"Study of Nest," 1994/2010, RC print with acrylic paint and UV varnish
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In a celebration of the surrealist imagination centered on the relations between human beings and the denuded natural landscape, the indomitable photographic team of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison sets up scenarios and confects collages that feature improbable constructions and collections that are the frames of bizarre performances enacted by Robert. After they have shot their handiwork, the ParkeHarrisons proceed to apply paint and varnish subtly to their prints, endowing the resulting photo-works with a faded surface that renders their subjects slightly indistinct, as though they come from days gone by that we know never were, and are inaccessible to us. Although the ParkeHarrisons intend to make an ecological point, they end up delivering bittersweet shaggy-dog stories, as when we see Robert, with his back to us, sitting inertly in a large bird’s nest after he has taken off his shoes, which have been neatly placed on barren ground nearby. It’s environmental dada. (Michael Weinstein)
Through October 30 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 West Superior
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.
