Category: Assemblage / Collage Page 1 of 9

David Barr @ Collected Detroit Gallery

On April 5, 2024

David Barr: Structural Relief, at Collected Detroit through April 13, 2024

An installation view of David Barr: Structural Relief, which is at Collected Detroit through April 13. Images courtesy of Detroit Art Review.

Novi artist David Barr, who died in 2015, was a creative polymath whose work ranged across media, including giant metal sculptures, wooden-relief wall hangings of great precision, and lithographs documenting a preposterous geometric intervention in the earth’s crust.

David Barr: Structural Relief at Collected Detroit gallery through April 13 focuses mainly on the artist’s multiple “structurist reliefs,” large, 3-D wooden wall hangings with layered straight lines and curves of varied colors that achieve an almost immediate architectural presence.

The exhibition was curated by Leslie Ann Pilling of the Metropolitan Museum of Design Detroit.

Also on the walls are the four rather elegant lithographs that “document” Barr’s Four Corners Project, which the Archives of American Art spotlit in a 1985 film for the Smithsonian Institution. In the early eighties, Barr enlisted the University of Michigan’s Institute of Mathematical Geography to figure out how to embed an imaginary tetrahedron – a pyramid – in the earth, with its four corners just poking through the soil in South Africa, Easter Island, Indonesia and Greenland. Barr traveled to each site to mark it with a small marble pyramid.

David Barr, Four Corners Project, Lithograph, 1981. Image courtesy of Collected Detroit.

But it’s the structurist reliefs that occupied most of Barr’s attention for several decades, and the geometric works on display here in Collected Detroit’s airy, fourth-floor digs are defined by crisp, sharp-edged lines, whether straight or curved. As noted, at times, these multi-layered compositions seem to leap out of an architect’s sketchbook. Structurist Relief No. 104 leans particularly hard in this direction, with its floating planes and cubes – see the detail below – looking a bit like something that might have emerged from Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Studio, circa 1928.

David Barr, – Structurist Relief No. 104; Mixed Media 44.5 by 48 inches, 1974.

David Barr, Detail, Structurist Relief No. 104; Mixed Media 44.5 by 48 inches, 1974.

Barr, who grew up in Grosse Pointe, was going to follow in the footsteps of his father, a Chrysler engineer. However, once enrolled at Wayne State, the young man found himself unexpectedly seduced by the fine arts. Barr ended up focusing on sculpture and industrial design, borrowing materials and concepts from the engineering trades that he deployed in installations and reliefs. After graduating in 1965 with a Master’s in Fine Arts, the artist began a lifelong career as a professor teaching at Macomb Community College.

Exactly thirty years later, Barr founded what in many respects might be his greatest contribution to the arts — Benzie County’s remarkable Michigan Legacy Art Park near Crystal Mountain, with 40 sculptural installations along 1.6 miles of forest paths that wind through 30 acres of deep woodlands. Installations include his lumber-industry Sawpath series, as well as other remarkable pieces of great size by Lois Teicher, Sergio DeGiusti, David Greenwood, Leslie Laskey and Joe Zajak, among others.

David Barr, Structurist Relief No. 310; Mixed media, 41 by 47.5 inches, 1991.

But Barr never abandoned his trademark reliefs. And over time, the compositions seemed to stretch and assert themselves in new ways. A budding sensuousness crept into what initially had been a mostly rectilinear universe. Starting in the 1980s, curvaceous forms began to compete with narrow verticals in charged juxtaposition, as in the rather breathtaking Structurist Relief No. 310, above.

Surfaces began buckling and cracking, spurning the strict geometry of Barr’s early years, as with Structurist Relief No. 271 from 1986. But even here, while the edges may be curved or slightly irregular, each element, as with the pink pieces below, still occupies a single plane. No waves or undulations are to be found.

David Barr, Detail – Structurist Relief No. 271; Mixed media, 50 by 66 inches, 1986.

