Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Month: May 2017

Carlos Diaz @ David Klein Gallery

CARLOS DIAZ, ROUGE SERIES: CLAM SHELL BUCKET – 2012-14 C PRINT 21 X 30″

The David Klein Gallery in Detroit opened a retrospective exhibition of work by the photographer Carlos Diaz, May 13, 2017.   Spaces & Spectacle covers four themes of work dating back to the early 1980’s. Diaz, a Professor of Photography at Center for Creative Studies, has taught and influenced several generations of students in the art of photography over the course of 35 years.

It has been at least a couple of generations since photographers were loading 35mm film into their single lens reflex cameras on a daily basis, providing themselves with the means to record images. The commercial photographers were using mid-range Hasselblad, Cannon, and Nikon that recorded on 2.25 x 2.25 rolls of film, a format that provided the resolution for high-quality print work. All of this changed in the mid-1990’s when digital photography came of age, founded in part by the NASA space program. Diaz had been using film to capture his fine art images, sometimes referred to today as analog versus the digital world of solid-state CCD image sensor chips. In this exhibition, we see a variety of formats Diaz has used to capture and print his fine art photography.

Christine Schefman, Gallery Director says, “The photographs and collages reflect Diaz’s continued interest in the American Industrial Revolution, which gave birth to the working class, and the American amusement industry which was born out of the Revolution.”

CARLOS DIAZ, INVENTED LANDSCAPES OF CONEY ISLAND – 2006 COLLAGE: GELATIN SILVER PRINT & VINTAGE STEEL PLATE WITH WOOD BLOCK ENGRAVINGS 11 X 14″

The collage series Invented Landscapes of Diaz’s work perhaps draws on experience doing mechanical drawing before he started his formal art studies. He went on to complete his BFA from Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and an MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art. The photographic collages are images of the industrial based Coney Island amusement park that became a backdrop for hand-cut images from old patent manuals, allowing Diaz to create what he has described in his statement, “The Invented Landscapes images and the Coney Island environment provides a space to merge both metaphorically and literally, the machines of the industrial revolution and the amusement park landscape. They are the fusion of the functional forms of labor and the fun of the fantasy of the carnival.” The change in tonality allows the viewer to see the added elements.

CARLOS DIAZ, WADE CARNIVAL SHOWS: OCTOPUS RIDE ATTENDANT – 1980-83 ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT 36 X 36″

In these early 2 x 2 mid-range photographs, created in 1980 while Diaz was still in Ann Arbor, he selects and poses carnival ride attendants for a straight-forward full-bodied portrait. It is back then that it becomes evident that Carlos Diaz has a psychological preference for formal balance in many of his compositions. In the work, Octopus Ride Attendant, Diaz spends the time to center the figure and create an equal amount of space in all directions, either in the compositional set-up or in the printing (described as an archival inkjet print, meaning the negative was scanned and printed using an inkjet printer.) This element does not appear in the Invented Landscape work but dominates most of his other work. To illustrate, when you visit his web site, his image and the text are all centered on the page. I recommend visiting the web site where you can view his entire body of work. He says, “In one form or fashion, photography for me has always provided an opportunity to attempt to understand other people and their circumstances.”

Mary’s Garden, Beyond Borders, 2010, C print. 23 x 30 inches

There is one photograph in the exhibition, Mary’s Garden that comes from his Beyond Borders series where he documents the front yards of many homes in Southwest Detroit. This photograph is another good example of creating this approach to a formal sense of balance and sensibility. The balance comes from this vertical chimney centered in the composition and an even amount of design weight to the large home on the right and the Madonna flower arrangement on the left, not to mention the nice halo of foliage around the parked truck, where a formality of color balance comes into play as well.

CARLOS DIAZ ROUGE SERIES: TORPEDO CAR – 2012-14 C PRINT 21 X 30″

These photographs from the Rouge Series look like full-frame color prints from 35mm film and printed as a C-Print. The term C-print stands for Chromogenic color prints. These are full-color photographic prints made using traditional chemicals and processes. It seems natural that Carlos Diaz would be interested in the Ford Rouge Complex, in that he grew up in Pontiac, Michigan and had a close relationship with the auto industry. Many of his family members work for the auto companies, and Diaz recalls his experience when he first saw the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He says, “When I saw the Diego Rivera Murals, my view of the automotive worker’s role and the understanding of the realities of automotive production shifted as I began to see modernists painters like Charles Sheeler, who depicted the Rouge and industry as a means that would save mankind.” Here, in the work Torpedo Car, Diaz centers his image, providing more evidence of this preference to address the concept of formality in composition.

CARLOS DIAZ, CARNIVAL MIDWAY: HORSE RACE MURAL – 2008 ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT 24 X 30″

Carlos Diaz remains interested in the life surrounding carnivals, not just the people, but also the structures, the culture and perhaps the nostalgia. In the 2008 print Horse Race Mural, part of the American Carnival Midway series, the work is formally composed and celebrates the photographic image center stage. We see how the umbrellas enter into the composition, almost identical on each side; More like Ansel Adams, than Henri Cartier-Bresson.

