Peri Schwartz likes to paint bottles—not the curvaceous, off-white, mysterious kind painted by Giorgio Morandi, but the straight-edged, clear glass kind that reveals the solid bright colors of the liquid within—predominantly red, orange and yellow. She began her career with confrontational self-portraits back in the 1970s, and she seems to be continuing that project without the outer anatomy. Isn’t each human body an assembly of liquid filled containers? Schwartz’s rectangular containers are tightly ordered, but still there’s a restless quality suggesting that she’s never quite satisfied with them.
“Studio XXX,” oil on canvas, 2013
What really excites Schwartz is the studio—a large, high-ceilinged workspace. Daylight pours in from the window, and it’s humming with activity, including those carefully arranged rows of bottles that will end up in her watercolors. It’s these views of the studio executed in either oil or charcoal that are the highlights of this show. She joyfully measures space, tone and color in dynamic, large flat patterns, much as Richard Diebenkorn once did. The space may feel wide open, but it also converges toward the center. Nothing else appears to fascinate her so much as working, and there’s no place she’d rather be than the studio. (Chris Miller)
Through February 28 at Perimeter Gallery, 210 West Superior.
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.
