EUTOPIA

Adam Shirley

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Adam Shirley
Ordinary Objects
Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit, MI [link]
March 5 – April 10, 2016

A lot of artwork needs an audience and rests on fragile social or circumstantial conditions to build meaning. Ordinary Objects does not. Shirley’s installation is rigid, square, plumb, and absolute. The exhibition renders a contemplative spatial deconstruction, a remembered space rebuilt to destroy the vagueness of memory and description.
Perhaps the greatest potential for sculpture lies in the notion that sculpture is made of matter. Materials do not have opinions; instead they retain actual, undeniable physical properties. In Shirley’s work, these material truths both resist and resonate with more illusive social or personal ideas of truth.

~ Trevor King
images courtesy of the author and gallery

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Chris Bradley

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“Chris Bradley: Freezer Fever” [2015] Roberto Paradise, Puerto Rico_ Courtesy of the artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Roberto Paradise, San Juan

Chris Bradley
Freezer Fever
Roberto Paradise, San Juan, Puerto Rico [link]

Looking like something a child might create in their first revelation of sculpture, Chris Bradley’s Clyde calls to mind a Quixotic day dream. Cast bronze and oil paint create the illusion of a casual construction of hot glued pretzel sticks.
This feigned naivety is Bradley’s signature. In a plebeian vocabulary of produce, junk food, and beer, these trompe l’oeil objects tempt an escapist notion; daydreaming of paradise while having a cold one. Banal moments of the everyday become animated, taunting with their own awkward existences, reflecting a glimpse of human desire in a greasy aluminum pizza box.

~ Trevor King

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Trevor King

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Trevor King
Anthem: Big Sound/Big Silence
Installation [2014]

Tensions mount, load roaring engines scream, an indiscernible voice bellows from an announcer as a clandestine passenger waits for his self-inflicted rite-of-passage to manhood.  King’s installation “Anthem: Big Sound/Big Silence” is the visual manifestation of the impotence faced by those searching for external validation.  Here we see a video of a young man losing, almost before the demolition-derby begins.

The illuminated seat acts a sanctuary, reinforcing the physicality of his experience of damnation.  The strewn concrete beer cans become vacillations of drunkenness and another attempt at representing loss, solidified moments, liquid frozen as a realization of time.

~ Ian F. Thomas

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Juliet Hinely

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Juliet Hinely
here now their then
Jam Handy Building, Detroit

Blending methods of installation and documentary, here now their then is an intensive look at both distant and recent histories of the Jam Handy building. Using this space as a catalyst for investigation, twelve hanging headphones tell narratives of the building’s past and present. While a playful experience, the artwork becomes bittersweet in the context of Detroit. The intervention leads the viewer to consider all of the lost histories of the vacant spaces that inhabit the city while illuminating something too often overlooked; people are still living, working, and creating in Detroit.

~ Trevor King