camera phone, you have access to your life’s images at the touch of a button. I think there is a real relevancy to the medium right now, even though there is this deluge of images. My goal is to help sort through that deluge, and give you some glimpses and narratives to hang onto, use, and bring back.
Q: I am very excited for upcoming exhibitions, and that is my last question: Do you have any upcoming projects that you are looking forward to?
A: I am looking forward to all of them, but after GLOSS is a show called Aftermath: Landscapes of Devastation, and it brings out images from almost the entire history of the medium, and shows scenes of natural and human inflicted destruction and devastation. They are all landscape images, and represent scenes of destruction. However, not all of the images were made immediately after the event. We have scenes of the Civil War, for example. An image just after the battle of Gettysburg is paired with a photograph by contemporary photographer Sally Mann, who is revisiting the antebellum landscapes of the Civil War era, re-photographing them in a way that is almost like a dream-like state. So you see a chronology of events, but the images themselves play with the idea of remembering and memory.
Elizabeth Smith is an AADL staff member and is interested in art history and visual culture.
"GLOSS: Modeling Beauty" is at UMMA, 525 S. State St., through January 7. Visit umma.umich.edu to see talks and events related to the exhibition.