“Homebody” at Cranbrook Art Museum
Strolling into the lower-level galleries of the Cranbrook Artwork Museum to see the group exhibition “Homebody,” I first encountered Martha Mysko’s What To Do With Home windows, 2021. This huge framed mixed-media work encompasses a photographic replica of a lounge, with three cream-colored accordion lampshades jutting out from the image’s floor. Holes are minimize into the picture, and out of them rise numerous textiles primarily based on the appointments in Mysko’s piece, like a patterned material that resembles a throw depicted on a settee. One of many slits partially obscures a bouquet of white daisies resting on a espresso desk, whereas the identical plastic and three-dimensional flowers, together with faux fern leaves, emerge from this opening.
“Homebody” options the work of twenty artists with ties to Detroit and attracts its central theme from the way in which pandemic isolation has developed our relationship to the place we dwell. In Ricky Weaver’s {photograph} “God’s gonna hassle the water,” 2021, the artist creates 4 clones of herself, two of whom rigorously pour water into crystal glasses round a kitchen. Every determine’s face is obscured, veillike, by her lengthy hair, giving this unusual scene a mournful high quality. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of House (1957), “A home constitutes a physique of photographs that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.” This conceit is obvious in lots of the items: Take Dessislava Terzieva’s meditation on the wrestle for escape within the period of the plague, When You Can’t Go away the Nation, Construct a Portal, 2020. This sculpture encompasses a plastic washbasin; inside it’s a swirl of wrinkled garments topped with dried yellow flowers, all shiny and frozen from resin, because the receptacle hangs vertically on the wall like a mirror.
In Victoria Shaheen’s sculpture Rebekah Lodge, 2018—which is called after a bunch based in 1851 beneath the fraternal Unbiased Order of Odd Fellows—we see a ceramic bouquet rising from the seat of a giant wood dining-hall chair, designed by Eliel Saarinen in 1928. A silicone rubber mat is unexpectedly draped over the chair’s decrease rungs. The chair acts as a scale balancing the 2 objects, whereas the mat additional grounds this bizarre object to the ground. The flowers draw the attention up the again of the chair: On the prime is little ornamental sq. fabricated from steel, depicting a crane, the world’s tallest flying hen. It seems worn, framed by Saarinen inside the sturdy and protecting wooden, the place it’s been remoted and trapped for the previous ninety-four years.
— Lisa John Rogers
