In his new solo show at ZG gallery, Bill Frederick moves quietly across the country in watercolors and graphite drawings of highways, landscapes, gas stations, parking lots and automobiles. Frederick is a realist, but it is an imprecise realism marked by distortions of human and mechanical vision, movement within the frame, and the effects of natural and electrical light on metallic, earthen and concrete surfaces. It’s as if realism has become a placeholder for Frederick’s experience of the world, the skillfully rendered specificity of his subjects’ structure and material superceded by the generalizable: a lake cottage, abandoned roads punctuated by the odd rundown auto-service station or roadside diner, a picnic table, a bright orange truck. The impact of the work depends on an instantaneous recognition of these places and the characteristic distance from them brought about by the shelter and privacy we enjoy in our cars—a framing which stands in for our relationship to the picture plane itself. (Rachel Furnari)
Repurposing AI: A Review of Stephanie Dinkins at Stamps Gallery While this show is timely for everyone, I consider its setting within a university art gallery and emerging tech hub like the city of Ann Arbor a subversive provocation which Dinkins invites the greater public—including members of the university community—to consider our own positionality to AI and technology.
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
