Visual art was once a sort of media technology created in workshops, and so a sketchbook was presumably only of interest to fellow practitioners. Then a culture of immediacy and a cult of individual charisma gave hasty mark-making its own cachet of “process,” and the line between sketch and finished piece got somewhat blurry. The study, the splash and the scribble took on epic grandeur. Now, we’ve gone through the looking-glass, and much art functions as either an experience in the present, or an artifact of an experience in the past. Peggy Robinson’s primarily architectural pencil sketches operate as such an artifact, reflecting fleeting moments in her 400-plus-mile walk to the Spanish church containing the remains of St. James, on a pilgrimage known as the Camino de Santiago. She was documenting an experience of personal reflection rather than generating gestural decorative architectural illustrations; for her they operated as snapshots of her internal and external sensations. These pages offer access to an ideal of personal expression as contemporary as the walking projects of artists such as Nick Brown and Chicago’s own Mike Wolf, among others. They also evoke an earlier era in figurative art; take John Singer Sargent’s oddly idyllic sun-dappled watercolor sketches from World War I, which contain similar surprises of shape and composition. Robinson’s craft is lovely, but the drawings are anything but fussy or expulsive. In her work, art institutions’ recently resuscitated romance of the studio and the sketchbook is eclipsed by the simple lyrical lines of a sympathetic journey. (Bert Stabler)
Through June 30 at Gallery Cabaret, 2020 North Oakley
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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