David Klein Gallery

For more than a decade the source material for my work has been the homes and neighborhoods in which I have lived from Wisconsin to Brooklyn to New Jersey. I have focused on domestic spaces – medicine cabinets, refrigerators, and closets – and narrowed in on individual objects. At times the paintings are interiors, viewed through a mirror or window, and at others it’s the exterior façade of my home or street views of the neighborhood. This subject matter allows me to explore a series of ideas. One is the notion of public and private space. My most recent pieces, for example, involve the use of a drone camera. The use of the drone camera itself is socially loaded, as their increasing prominence has led them to be viewed as tools of aggression used for spying and warfare. Drones have also become a symbol of our collective declining privacy. My images illustrate this by laying bare both the physical and socioeconomic elements of the neighborhood via the meticulous capture of homes, cars, swimming pools, and outdoor furniture. Conversely, drones also represent an isolated, harmless, everyday leisure activity for both adults and children. In that sense, the details included in the drawings can also be viewed from a perspective of being commonplace and unintrusive. The houses and cars in this neighborhood could be most anywhere, and as a result do little to tell us about the families, who remain out-of- sight. Another concept of interest to me is the desire to control our surrounding environment. My work investigates our desire to not only capture and record the minutiae of life, but to idealize and stylize each and every detail. Photography has long-enabled us to hold time still, but the ubiquity of camera phones and publishing platforms such as social media lead us more and more to obsessively stage our lives for both ourselves and others. Just as we carefully attempt to manipulate others’ perception of us, so too do I wish to curate the viewer’s perception of my subject matter. There is a searching that takes place traveling above and around these spaces, sometimes drawn closer to observe plants, a swimming pool, or patio chairs, and other times pulling back to focus more on the pattern of rooftops or gridwork of yards. Details of the familiar or mundane aspects of life are given equal importance, from cars that are left abandoned on the street to individual leaves and roof shingles. Ultimately the viewer is presented with an abundance of information that is carefully organized and staged. -Jessica Rohrer

Familiar is a show that explores interconnected personal and diasporic histories. The title of this exhibition uses the word Familiar to examine our understandings and perceptions of what we believe we know. What is our understanding of American history in the context of Black lives? How can we expand our concepts of the personal, domestic and historical? Each artist allows the viewer an inside look beyond negative tropes of how blackness is portrayed historically and through contemporary lenses. Familiar includes photography, paintings and drawings that explore an intersection where the intimacy of Black culture meets. Some of the work quarries the archives of history to highlight specific individuals and stories, while others focus on spaces that are familiar in our everyday lives—a commonality outside viewers may be estranged to. This show gives each artist the room to explore their own ideas while also forming a shared overlapping and understanding of relationships.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Al Held: Watercolors. This exhibition offers the opportunity to view rare watercolor paintings by Held, which were created at his studio in Camerata di Todi, Italy in the early 1990s.

Viewing art history through a female lens, Elise Ansel translates Old Master paintings into vibrant contemporary abstractions. Improvising on the historical artworks, Ansel implements the color and composition of the masterpieces adding gestural expression to her interpretations. Her brushstrokes make a visible map of her movements as she vigorously applies the paint to canvas.

Kelly Reemtsen is best known for her iconic depictions of the modern day woman. Strikingly feminine at first glance, in designer dresses and runway- worthy accessories, Reemtsen’s women are not simply fashionistas or arm candy. Rather, these women, dressed to the nines, undertake tasks that are often traditionally masculine, requiring the use of power tools such as chainsaws, wrenches, and bolt cutters. Their stance ranges from domestic to menacing and yet, as a body of work, address the question: What is the role of the contemporary woman? Reemtsen answers that question with a resounding “Anything!” The presentation of her subjects is anonymous by choice, they could be Any Woman, both feminine and powerful. This online exhibition features paintings, drawings and prints produced in her Los Angeles and London studios.

