January 12 – March 31, 2013

Partcipating artists: Michaël Borremans, Noah Becker, Jeff Burton, Andrew Bush, Kent Dorn, Charlotte Dumas, Anh Duong, Pierre Gonnord, Debbie Grossman, Andrew Guenther, Rosemary Laing, Loretta Lux, Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist), David Shrigley, Tereza Vlcková, Matthew Watson, Nicole Wittenberg, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

This exhibition explores the work of international contemporary artists fixated with portraiture. It considers: the sitter, the artist and, you, the viewer. It proposes to facilitate a fresh look at portraiture, to re-evaluate and reclaim it as a practice central to the artist rather than the amateur. In this context the artist is the only genuine author of authenticity. To glean an authentic essence or presence, each artist must liberate the genuine aura of the sitter: this elusive thing that possesses immense psychological and emotional octane. An effective portrait captures something essential that can only be seen and felt by the viewer in the presence of the likeness. If we value portraiture, we must nurture the form, reconsider its role within the context of contemporary art, re-presented it, and support its practitioners. There are thirty-seven portraits in the exhibition: works on paper, photographs, videos, and paintings.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

October 20 – November 18, 2012

Philadelphia artist James Johnson explores the varied effects that possessions have on individual human consciousness and society as a whole. Singular sculptural objects coalesce with photo­graphic images to form ever-changing constructs. Johnson’s work encourages the viewer to create and examine personalized narratives of identity, impulse, ownership and self-determination. With motives likened to that of a magician, he con­tinually reveals and conceals his method of operation. In spite of these clever manipulations, the behind-the-scenes accoutrements invert newly formed notions and undo guises. The title piece of the exhibition, I come from a serious place, is a mesmerizing form with a meaningful statement that preys on the mind’s conscious and unconscious capacity to read words. Undeniably beacon-like, it is a point of departure, contextualization and connectivity between artworks, summoning viewers to revive the memory of their own “serious place.” Embodied in this exhibition is the artist’s inspired ability to take notice of the world around him and a hope that viewers will do the same. His objects and images further reflect the propensity of contemporary artists to develop a practice that is experiential and multivalent. Departing from, or just arriving to, a serious place requires reflection, and perhaps viewers may ask themselves: is this context of place indeterminate — neither past nor future — and will I engage with the present moment?

Curated by Cody VanderKaay. Full-color catalogue available.

Born in Syracuse, NY, in 1976, Johnson received an M.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technol­ogy. In 2011 he was awarded an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts and nominated for the 2010 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He was an Acquisition Finalist for the West Prize in 2009 and has been awarded two Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture/Installation. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at Fleisher/Ollman Gal­lery, Philadelphia; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; No Soul For Sale: a Festival of Indepen­dents at X-Initiative, New York City and at Vox Populi, Tate Modern, London; The West Collection’s booth at NEXT Art Fair, Chicago; Repetti Gallery, New York City; and ThreeWalls, Chicago. John­son lives and works in Philadelphia and is an assistant professor of Photography & Digital Arts at Moore College of Art and Design.

Artist’s Talk: Forgetting is Really Important,Sunday, October 21 at noon.

September 8 – October 7, 2012

The artistic practice of Graem Whyte lies at the intersection of family, community, collaboration, craftsmanship, metaphysics and the imaginative repurposing materials.  In this exhibition he focuses on four projects paralleling themes drawn from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  The resulting sculptures and installations encourage relational involvement.  They are not merely to contemplated, the viewer is invited to participate and engage, to complete the work.

The mythological themes in “Remain Calm” explore war, death, famine and conquest.  However, Whyte reinterprets them by presenting their inverse viewpoints.  Each theme is transposed it into something positive.  Hence “war” becomes “play,” “death” “sleep,” “famine” “purification,” and “conquest” “enlightenment.”  Addressing universal issues of morality and mortality, he engages the world, its challenges and its contradictions.

This exhibition bridges Detroit and the suburbs.  It is a distillation of Whytes locale: “Popps Packing” (a former meat packing business) which serves as home, studio, gallery and de facto community center.  Located at the northern rim of Hamtramck, an enclave within the City of Detroit, here Whyte produces works in a variety of scale from small domestic sized sculptures, to mid-sized assemblages, to larger collaborative projects.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

In conjunction with this exhibition Graem Whyte is participating in “Dlectricity” with the installation: “The Ice Cave.”  “Dlectricity,” the mid-town Detroit Art & Light Festival, takes place October 5 & 6 and is part of Art Now Detroit Gallery Week.

