October 16 – November 22, 2015

Stimulus/Response/Affect explores varied ways artists engage the human body through sensorial, perceptual, chronological and spatial shifts, using sound and kinetic sculpture, interactive video, participatory games, augmented reality, social media and programmed software. Featuring: Sophia Brueckner, Cuppetelli and Mendoza, Brian Patrick Franklin and Chris Wille, Ben Grosser, Aaron Higgins, Meg Mitchell, Byron Rich and John Wenskovitch, Andrea Roberts, Brian Schrank, Brad Tober, Channel TWo: Adam Trowbridge and Jessica Parris Westbrook. Curated by Colleen Ludwig and Vagner M. Whitehead

These dynamic artworks engage the viewer as a participant, raising questions about self, relationships, surroundings and society, and provide the unique opportunity to experience and actively (re)consider the relevance and implications of innovative interactive contemporary art.  With this in mind, we also invite you to attend a special symposium in conjunction with the exhibition the day after the opening. Full-color catalogue available.

Events

New Media in the Great Lakes Symposium, Saturday, October 17, 2015
This daylong accompanying symposium is organized in four thematic sessions that widen in scope from the personal to the social as the day progresses. All participating artists will be present.

September 11 – October 11, 2015

Employees Only features: Meaghan Barry, Susan E. Evans, Lynn Galbreath-Fausone, Dick Goody, Colleen Ludwig, Sally Schluter Tardella, Cody VanderKaay, and Vagner M. Whitehead. 

This exhibition by members of Oakland University’s studio art faculty is accompanied by a catalogue, and comprises work in all medias.  Meaghan Barry’s Absence of Tongues watercolor and ink series depicts amorphous figures. Colleen Ludwig’s 5’ high cluster of kinetic sculptures entitled Pod.Field interacts with the proximity of the viewer, and drawn from her imagination.  Cody VanderKaay explores the macro and the micro in his large imposing monolithic floor work Field Study and his intimate gray painted basswood constructions such as Last Outpost.  Sally Schluter Tardella has work fabricated by a 3D-printer, as well as some of her probing codices and drawings.  More is Never Enough is one of a series of ornate mixed media works constructed, drawn and painted by Lynn Galbreat-Fausone.  Susan E. Evans’ environmental conceptual work comes with the intriguing title: upon green hills and ice girdled waters beneath the Polar Star.  Dick Goody has painted a series of intimate still lifes such as Tweede Leliedwarsstraat 6. Vagner Whitehead is integrating lens-based laser etchings with drawing and painting. Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

Artists in Conversation with Dick Goody, September 29, 2015

March 7 – April 5, 2015

The Fortress is a complex of workshops and residency studio spaces in North End, Detroit, where Steven Kuypers and Steven McShane have created a unique workspace with artist residency studios that includes an array of production machines for metalsmithing, woodworking and new and alternative technologies.  Their collaborative work encompasses the use traditional and experimental materials and techniques and the aesthetics of social and relational sculptural practices.

The new works in this exhibition, created in 2014 and 2015, comprise five sculpture-installations: The Fortress Archive, Sauna Tower, Reclaimed Tractor, Fortress Sign, and Can You Lift It?

The Fortress is a nexus for contemporary art in Detroit and the values of labor, craftsmanship, community involvement and the production it supports.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

Events

Steven Kuypers and Steven McShane in Conversation with Dick Goody, April 2, 5 pm.

January 10 – February 22, 2015

Field Guide explores Susan Goethel Campbell’s work from 2005 to 2015, revealing the trajectory of her expansive interests made manifest in her various oeuvres.  These bodies of work emerge, populate and overlap one another.  In common, they are each fields or organized visual systems.  Each field begins as an idea, an agenda to process objects/phenomenon by means of handmade or mechanical procedures and interventions.

Campbell’s studio practice is embedded in the realm of printmaking.  She began as a print-based artist, but her impressions these days are multifarious and one of a kind.  Each imprint/object is unique, but dependent upon (for its very existence) the fact of its conscription to a field of like-minded works, which comprise a whole, yet the individual “cells” that define each field possess a personality.  These cells do not make the body, but rather they collaborate to build the system. 

Field Guide, and its 120-page catalogue, with an essay by John J. Corso PH.D, serves as a record of these many endeavors, contextualizing Campbell’s prolific activities over the last decade. Curated by Dick Goody.

