The play’s the thing for Tracy Featherstone and Krista Connerly, even though they claim to intend their color photographs of bodies sporting their sculptural and sartorial adornments to pack the message that we should live in a more “connected world” that replaces “rationality with sensuality, and isolation with relationship.” We are back in high school when we see their “Rootpack” series in which Featherstone, decked out in old-fashioned rural garb, stands in a verdant backyard modeling a backpack-like contraption of roughly woven branches that promises the wearer “extra connection and nutrition” from its virtue of “transmitting and/or absorbing molecules” from the environment. The rootpack itself—festooned with babies’ panties—is on display, beckoning us to try it on for size and effect, but it is, after all, in a gallery and looks a bit fragile. Are Featherstone and Connerly New Age super-believers or sassy teenagers at heart? (Michael Weinstein)
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.
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.
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