Pamela Fraser, "untitled (tearjerker)," 2009, Acrylic on canvas
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If the fashion of the eighties has made a comeback (thank you very much Kanye West!), then it can be said that the palette of the eighties has likewise experienced a revival. However, unlike in fashion, this is not an unwelcome event. In “Honeypot,” Judy Ledgerwood takes up the challenge of making garish hot pink, bright blue and glittering gold paint all coexist peacefully. One look at her work and the exhibition title “Pop Sizzle Hum” makes sense. Pamela Fraser is represented by two paintings, both executed in metallic paints and both directional arrows. Certain rhetoric surrounding abstract painting may describe it as “pointing” to something exterior (landscape, figure, etc.), and Fraser humorously makes this explicit. Directly across the gallery from Ledgerwood and between the two canvases by Fraser, is Carrie Gundersdorf’s single canvas, “Star Trails–52 minutes.” The work is subdued in content, palette and paint handling, and doesn’t entirely benefit from the placement. Steven Husby (whom I have curated previously) shows two canvases. Both untitled, they are tightly held in a visual boil by his precise composition and technique. The paintings flex into and out of the visual plane and snap back to flat if you try to focus too hard. These four painters show the continued possibilities of abstraction and, more impressively, the viability of certain colors and their combinations left for dead decades ago. (Abraham Ritchie)
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.