Curator Pilling says she was immediately mesmerized by the shadows that the elements in the reliefs cast. She adds that the works’ unusual magnetism can be read in the way visitors progress through the gallery. “People spend time with each relief,” she said. “A lot of times people going through exhibitions are, like: Walk, walk, stop, walk, walk. But this is more: Walk, walk, STOP. They really take them in.”

If you haven’t been to Collected Detroit since the pandemic, be aware that the gallery has moved from its first-floor location on Fourth Street just around the corner. It’s now on Henry Street, on the top floor of an adjacent building.

Also well worth a look if you visit the gallery are freestanding works here and there by Harry Bertoia, Joseph E. Senungetuk, Detroit’s legendary Charles McGee and, most astonishing, the Hollywood actor Anthony Quinn. The sinuous “Nude” that this Renaissance man sculpted out of marble sits on a ledge right by a window, one ankle resting delicately on the other, cool as a cucumber.

David Barr: Structural Relief will be at Collected Detroit through April 13.

Larry Zdeb @ Color / Ink Studio

By K.A. Letts

On December 12, 2023

In Assemblage / Collage

Larry Zdeb: Dream Journals – Mixed Media Assemblages at the Color|Ink Studio

“Dream Journals,” a solo show of mixed media assemblages by Troy artist Larry Zdeb, installation and reception at Color|Ink Studio, Dec. 10, 2023.

Larry Zdeb is a connoisseur of other people’s memories and a gifted poet of the found object. He collects anonymous vintage photographs, broken bits of machinery and unidentifiable detritus, fashioning them into cryptic but emotionally resonant assemblages that puzzle and intrigue. Culled from rich troves of innumerable estate sales, musty basements and obscure garages in Detroit and environs over the last 20 years, 40 of his three-dimensional constructs, entitled “Dream Journals,” will populate the walls of Color|Ink Studio in Hazel Park until December 20, 2023.

Assemblage, the 3-d cousin of 2-d collage, has been a dominant genre in artists’ practice since the early 20^th century. The constructivists, followed by cubists and surrealists–and thousands of artists from then to now–have found the idiosyncratic combination of industrially produced images and objects, handmade tchotchkes and cryptic images into compelling artworks an ideal mode for expressing the dislocations and absurdities of modern life. Picasso and Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, and Robert Rauschenberg have all had their say, but Zdeb finds he is most influenced by the surrealist boxes of Joseph Cornell as well as the work of a lesser-known near-contemporary Janice Lowry (1946-2009).

Elsinore, Larry Zdeb, 2015, wood box with photograph in a steel frame, automotive identification number, adding machine button and copper tube.

Zdeb was born in Highland Park, Michigan, and discovered his vocation for art as a draftee during the Vietnam War era. He was trained and served as an Air Force cartographer, and upon his discharge studied art at Oakland Community College. He began creating his signature assemblages in 2003 and has since participated in over a hundred exhibitions from California to New York City.

The artworks in “Dream Journals” are drawn from unlovely constituent parts, often technical or industrial in nature—a funnel, a cloudy lens, obscure bits of obsolete technical equipment. He traffics only in the broken and discarded, never breaking an intact object, always intent upon reclaiming the discarded. His color palette runs to shades of gray, olive drab and khaki reminiscent of his military experience. These aggregations of neglected and lost mementos, while carefully crafted, maintain an air of the contingent. They are formally simple but emotionally complex, nostalgic but unsentimental.

Harris, Larry Zdeb, 2012, 8” x 9″ wood drawer, photograph under engineering acetate, clock spring, brass stencil, fasteners & telescope part.

His assemblage Harris illustrates Zdeb at his most enigmatic. A photo of a formally dressed young man is mounted inside a small wooden box. He gazes out at the viewer seriously, but his expression is obscured by the shadow of a sheet metal label placed above, and a thin curl of steel in front of his face emphasizes his anonymity. Outside the box, an attached, cloudy lens implies that perhaps some memories can’t be retrieved.

Wednesday, Larry Zdeb, 2010, 14” x 24″ wood frame, 1943 license plate tab, cardboard box with the pictures, newspaper engraver mat, painted tin, feed sack, wire, adding machine part, sand toy, steel part with switch for battery-powered illumination.

