Although it is loaded with conceptual explanation concerning tradition, globalization, imperialism, and cultural hybridism and interchange, Sheba Chhachhi’s installation of light boxes, in which images of Buddhist pilgrim monks proceed across brightly colored photographic landscapes and birds soar above them on moving spools of film, is best enjoyed as an array of intriguing scenes that are geared to captivate the child in us and put a sweet and mirthful smile on our faces. The monks in their thick traveling robes are the most entrancing of all, because Chhachhi cannot make them stride and is left with having them appear to be on a moving walkway as they journey through the desert. In sharp contrast to “Winged Pilgrims and Other Creatures,” “Silver Sap” is a series of unsparing straight black-and-white studies of older women’s bodies in fine detail that are meant to “recuperate the female body from dominant market and mediatic representations”—a return to hardcore feminism that has become familiar this season. (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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