Based on an 1890’s photograph of a massive pile of bison-bones at the Michigan Carbon Works plant in Detroit, and the “bone black” pigment created from their process of burning animal bones, practiced for approximately 150 years, the Bone Black installation was created over the course of 5 weeks in the Spring of 2019. Commissioned by Cranbrook Art Museum, for the exhibition “Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, & Materiality,” curated by Laura Mott, the work was designed site-specifically within the vacant Assembly Bay building of the former Northern Crane industrial sites, along an old railroad street called Guoin, one block from the Detroit River, in the historic Warehouse District. Focusing on the metaphorical “bones” of Detroit, approximately 35 abandoned boats – Shipwrecks - and related debris, illegally dumped and neglected throughout the City, were collected via trailer-towing pick- ups and various winches, and hauled to the Northern Crane site as materials for the work. 33 of these Shipwrecks were suspended and stacked within the Assembly Bay, creating a sort of “ghost fleet,” or funerary procession through time, flowing westward just as the Detroit River does. 22 of the boats were washed with the Bone Black pigment, allowing each Shipwreck’s colors, graffiti, and history to bleed through. Multiple boats had trees and plants growing within them, sprouting from years of sitting in the same forlorn spots – all of which were preserved during install, with the tree-boats situated under the collapsed sections of roof, so they could soak up all the rain of one of Michigan’s wettest years. Playing with ideas of archeology, anthropology, ceremony, and mysticism, the installation was designed to transform the cavernous factory setting into a future-archaic scene from some alternate history, and perhaps convey a view from underwater, looking at the entire work from the stillness of a seafloor. Photographed and documented over time, the suspended Ships were lowered in stages, hanging nose- down in the final days, followed by being stacked into one central burial mound – a Shipwreck version of the Carbon Works bison-bone mountain. Exhibited from June through October of 2019, the entire installation was dismantled and destroyed by Autumn, with all 33 fiberglass wrecks being smashed into bits and crushed into dumpsters, as they have no scrap-value and cannot be recycled, and why they are so commonly dumped in Detroit. Along with various boat artifacts and hardware saved before destruction, the work lives on as a dual photographic series: Bone Black (2019), which documents the entire installation, and the 20-year series Shipwrecks (2000-2020), which served as inspiration for the concept of this work.

This series is about taking things apart - people, ideas, relationships, feelings and then recombining them. I think a lot about how we don’t move through this world alone, but take other people and things insides of us. We’re these weird conglomerations. What happens to one, happens to the other, only differently. We take each other in. We are made up of all of our own experiences, and we absorb the things which happen to others. We are both incredibly alone and impossibly linked. In this series, I’m working with strong variegated fields of color. Many pieces are monochromatic and the figure and field merge into one. It is not easy to see the image - instead they are meant to be felt first. Fields split in half - offering presence and absence. What is cut from one panel, appears in the other panel, two parts separated from each other. The cut pieces involve a laborious iterative process of removal and repair. To me, this is symbolic. And the linework leftover from the process offers both record and image of the work. I’m always preoccupied with parts and wholes, aloneness and togetherness, absence and presence, with empathy and boundaries and also the ways that these opposites are always coming into contact and intermingling. With what is happening right now, the palpability of both distance and connection feels especially resonant. -Emmy Bright

Alternative Testimony features the work of four artists who use traditional and historical photographic processes in alternative ways. Experimenting with early techniques such as Cyanotype, Photogram, Mordancage and Bromoil, Cyrus Karimipour, Aspen Mays, Brittany Nelson and Meghann Riepenhoff move these techniques into the present tense, disregarding or obscuring representational imagery in the final results.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to kick off 2020 with a presentation of recent paintings, photographs, and sculpture by gallery artists both new and familiar: Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Matthew Hawtin, Scott Hocking, Jisoo Hur, Mario Moore, Marianna Olague, Robert Schefman, and Corine Vermeulen.