In the work Wednesday, the image of a comely young woman in an improbable pose raises more questions than it answers. Next to her, a headline promises: “Spectacle Opens at Auditorium Tonight.” Is she the spectacle? Once again, shadow plays an important part in the composition, the ultramarine funnel casting a heart-shaped penumbra on the forms below. The specificity of the day and date underline–but don’t explain–the mystery of the artwork’s meaning.

Les Preludes, Larry Zdeb, 2023, 12” x 19″ wood, violin part with license plate number, brass mesh, fasteners, hinge, photograph under painted orange plastic, leather glove cut fingers, player piano part with wires, changeable alarm clock numbers, newspaper engraver mat, paper & cloth.

Zdeb offers a small collection of performance-related imagery in Les Preludes: a photograph of a dancer–her prettiness marred by a grubby translucent orange overlay–part of a violin, embossed advertisements, numbers (seat numbers?) The constituent parts are arranged in a row like a sentence or a line from a poem. In one of his more recent assemblages, the artist breaks out of his usual preferred box format into a line of connected images.

Parasol, 2022, Larry Zdeb, 12” x 18”, painted toy parasol, architectural wood parts, piano part with cloth, antique photograph, wood, copper, buttons, adding machine button.

Parasol, similarly, offers a kind of triptych: a modified cross on the left connects to the center image of a young woman in a hat, surrounded by an elaborate, improvised wooden frame and followed on the right by an open canvas sunshade. The rough textures and faded, abraded colors of the combined elements undermine their intrinsic sweetness.

Zdeb’s artworks might all be said to be about memory and its elusive nature. He returns again and again to photographic images of unidentified subjects, often in costume or in uniform, as if they are reaching out from the past to present themselves to a modern audience. His components form implied narratives that hint at, but then withhold their meanings.

The Clown, Larry Zdeb, 2022, 13” x 14, wood box with steel chambers, each chamber has rolled engineering acetate pieces with rolling wood balls inside, player piano parts with wires, cast iron vent and photograph under refrigerator door plastic.

Each composition in “Dream Journals” is its own conundrum. Zeb is careful not to reveal too much—that would be telling. Instead, his basketball players and ballerinas, his musicians and mannequins, suggest half-remembered visions and barely recalled reminiscences of past friends, past events, and past lives. These imperfectly recalled scenarios illuminate a larger theme—that no matter how hard we try to retain our memories, they are constantly in the process of slipping away.

Dream Journals: Mixed Media Assemblages by Larry Zdeb at the Color|Ink Studio through December 20, 2023.

Shouldn’t You Be Working? @ MSU Broad Museum

By Jonathan Rinck

On September 11, 2023

In Assemblage / Collage, Design, Installation, Photography, Video

Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2023. Photo: Vincent Morse/MSU Broad Art Museum.

In 1896, Michigan State University opened the doors to its School of Home Economics, one of the first in the nation. The school even contained a fully functional practice home where the students cooked, cleaned, and hosted events. The home was demolished in 2008, and the Broad Art Museum was erected in its place. Taking its former school of home economics as its reference point, through December 27, the Broad presents Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working From Home. Curated by Teresa Fankhänel, the exhibit features photography, digital media, and installation, and it explores the intersection of work and home life, focusing on how technology and artificial intelligence are shaping the future of both.

This exhibition pairs ten contemporary artists and architects with a selection of photography and ephemera, including archival photographs from the university’s former School of Home Economics. These are paired alongside iconic photographs of workers in their homes, taken by the likes of Walker Evans and Marion Post Wolcott, who, on behalf of the Farm Security Administration, famously documented the lives of the rural workers and sharecroppers who struggled to maintain their livelihoods during the Great Depression.

Records of the MSU School of Home Economics. Courtesy Michigan State University Archives & Historical Collections.