Panel discussion: The Academy, the Student & the Artist, 2PM, Sunday, October 7, 2012. Panelists: Kevin Beasley, artist, NYC, Heather Darcy Bhandari, Director, Mixed Greens, NYC & author of ART/WORK, Gunalan Naderajan, Dean, School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, Vagner M. Whitehead, Associate Professor of Art, Oakland University. Graem Whyte, artist, Detroit. Moderator: Dick Goody, Director, OU Art Gallery.

January 14 – April 1, 2012

Featuring: Kevin Baker, Trudy Benson, Katherine Bernhardt, Cecily Brown, Jesse Chapman, Matt Connors, Kim Dorland, Mark Flood, José Lerma, Dasha Shishkin, Josh Smith, Denyse Thomasos, and Wendy White.

Central to the practice of the painters in this exhibition is the expansion of the imaginary as the primary source of their compositions and as such their practice is rooted in invention and the mind’s eye. The resulting works are reflexive of something intrinsic to contemporary painting: creating a surface that is neither a window onto the extant, nor a mirror, but rather a platform expressing the interior feelings and thoughts of each artist onto a vital exterior surface.

The dimensional, spatial arena in which these artists work is unique to the time and locale of their painting. And to be sure, it is a charged moment when the immense proliferation of im­ages, digital or otherwise, has expanded rapidly outward like an infinite exploding universe. More information exists than can ever be processed. We no longer live in the information age rather we have entered the age of conceptuality. How these artists think and feel has become infinitely more significant to them than recounting what they have seen. These artists reinvigorate and reintroduce painting as something urgently relevant, interdisciplinary and contemporaneous. Through painting, they make their thoughts and feelings universally acces­sible for everyone to experience. They make painting a transcendent practice, not one defined by image or doctrine, but rather by idealization of the imaginary and the recognition that invention and illusion are the engines of artistic freedom, change and necessity.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

September 10 – November 20, 2011

This exhibition from the John F. Korachis Collection of African Art explores the diversity of African art. Encouraging the viewer to connect personally with each object, many of the artworks are accompanied by reflective texts by Oakland University faculty members, urging each of us to consider how we contextualize art from different cultures. Chiefly from the 19th and 20th centuries, these objects were made by artists to be used in religious ceremonies. Some were placed in communal gathering places, many were worn by dancers, and others were a permanent presence in domestic environments.

An intrinsic part of the everyday life of the people that made and used them, each object’s appearance was fashioned to communicate precisely its personification and purpose – that of interceding and seeking a solution to a particular predicament, for example, to achieve fertility, to prevent drought, to ensure a good harvest, or to bar a malevolent presence. The power of these works of art lies in their metaphysical capacity to communicate with ancestors in the afterlife. In the context of this exhibition, their extraordinary visual presence reminds us that they are a vital part of both the kaleidoscope of global visual culture and the living culture that made them.

Curated by: Andrea Eis. Full-color catalogue available.

March 5 – April 10, 2011

Jonathan Allen, Michael Anderson, Matthew Cusick, Chambliss Giobbi, David LaChapelle, George Rahme, Holli Schorno, Maritta Tapanainen and Mark Wagner. Catalogue available.

Using the notion of “borders and frontiers” as a metaphor for the democratization of imagery and the collaging of reconfigured pictorial forms in a global context, this exhibition explores the cultural significance of the reproduced and repurposed image. Collage artists appropriate from their surroundings; their cut-and-pasted forms become the reflexive visual record of their time. Borders and Frontiers presents artists with a specialized appetite for the digital and contemporary and, at the same time, an absorption with the image bank of the past, and, in doing so they build a bridge between history, the contextual present, and a conjectural tomorrow.