Events

Artist’s Talk: Susan Geothel Campbell, Wednesday, February 4, 2015

October 11 – November 23, 2014

Featuring: Michael Floman, David Maisel, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Susan kae Grant, Shimpei Takeda, Amy Theiss Giese and Chrysanne Stathacos

The ability of photography to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye has a rich history dating back to the advent of the medium. Often typifying the conflation of science and art characterizing early photography, the pursuit of the invisible by means of light-sensitive emulsions remains a compelling source of fascination for contemporary image-makers and their audience. Within the realm of art, this preoccupation with the unseen manifests itself in remarkable fashions ranging from the poetics of evocation to the dread of the unknown.

Bringing together the intriguing work of seven international photo-based artists, Shadows of the Invisible casts light upon a spectrum of energy fields, emanations, perceptual imaginings, and subconscious imaging rendered tangible by photographic technologies.

Curated by Claude Baillargeon. Full-color catalogue available.

Michael Floman’s photograms explore the trajectory of natural light emanating from fireflies. Susan kae Grant’s images and installations recast the fragmented course of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep awakenings. David Maisel creates recontextualized X-rays of art objects from antiquity. Marie-Jeanne Musiol captures the electrical coronal discharges from botanical specimens. Shimpei Takeda records the cameraless traces of radioactive soil contamination from Fukushima. Amy Theiss Giese documents the apertureless recordings of darkened interiors. Chrysanne Stathacos photographs investigate the relationship between color and portraiture beyond definitions of race, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

Events

Artist’s Talks
Susan kae Grant, Saturday, October 11 at 5PM, 123 Wilson Hall
Maire-Jeanne Musial, Sunday, October 12 at 2PM in the gallery

Curator’s Talk
Claude Baillargeon, Wednesday, November 5 at noon in the gallery

September 6 – October 5, 2014

Memory Palace, comprised of paintings and codices, concretizes the conceptual practice of recording and archiving a selected collection of memories. Sally Schluter Tardella’s paintings are reminiscent of floor plans from an archeological dig, but they are accumulations rather than subtractions, being built up over time until the final layer of paint cures. Schluter Tardella offers two versions of memory.

The paintings are declarative and convey a one-time version of events – an ossuary of recollections rendered down into a primary painterly structure.  Her books, on the other hand, are more open-ended, their catacomb-like progress being labyrinthine, serpentine and sequential. The rooms, antechambers and passageways of Memory Palace map the territory of memory in subtle configurations of earth tones, grays and ochers with occasional flourishes of color.  These taut surfaces of metaphorical accumulations are formalistically rendered in a language, which is idiosyncratic, universal and engaging.

Curated by: Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available. 

Artist’s Talk: Sally Schluter Tardella, Tuesday, September 9 at noon

Kaiho is a Finnish word evoking a feeling of melancholia for a lost paradise.  In her photographs, Susan E. Evans explores identity retrospectively and contemporaneously through images made in Finland after discovering that her maternal ancestors originated there.  These images reveal the Finnish landscape accumulatively and poetically; they also explore deeper memories using the very earth itself as a metaphor for identity.  Kaiho includes four bodies of work.  In Luonnonkaunis Suomi, she buried rolls of 120 Kodak film in rural sites around Finland, documenting their location and then later disinterring the moldering film rolls as evidence of the effects of earth of her origins on the materiel of her trade. 

The Kaiho landscape photographs skillfully render the Finnish countryside without seeming to enter into it completely, keeping us slightly at a distance from the intimacy of actually being there, making her images all the more like lamentations for a remembered place recently reclaimed from a tangled history. Evans’ panoramic Maisema series are an amalgam of all the hues and tones that conceptually resonate in the Kaiho landscapes. Rounding off the Kaiho oeuvre, the fourth body of work, Ylevä, comprises a series of videos, which focus (and un-focus) meditatively on singular vistas. History, identity, memory and place are authentic catalysts that in these new parallel bodies of work legitimize Evans’ emotionally wrought, reflexive vistas, which have become embodiments of her identity.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

Artist’s Talk: Susan E. Evans, Wednesday, September 17 at noon

January 11 – March 30, 2014

The Body Metonymic, an exhibition of contemporary sculpture by twelve international artists: David Altmejd, Folkert de Jong, Lonnie Holley, Chris Jones, Fabienne Lasserre, Martin McMurray, Matthew Monahan, Martha Mysko, Michelle Segre, Shinique Smith, William Stone, and Johannes VanDerBeek.