Kenny Scharf is widely known for his pop culture murals, paintings, sculpture, and installations. Scharf considers himself a “Pop Surrealist”. As Scharf states: In the early 1980’s, Scharf was a prominent member of the East Village art scene along with his friends and contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf participated in many significant exhibitions in New York at that time including the Times Square Show, Club 57 at Club 57, the Open Studio Show at P.S.1 and the 1985 Whitney Biennial. Most recently, Scharf was included in Club 57: Film, Performance and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983 at the Museum of Modern Art and Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980’s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, NY. His murals can be found in multiple cities in the U.S. and abroad, including Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Wynwood, FL; Careyes, Mexico; Paris, France; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Malaga, Spain. Scharf’s Detroit exhibition will feature a number of seminal works including Handy Andy, 2008, Bearjungle, 2010, and Probz, 2018. As a child growing up in 1950s and 60s, Scharf was intrigued and inspired by popular TV culture, especially the saturated color and imagery of daytime cartoons like The Jetsons and The Flintstones. These characters and the wildly imaginative landscapes they inhabit have had a profound influence on Scharf’s work. The cartoons’ playfulness and sunny optimism continue to a provide a foundation for his best work.

Recovery features silverpoint drawings of significant African-American artists, writers, musicians and revolutionaries at rest or enjoying a leisurely activity. Moore, who often paints on copper panels, presents a group of intimately sized portraits of close friends as well as a self-portrait. A focal point of the show is a large-scale oil on canvas titled A Student’s Dream, which depicts Moore lying on a table in what appears to be an early operating theater. The painting is a reference to Moore’s recent awake craniotomy, a surgery he underwent to remove a benign brain tumor. Also included in the exhibition are two recent videos: I Wish It Was Mine and Sorry for the Interruption, produced during Moore’s 2017 residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. After enduring his own physical trauma and surgery, Moore sought to examine the nature of recovery from trauma and stress and how it is experienced by black men in our contemporary society. He states: “The process of recovery is imperative for a body that has endured a certain trauma or physical strain. Yet, In America, there is an expectation for Black men to perpetually prevail—to keep working, keep fighting, and deny the body rest – despite the pains they may endure. Throughout history, Black men in America have been bombarded with endless conflict against their minds and bodies, rarely ever having opportunity to consider self-care.” Mario Moore, was born and raised in Detroit. He holds a BFA from College for Creative Studies, Detroit and an MFA from Yale, New Haven, CT. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Winston-Salem State University and Knox College. He was recently awarded the prestigious Hodder Fellowship by Princeton University.

A sixth-generation Detroiter, Hocking is descended from generations of Baltic Polish immigrants and Cornish copper miners who settled in the Upper Peninsula’s Copper Harbor. Hocking states: “The idea of copper mining being a huge part of my family history connected to an overall theme for me. Copper mining in the Upper Peninsula has been going on for thousands of years. The earliest natives living in this region around the Great Lakes were classified as the Old Copper Complex and copper artifacts from this culture can be dated up to 6000 or more years ago...In my time making art in Detroit, copper has always been the most coveted scrap metal, scavenged from any place possible. Scrapping has slowed in Detroit in the last 10 years, but the importance of copper in Detroit is a system that’s thousands of years old, moreover, it’ s a continual form of currency, trade, and a coveted material.” Hocking considers the exhibition to be a culmination of two decades of producing his work in Detroit. The various stages of his practice as an artist are represented by iconic artifacts and sculptures as well as photographic images of several of his significant projects including the Tower of Babel and the Celestial Ship of the North (Emergency Ark) aka The Barnboat. He notes that all of the projects in the show tie into the concept of all that is OLD. With OLD, Hocking addresses the looming presence of a large column in the middle of the gallery with a site- specific installation inspired by a visit he made to the Paris Catacombs in 2015. Throughout history mankind has built cities on top of the cities and graves of the people who came before them. Hocking states that in Detroit, ancient Native-American burial mound sites are in the more industrialized and worked over parts of the city. “...There's a connection to the ancient past, tied in with my familial past, tied in with my personal history.” Hocking is recognized internationally for his interventions into urban and rural landscapes that reference mythology, mysticism and folklore. He has produced and documented numerous site-specific installations in Australia, France, Germany, and Mexico, as well as in multiple locations in the U.S. including Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and Michigan. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art and the Kunst-Werk Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, among others.