All posts by Dennis A. Nawrocki

06 Kathryn Brackett Luchs

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Born Detroit, 1950 / BFA, MFA, University of Michigan / Lives in Lewiston, Michigan

Kathryn Brackett Luchs has been making big, odd-couple “hybrids” (her preferred term) since the late eighties, often pairing plywood and glassine, canvas and photographs, hard and soft, sturdy and fragile as her signature practice. As such, her work challenges the conventions of modest scale, tautness, framing, and single sheets of paper associated with the print medium (which she in fact teaches at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design). Her combinations have instead been conspicuously expansive and enveloping, imposingly large, and relentlessly experimental in execution and appearance. In her studio multiple compositions are usually underway simultaneously.

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03 Melanie Manos

cabinet thinker

Born Detroit, 1964 / BA, University of California at Los Angeles / MFA, University of Michigan / Lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan

To date, Melanie Manos has scrunched into the upper shelves of walk-in closets; inserted her body between exposed wall studs; inhabited the interiors of defunct, doorless refrigerators; squeezed into rolling metal utility cabinets; ducked into niches and crevasses of attics; walked the rafters; clambered up, over, and down interior walls; climbed the exteriors of multistoried buildings; and, most recently, shinnied into the upper reaches of gigundo, sequoia-sized tree trunks. A number of Manos’s intrepid feats have been achieved digitally or on video and, surprisingly perhaps, beget as potent a reflexive audience reaction—fear, unease, release—as her literal, physical performances. She is indeed the consummate interdisciplinary artist who works in performance, digital media, and installation, exhibiting not only nationally but internationally.

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New writer – Dennis Alan Nawrocki

Dennis A. Nawrocki serves as adjunct faculty in the department of art and art history at Wayne State University. He directed Center Galleries at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies from 1990 to 1998, in addition to teaching art history there from 1990 to 2005. Author of Art in Detroit Public Places (Wayne State University Press, 2008) and a freelance critic, Nawrocki is a co-founder of Essay’d, and he has reviewed national and international exhibitions for Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, New Art Examiner, and Metro Times.