Myanmar, which is notorious for its tyrannical political regime and its recent devastation by a disastrous typhoon, never looked so placidly Buddhistic as it does in Robert Berlin’s color photographs, printed on plexiglass to enhance their saturation and refine their gradation of tones. His triptych of people, caught from behind, walking down streets in the rain, and his diptych of Buddhist monks taking a bite to eat and lounging over a balustrade taking in the woods belie any thought that we are not in Shangri-la. The myth cuts even deeper in Berlin’s shots of solitary people taken at a distance walking a lonely road sculpted out of forested mountains or bicycling along an esplanade past a blasted billboard and roosting little birds as ethereal mountains loom across the channel. Would that this was Myanmar. (Michael Weinstein)
At Gallery KH 311 W. Superior, (312)642-0202. Through Aug 31.
Unexpected: A Conversation with Robert Lostutter About His New Work, "Songs of War" Lostutter’s best-known works, which he’s been making since the early 1970s, are his watercolor portraits of a kind of hybrid species, combining human and avian features.The new graphite works, as well as five watercolors, are intense. Their subjects though, offer a radical departure from his preening young birdmen.
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.