Marion Post Wolcott, A member of the Fred Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornhusking day, Tallyho, near Stem, N.C., 1939. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, purchase, funded by the Emma Grace Holmes Endowment, 2006.33.1

The visual epicenter of the exhibition space is a partial recreation (at a 1 to 1 ratio) of the Paolucci Building, the former home economics practice house that once occupied this site. This interactive structure serves to frame a selection of photography, digital art, and an installation, which explore contemporary intersections of work and home life. Inside, there’s a mock-up of a home office replete with all the trappings of a television studio; a sight which will resonate with any of us who have been on a Zoom call. It also recalls the home studios of the social media “influencers” who ironically manage to create lucrative public careers from the privacy of their homes. This office installation, Cream Screen, by Marisa Olson, also serves to confront and dismantle the assumption that the technology to work or study remotely is accessible to everyone.

Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2023. Photo: Vincent Morse/MSU Broad Art Museum.

Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2023. Photo: Vincent Morse/MSU Broad Art Museum.

Also inside this recreation of the Paolucci Building is a selection of photography by Korean artist Won Kim. His series Living Small shows the cramped living quarters of Tokyo’s pod hotels. Unlike the city’s chic capsule hotels (more refined, but still not for the claustrophobic), these pods are little more than plywood boxes; there’s not even a door or windows. These spaces offer very low-income housing for individuals in between jobs, and are the ultimate expression of minimalist living. These images call to mind the famous photograph Five Cents a Spot taken by Jacob Riis, which shows the crammed tenement housing of some of New York City’s poorest residents.

Won Kim, Enclosed: Living Small, 2014. Photo print © Won Kim

Several monitors screen short video works that specifically address how technology shapes our work/home balance. Theo Triantafyllidis’ Ork Haus applies a sort of dark, absurdist humor in his digital portrayal of a dysfunctional family of orks (yes, orks) at home during lockdown. All are hopelessly addicted to their screens (VR headsets, TVs, and phones). The papa ork dabbles in cryptocurrency, and his little orkling learns to code; meanwhile, the family is oblivious to real-world catastrophes that surround them, such as the out-of-control fire in their kitchen.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Ork House, 2022. Live simulation video © Theo Triantafyllidis

Merger, a video by Keiichi Matsuda, presents us with a dystopian future in which artificial intelligence has taken over all corporations. The film’s unnamed protagonist has resigned to this digital takeover, acknowledging her status as a human is obsolete, and ultimately makes the decision to transition into a digital entity.

Keiichi Matsuda, Merger, 2018. Video © Keiichi Matsuda

For better or for worse, the boundaries between work and home are shifting. And COVID certainly accelerated the process, turning our homes into workspaces, at least for those of us who were fortunate to have the means to work remotely. This exhibition doesn’t necessarily criticize the advent of new technologies in the home, though it does invite us to pause for a moment and consider what this brave new world will look like.

Shouldn’t You Be Working? is on view at the MSU Broad Art Museum through December 17, 2023.

Susan Yamasaki @ Center Gallery

By Ron Scott

On August 6, 2023

In Assemblage / Collage

A Collection of Birch Assemblages at the Center Gallery in Glen Arbor, Michigan.

Installation image, work by Susan Yamasaki at Center Gallery, Glen Arbor, 2023 Image courtesy of Susan Tusa

It has been nineteen years since Susan and Taro move from Birmingham, Michigan, to the glacial moraine in Leelanau County, where their property rises upward to look out over Lake Michigan and the Sleeping Bear Dunes. The forest comprises thick oaks, pines, black ash, beech/maple, and birch. A devastating storm in 2015 snapped birch trees in half, and Susan foraged her land to discover this bark from birch trees with a wide diversity of color and texture.

The following birch assemblages are a sample of what is now on display at Center Gallery, opening August 4 -10th, 2023, in Glen Arbor, Michigan.

She says in her statement, “My heart would break as I would step over the wreckage of trees whose lives had ended. But upon taking a closer look, I could see that the bark of the birch beautifully reveals the experience of the tree. I chose to use the bark of the fallen birch to make my art. The panels become sacred objects, honoring the link between earth and sky. They pay homage to the struggle and adaptability of each tree.”

