The paintings of Megan Parry are obsessed with looking. In her wry and varied visual universe, cartoonish, bald-headed figures peer at the viewer, at one another, or at obscure objects of interest that only they can see. Huge, lidless eyeballs (intimations of vast, inscrutable beings that the canvas cannot contain) hover in close-up and stare with a deranged intensity (as in Aspetto, 2008–2010), or else a kind of cosmic serenity. When Parry paints houses, their windows are often eyes: personifying, face-making. Even her multitudinous coffins and “enclosures,” isolated details of an architecture of confinement, have eyes, have windows—or if they don’t, they insistently don’t, inviting the viewer to wonder what is being kept in (or out) behind their solid walls.

If there are tendencies that unite what is categorically understood as “Detroit art” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the two- and three- dimensional paintings of David Rubello stand outside of them. If Detroit art is messy, Rubello’s is meticulous. If Detroit art tends toward representation, Rubello’s insists on abstraction. If Detroit art is a reflexive interrogation of the postindustrial condition, Rubello’s formalist paintings exist in an idealized, apolitical, and ageographic universe of pure visuality, where form is content and content simply form.