Suzy Poling, "Bacteria Mat #3," archival pigment print, 2011
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Occupying a highly specialized niche of natural-beauty photography, Suzy Poling’s luscious color images of geysers in Yellowstone Park have the eerie and disquieting yet seductive feel of scenes of shimmering sites of environmental pollution and devastation, wrought by mines in the western desert. Stark color dominates among the photographic values that Poling achieves; her palette emphasizes earthen oranges, reddish browns, light purples, roiling blues and yellowish greens that bleed over the land and scar it, painting it in unfamiliar and threatening hues. Poling’s studies fascinate, yet their colors and irregular shapes make them border on the sublime, introducing us to aspects of nature that are alien to our sense of and quest for comfort, tranquility and harmony, or even of our taste for adventure and excitement. As one visitor to the show said as he quickly left, “These photographs seem to come from another planet.” They remind us that the world is neither made for nor belongs to our species. (Michael Weinstein)
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.