Susan Yamasaki, Shift, 26 x 31″, Assemblage, 2023 Image courtesy of Taro Yamasaki.

The assemblage is composed formally on a grid and is abstract. Shift has chevrons on the top and bottom of the center staged rectangle, and the overall pieces are squares with bits and pieces of gold leaf as a border and a punctuated black frame.

Assemblage is the art of creating a three-dimensional sculptural composition from found objects. One of the best-known assemblage artists of the 20th century was the Russian-born American sculptor Louise Nevelson. She transformed these found objects into large wall-mounted and free-standing reliefs, which often take the form of stacked boxes and compartments. Once assembled, the sculpture was spray-painted with a single color – usually black, white, or gold – to unify the complex sculptural elements and bring symbolic meaning.

Susan Yamasaki, Hieroglyphs, 35 x 35″, Assemblage, 2021. Image courtesy of Taro Yamasaki.

It is easy to say squares and rectangles dominate the motifs in a background of white in Hieroglyphs, as the square abstraction surrounds a cluster of gold leaf objects. Found in ancient Egyptian art, the stylized shapes represent a word, syllable, or sound, where gold is designed to elevate the symbol’s value.

Susan Yamasaki, Burnt, 34 x 34″, Assemblage, 2020. Image courtesy of Taro Yamasaki.

In the work, Burnt, although its background is a field of squares, an overlapping darkened color represents the birch that was touched by fire. The effect contrasts the composition and moves the action of larger pieces of bark from left to right, repeating the small horizontal lines in many of the squares.

Susan Yamasaki, Underbark, 35 x 30″ Assemblage, 2023, Image courtesy of Taro Yamasaki.

The image Underbark, illustrates how the artist handles color (red and orange), which opens the door to expanding the option to future compositions. It is noticeable that Susan Yamasaki has a comfort level using a grid-based composition of squares and working overtime on variations of well-established designs of gold leaf borders and black frames until she gets to a point where there are options that present themselves.

Until now, she has created a very personal oeuvre: abstract assemblages based on her relationship with material that is part of her natural environment, but raises the question, where will the work go from here?

Susan Yamasaki, Installation, Assemblages, 2023. Image courtesy to Taro Yamasaki.

Susan Yamasaki studied art at Michigan State University and then finished at Wayne State University, ultimately with a degree in Art History. She earned a teaching certificate and taught science at Roeper School in Suburban Detroit. After moving to northern Michigan, she taught at a public Montessori school in Traverse City.

Susan Yamasaki, Birch Assemblages, Center Gallery in Glen Arbor, Michigan, August 4 – 10, 2023.

Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco @ MSU Broad

By Jonathan Rinck

On June 11, 2023

In Assemblage / Collage, Installation, Photography

Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) Stephanie Syjuco, Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019. Wooden platform, digital photos and printed vinyl on lasercut wood, chroma key fabric, printed backdrops, seamless paper, artificial plants, mixed media. Overall 20 x 17 x 8 feet. Photo: Dusty Kessler. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

While I chatted with Rachel Winter (assistant curator at the MSU Broad Art Museum) about the artistic practice of Stephanie Syjuco, Winter described her as a “force of nature,” and given her many accomplishments, it’s easy to see why. Syjuco’s work has been displayed at the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Recently, she was featured on the PBS series Art21. Born in the Philippines, Syjuco has spent most of her life in the United States, and currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Using America’s colonization of the Philippines as a frequent reference point, her archival and research-based artistic practice addresses the ways photographs and objects can be used to construct skewed narratives.

Through July 23, the Broad presents the exhibition Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco, a collection of Syjuco’s work which traverses across photography, sculpture, craft-based media, and installation. This is a diverse body of work with a focused intent, addressing the ways individuals from the Philippines were represented in America during the years of American occupation (1898-1946). America’s history in the region is not given much attention in our history books, and is a “blind spot” for many of us. But these works also speak to colonialism and representation in a broader, more generalized sense.