Contemporary collage in 2011 demonstrates a diverse array of practices; Borders and Frontiers brings together nine artists: six from New York, one from Detroit, and two from Los Angeles. David LaChapelle, the defining American portrait and tableau photographer of his generation, creates an immediate and palpable short-cut to his photographs in his new collages, which he cuts and reassembles. Chambliss Giobbi similarly collages his photographs – the ones he takes of his sitters specifically to be torn and reassembled in his unique multiple viewpoint portraits. Michael Anderson hijacks the semiotics of images and creates what he calls 3rd-wave-abstraction from found street posters. Like Anderson, George Rahme and Jonathan Allen riff from a variety of lens-based images but their sources are diverse: posters, reproductions, magazines and more. Holli Schorno and Maritta Tapanainen assemble intricate collages from technical illustrations. Matthew Cusick renders cars from deconstructed roadmaps. These artists are connoisseurs, each amassing archives of material; Mark Wagner, for example, has an archive of dollar bills which he dissects, deconstructs, and repurposes in his painstaking constructed collages. Some of the artists share common goals, others are divergent, but all work to advance a means of expression that emancipates a direct approach to composing the pictorial via the repurposing of the extant. Their work is all encompassing, culturally rich and confronts assumptions about the present, the popular, and the future of pictorial art. Absorbed by the interlocking assimilation of media and ideas, they are pluralistic visionaries and visual collaborators.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available

January 7 – February 20, 2011

Cynthia Greig has shown her photographs nationally and internationally in numerous solo exhibitions most recently at the Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam, DNJ Gallery, Los Angeles, and the UNO Art Space, Stuttgart. Her work is represented in major collections including the George Eastman House International Center for Photography, Rochester, NY; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Coleçao Foto Arte/Arte 21, Brasilia. This is her first solo project in Michigan and spans two decades of work.

A conceptual artist, Greig uses the authority of photography to challenge conventions of image making about gender, identity and truth. Whether exploring nineteenth century mores as a reflection of our own conformity, or testing the limits of appropriation, ideology, or respectability, her work is often embedded in autobiography or its fictional antithesis. Her provocative photographs demonstrate the undermining eye of her underlying antiauthoritarianism, which is inherent in all her work.

Greig’s artistic practice divides her interests into discrete bodies of work. She fuses conventions and anticonventions into a revealing and intriguing view of how both can be subverted and manipulated to change attitudes, raise questions about the truth of an image, and challenge assumptions about what is real, what is desirable, and what is false.

This exhibition reprises New Eden: The Life and Work of Isabelle Raymond (1993-present) and includes an installation/reconstruction of a 19th century room containing some of Isabelle Raymond’s photographs. Recent bodies of work represented in this survey exhibition include: Likeness of Being, Nature Morte, and Growth Gravity.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

September 11 – October 17, 2010

Peter Williams, James Stephens, Michael E. Smith, Christian Tedeschi, Robert Schefman, Senghor Reid, Sharon Que, Renata Palubinskas, Eric Mesko, Jae Won Lee, Jane Lackey, Rob Kangas, Chido Johnson, Ed Fraga, Dennis Michael Jones, Kristin Beaver, Hasan Elahi, Susan Goethel Campbell, Hartmut Austen, Denise Whitebread Fanning

Twenty artists: forty works. Ten Years of Contemporary Art takes a celebratory look at the past decade with artists from the earliest to the most recent exhibitions; each shows a recent work and one from the last ten years, describing in a statement how his/her work has evolved.

January 8 – April 4, 2010

Lynne Avadenka, Matthew Barney, IAIN BAXTER&, Christian Boltanski, Susan Goethel Campbell, Sir Anthony Caro, Vija Celmins, Ed Fraga, Jane Hammond, Chido Johnson, Dennis Michael Jones, R. B. Kitaj, David Lambert, Ronald Allen Leax, Donald Lipski, Kathleen McShane, Eric Mesko, Sabrina Nelson, Matthew Shlian, Kiki Smith, Michael E. Smith, Jill Sylvia, Stella Waitzkin, Kara Walker, and Peter Williams

Artists’ books are often more intimate than an artist’s primary oeuvre because they are not generally meant for public scrutiny. Their scale and personal nature make their perusal the exclusive domain of one pair of eyes at a time. This engrossing survey features contemporary artists’ books from the last two decades. 

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

September 11 – November 22, 2009

The more than thirty Chinese Literati scroll paintings in this exhibition are dated from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to the present day. Organized into five sections, “Hermitic Scholars,” “Divine Landscapes,” “Politicized Animals,” “Humanized Plants,” and “Written Images,” it offers a comprehensive introduction to the historical contexts, major themes, and philosophical backgrounds of Literati art.

Cuarted by Shuishan Yu. Catalogue available.