David Klein Gallery until June 10, 2017

Michael Scoggins @ Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center

The Robinson Gallery at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center (BBAC) is home to a new exhibition by New York artist Michael Scoggins, opening April 28, 2017.

If you’re expecting landscape, figurative, representational, or abstract artwork, this is not one of those. If I had to place it in context, it would more attuned to the Pop art movement, where Andy Warhol took the image of a Campbell’s soup can and increases its scale, often repeating the image multiple times. Here in the United States, Pop art started with the New York artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg, all of who drew on popular imagery that eventually became an international phenomenon. Pop artist’s celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art.

Michael Scoggins, Bart Art #1, Colored Pencil on Paper, 67 x 51″, 2014

The work of Michael Scoggins takes on the politics of childlike imagery and dramatically changes its scale. If this work were executed on an average piece of notebook paper, 8 ½ x 11”, it would be appropriately displayed in an elementary school gymnasium exhibition. The key concept here is scale. These large 50 x 70” pieces of paper carefully simulate the torn out notebook sheet and illustrate the horizontal thin blue lines and the vertical red line on the left. In the imagery from The Simpsons, the character of Bart is reaching out, “Don’t have a Cow, Man.” Well, maybe he’s reaching out to his audience, a kind of confrontation about this iconic image hanging on a gallery wall while appealing to lovers of this character that was first developed by Matt Groening in 1989, and the Fox sitcom now in its 29th season.

Michael Scoggins, I Was Born…(Frida), Graphite, Color Pencil, on Paper, 67 x 51″ 2016

The imagery displayed in Scoggins work is mixed. You have a child’s rendition of a Frida Kahlo work, as in I Was Born…(Frida) with commentary, to a copy of a two-dollar bill, or often an entire sheet of paper devoted to a page of childlike penmanship, repeating a controversial sentence the entire length of the page. There is the possibility that the work is autobiographical, and takes the viewer back to transformative years of Scoggin’s youth. Few of us would disclose our fourth-grade classroom illustrations and present them later in life, after an MFA in painting, as fine art.

Michael Scoggins, Explosion Drawing #4, Marker, Color Pencil on Paper, 67 x 51″ 2014

In many, if not all, of the labels we have given to artistic movements since the beginning of time, is the reason why I go to the Pop Art movement to explain Michael Scoggins work. We have artists, today, that are producing minimal sculpture, impressionistic paintings, abstract expressionistic canvases, and photographic realism, all part of a continuation of movements that began in the past. This concept is an endeavor that transforms youthful memories onto large re-created sheets of notebook paper, to comment on narratives that are nostalgic images and make us take notice. Scoggins uses “Michael S. as a caricature of his younger self, in deliberately creating a signature, and uses nuances of crumpled, folded, sometimes torn or folded paper, to create the facsimile.

“The work I make is always political,” says Michael Scoggins, who satirizes art-world politics and provincialism in penetrating, disarming schoolboy-style doodles and writings. “I feel the ‘Michael S.’ character has definitely transformed over the years and has become more of an extension of my adult self,” Scoggins has said. “I want to present my work with sincerity, and it is truly a reflection of my inter-self.”

Michael Scoggins work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); the Hammer Museum, (Los Angeles, CA); the Mattituck Museum (Mattituck, CT); the Gettysburg Museum (Gettysburg, PA); The Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, GA); along with several prestigious private collections. In addition, Scoggins is one of Wasserman Projects’ artists and his work was first shown in January 2016 at their gallery in Detroit, Michigan.

He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

The BBAC mission is “to connect people of all ages and abilities with visual arts education, exhibition, and other creative experiences.” They accomplish this by offering classes, exhibits, workshops, camps, and events to the public since 1957.

Michael Scoggins     Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center      April 28 – June 9, 2017

 

Suspended Disbelief @ Broad Museum, East Lansing

Transported Man Exhibition opens by New Director

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

I once entertained aspirations of being a professional magician (I was never good, but at one point I could make all the faces of a deck of cards disappear, using a trick deck, admittedly). It’s likely for the best that I never pursued that career, but the Broad Art Museum’s Transported Man suggests that perhaps the world of art and that of magic aren’t that different. Both, after all, inexorably rely on the viewer voluntarily suspending disbelief.

The Broad’s new director, Marc-Olivier Wahler has a tough act to follow. The museum’s grand opening in 2012 featured works by art world heavyweights Andy Warhol, Joseph Albers, Anselm Kiefer, and Damien Hirst. The building’s architect Zaha Hadid even made an appearance. But, with over 400 exhibitions under his belt, Wahler capably delivers a conceptually interesting and visually arresting debut exhibition. His first show is an ambitious exploration of the relationship between art and viewer, and it brings together over 40 international artists, some quite familiar (Duchamp and Magritte) and others either emerging or mid-career.