Never mere replicas of depicted subject matter, the works in this exhibition embody a schema, a reformation, or a reconstruction of their objecthood. Distilled figures, structures or physiques, they stand for the conceptual intent of using a compound number of objects to create a whole, singular work. Fueled by an unabashed use of non-traditional materials, these sculptures assert themselves viscerally, in ways that mediated art forms like painting cannot, each object’s signification operating directly and metonymically. The Body Metonymic personifies the idea of a short-cut equivalency, that is to say, the presence of a more direct or rapid entry point to each work’s ideological position – this in comparison, say, to mimetic realism. The “body” aspect is relational and refers to the human scale of the work.  Elementally, these artists dissect the subtleties of mass and volume and stand diametrically opposed to pomp and circumstance of epic monolithic sculpture.  Their powerful metonymic forms take us directly to the heart of each artist’s emotional and intellectual intent, in works that are democratizing, unembellished, and universally engaging.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

Curator’s Talk: Dick Goody, February 19, 2014, noon.

Panel Discussion:What is Contemporary Sculpture? with Martha Mysko, William Stone and Johannes VanDerBeek. Moderated by Dick Goody, March 16, 2014 at 2 pm.       

October 26 – November 24, 2013

Gilda Snowden – Album: A Retrospective, 1977-2010, with its archivist-inflected title, Album, is a look back at a varied and impressive oeuvre, almost forty years in the making.  It is also a reflection on Gilda Snowden’s extensive career and community presence as an artist, activist, teacher, peacemaker and doyenne of the visual arts in Detroit.  Thirty-three works (paintings, drawings, reliefs, sculpture, encaustics and embedded photographs) create a compelling narrative from Snowden’s student days in the mid-seventies up to 2010, where she looks far back to her ancestral roots, bringing her work up to date with her present family.

The artist states: “The definition of painting is expanding and continually flexing its muscles.  When I was in school I never thought that I would be using the media that I use now.  It seems that the older I get, the more radical I am in my own visual practices.  This is an outgrowth of my early experiences as a young artist in school, observations and immersion in the Cass Corridor community, and a constant study of art history.  To be radical is required for forward progression.”

Curated by Dick Goody. A full-color catalogue accompanies this retrospective. Included in it is an interview with the artist and a timeline of the thirty-six years covered by this survey; all works on view are reproduced in the fifty-page publication.

Artist’s Talk: Gilda Snowden, Thursday, November 7 at 5PM.

September 7 – October 13, 2013

Born in Morocco, Lalla Essaydi works to examine the role of the Muslim woman in today’s society. Through the use of hand-applied Arabic calligraphy and the re-appropriation of poses inspired by Orientalist paintings, Essaydi explores the relationship between the themes of writing, femininity, and pleasure.  Writing upon the faces and skin of her models with henna, Essaydi actively defies the traditional use of calligraphy, an art form customarily reserved for men.

Lalla Essaydi lives in New York and Morocco, her country of origin and the setting for her fantastic interior tableaux of Moroccan women. She is well aware that Western art history has crafted its own fantasy of the East, and especially of Islamic women. Today we recognize that those fantasies, which we describe as “Orientalist,” are problematic. Artists like Ingres, Delacroix, and others focused on exotic, often fictionalized subjects, as a way to subordinate the “wild” cultures of the East while promoting the “civilization” of the West. Essaydi understands this tradition; she was schooled in Paris and Boston, and is exceedingly familiar with the Romantic Masters. But she stages her critique in subtle, multivalent ways. Essaydi knows that these traditions have produced beautiful if prejudiced masterpieces. Moreover, she knows that the relationship between beauty and subjugation is itself a multifaceted one, a connection that involves power, knowledge of the other, and desire. Essaydi doesn’t shy away from these difficult conversations on the nature of beauty and desire, but rather she brings all of its intricacy into her performative photographs of women.

This exhibition brings together 20 large-scale photographic works, made from 2003 to 2012 and spanning five major bodies of work. In the earliest body of work, Converging Territories, Essaydi establishes the primary conditions of her aesthetic investigations: she photographs women elaborately adorned in henna script within exquisitely ornamented interiors. These works highlight the importance of writing in the creation of the self and of femininity. In her later series Harem and Harem Revisited, Essaydi examines the relationship of women, writing, and the fantastic architecture of the harem.  Finally, in Bullets and Bullets Revisited, Essaydi crafts heavenly interiors from shining gold bullet cartridges. The women in these interiors sparkle, occasionally they wear bullets themselves, and they appear larger than life and otherworldly. In all of these series, Essaydi deftly pursues the relationship of writing to beauty and pleasure, and its role in the creation and expression of femininity.

Curated by John Corso. Full-color catalogue available.

Events

• Preview Panel Discussion with Lalla Essaydi, Allan Doyle, and John Corso Saturday, September 7, 5PM in Wilson Hall Room 12
• Opening, Saturday, September 7, 6-8PM in the OU Art Gallery
• Keynote Address, Lalla Essaydi, Sunday, September 8, 2PM in the OU Art Gallery
• Curator’s Talk, Saturday, October 12, 2PM in the OU Art Gallery