Syjuco frequently uses chromakey green in her works, a reference to the green-screen used in digital video post-production. And the grey and white checkered pattern she often uses is a reference to the transparency background in Photoshop which fills the negative space in an image after something has been deleted. These allow for both superimposition and erasure, and their prevalence in her work speaks to the omnipresence (particularly in the internet age) of manipulated images and narratives.

The exhibition’s namesake, Blind Spot, is an evocative digital reconstruction of photographs taken during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. In addition to showcasing new technologies and scientific innovations, the fair also Included what was described at the time as a “human zoo,” featuring more than 1,100 individuals who were trafficked from the Philippines and who, for the duration of the fair, inhabited a Disneyland-style mockup of a village. It was conceived as an educational display, but the exhibit also served to propagate notions about racial inferiority. Photographs of these individuals, taken as they posed in front of backdrops and dioramas suggestive of the South Pacific, helped disseminate these problematic ideas. Blind Spot is a digital intervention for which Syjuco manipulated these images in Photoshop, removing the people and leaving in their trace ghostlike, blurry apparitions. In the 40 images that comprise Blind Spot, all we see are the backgrounds that these individuals were posed in front of, and in removing the people from the photos, Syjuco symbolically liberates them from the ethnographic gaze. Begun in 2019 during a Smithsonian research fellowship, Syjuco completed the project specifically for this exhibition, and afterward it will enter the Broad’s permanent collection.

Blind Spot Stephanie Syjuco, Blind Spot, 2023. Pigmented inkjet prints mounted on aluminum. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, purchase, funded by the Nellie M. Loomis Endowment in memory of Martha Jane Loomis, 2022.33

Although the installation Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) is sculptural, like Blind Spot it also directly addresses photography and representation. The title references the photographic darkroom technique of lightening or darkening certain parts of the image, though Dodge and Burn can certainly be read in more literal ways. The ensemble presents a large stage crammed with images and objects associated with the Philippines. Many of these are cut-outs of stock images (watermarks clearly visible) that are displayed as prop-like objects. The centerpiece of the ensemble are sculptural representations of two women from the late 19^th Century, one in traditional Filipinx dress, and one dressed in more Western fashion. It’s an intentionally busy sculptural collage which the artist likens to having too many tabs open on a computer. While the work reminds us of America’s colonial history, contemporary references in the ensemble (emojis, photographic color calibration charts, and MAGA hats) encourage us to think about the extent to which America is still a colonial power (Puerto Rico and Guam remain U.S. territories, after all, an enduring legacy of the 1898 Treaty of Paris). Subtitled “Visible Storage,” the work serves as a critique of how objects in museums have often been used to construct problematic narratives.

While several bodies of work in this exhibit specifically address Filipinx representation, Syjuco’s work also addresses representation and constructed narratives in more generalized ways. One work in the show features 20 digitally printed flags suspended from the ceiling; their presence evokes the United Nations, and initially they seem to be an expression of unity. But these flags come from fictional rogue/enemy states portrayed in American and European movies; none of these states existed in reality. Most of these are from films produced during the cold war, and are stylized to evoke certain parts of the world; together they speak to a generalized fear of a foreign enemy.

Syjuco’s work is heavily based on archival research, and it raises questions about how archival holdings are acquired, interpreted, and displayed. In support of this exhibit, the accompanying booklet includes brief essays by the directors and registrars of Michigan State University’s varied collections across the arts and sciences (such as the herbarium and the university archives). They discuss their holdings while acknowledging the “blind spots” that exist within these collections, underscoring the cross disciplinary relevance of Syjuco’s artistic practice.

The show takes full advantage of the Broad’s Zaha Hadid designed exhibition space. It’s both conceptually powerful and visually rich. And while the colonization of the Philippines occurred on the other side of the world, Syjuco, particularly with her Blind Spot project, reminds us of some of the ways that the enduring impact of America’s colonial legacy comes close to home.

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum

Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco is on view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum through July 23, 2023