The Transported Man derives its title from the magic trick of the same name, as depicted in the novel (and movie) The Prestige. Using magic as a motif, the exhibition, broadly speaking, explores the mutability of perception. Mundane items—magically—become art objects once placed in a museum. Furthermore, the exhibition tests the limits at which art can fool us. It certainly works. By the time you’re done on the second floor, you’ll have seen so much trompe l’oeil wizardry and visual sleight-of-hand that you’ll be thoroughly confounded as to what’s real and what’s illusory. The Broad’s counterintuitively shaped spaces, replete with walls that slant every which way, make the experience even more disorienting.

The Transported Man, all images courtesy of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

Stepping into the first level exhibition galleries, visitors will be met with a wooden table hovering in air; it’s propped up by a fan set within the floor (there’s no attempt at hiding that), yet how the air current so firmly holds the table in place remains a mystery. But the elephant in the room is, quite literally, the elephant in the room. It freely hangs with its trunk clasped around a rope affixed to the ceiling. Possessing all the convincing texture of an actual elephant, it’s actually a polyurethane resin, polyester, steel, and fiberglass sculpture by Daniel Firman. There’s something strangely beautiful and visually satisfying about the suspended creature so improbably defying gravity. (Look up Firman’s elephants on the internet; they’ve appeared in all sorts of places).

Perhaps the most disorienting work in the show is Synchronicity, an experimental work by Robin Meier and Andre Gwerder. It’s a big, black tent inside a big black tent. Step inside both and suddenly you’re walking on (and smelling, quite strongly, in fact) soil and grass, the atmosphere has suddenly become hot and extremely humid, and it’s very dark. Real crickets happily chirp away (afterhours, the lights within turn on, mimicking natural daylight, and the crickets, cicadas, and fireflies erroneously think it’s day). The work explores how we can manipulate nature through electronic stimuli. Small electronic LED lights stimulate actual synchronistic fireflies, which under the impression that it’s a hot, muggy night, flicker in a pulsating rhythm. While far from the point of the installation, I couldn’t help but reflect on our own susceptibility to electronic stimuli/media which we increasingly accept at face-value as truth.

Upstairs, the visual and sensory theatrics continue. In the corner of one gallery space you’ll find weeds sprouting improbably from the floor. They’re actually steel sculptures by Tony Matelli, and seem so convincingly real that you really do have to fight the urge to reach out and touch them…just to check.

The Transported Man, all images courtesy of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

One subtext of the show is the uncanny transformation of mundane objects into works of art. The point is most explicitly made with Piero Manzoni’s Magic Base—Living Sculpture, a wooden pedestal upon which people are supposed to stand, thus momentarily turning themselves into art objects (for this exhibition, however, viewers are asked to kindly refrain from turning themselves into art objects, and thus help preserve the original base, now over half a century old). This also seems to be the point behind the many non-functional air ducts installed throughout the museum by Charlotte Posenenske, and the plywood plank (by Robert Gober) leaning against a wall. Visually, these works are uninteresting, but they nevertheless foster conversation about the nature of art, and in this respect they advance the goal of the exhibition.

The Transported Man, all images courtesy of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

 

Perhaps ironically, the most conceptual part of the show may very well be The Transported Collection, a playfully inventive adjacent exhibition of works from the Broad’s permanent collection. About forty paintings and drawings hang on a wall in one of the Broad’s lower galleries, but without any obvious reference to their corresponding artists. The viewer is left in a quandary: which of these works are, in fact, generally recognized as great works of art? Stealthily tucked in the corner of the room are some laminated explanatory cards which identify the artists. I cheated and peaked; the list is impressive– Van Dyck, Picasso, Delacroix, Matisse, Giacometti, and others. But some of the most compelling works on view were by artists I’d not heard of, such as Federico Castelluccio, who fools the eye with a convincingly illusory painting of a torn up, wrinkled postcard of a Titian portrait which seemed to be taped back together and affixed to a wooden background. This small exhibition wittily questions the subjective process by which we determine what constitutes great works of art.

Jonathan Monk, Second Hand Daily Exchange, 2006 The Transported Man, all images courtesy of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

Picasso famously said that art is a lie which points to the truth. He was right; after all, the overwhelming majority of art history is comprised of artists trying to fool us into seeing three dimensions on a two dimensional surface. But it’s while looking at illusory paintings that we’re made acutely aware of the beauty of the actual world…or the shortcomings of human nature, as the case may be. Art’s deception has a purpose; to paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it holds up a mirror to nature, and within that mirror’s distorted reflection, we’re more able to see ourselves.   So while the playful theatrics and visual punning makes The Transported Man an eminently enjoyable and accessible show, there’s substance behind the visual magic that speaks to art’s ability to nudge us toward beautiful, enduring– sometimes uncomfortable– truths

The Transported Man at  the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

 

 

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