Mary Gillis: Studio Views

This past February I was asked to write an introduction for an exhibition at Gladden Space, a new gallery in Lansing, of work by the artist Mary Gillis. I first met Mary many years ago when she had a studio near my house in Royal Oak. I acquired a work on paper of Mary's for my office when I was a corporate guy. (The other piece was a print by Richard Serra.) The director of the gallery, Ian Stallings, is a pretty interesting guy, a transplant mostly recently from San Francisco where he had been doing high-end design work and repping artists, as well as creating artworks of his own. It turns out I had met Ian a few months previous at the 10th anniversary gala for the Broad Museum at Michigan State University where he serves as a board member. All-in-all it was a good experience and I am especially happy with how the essay turned out.

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The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his famous study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, distinguishes between what he terms the “front stage” and the “backstage” of our social interactions. The front stage is where we consciously present ourselves to others, especially in our formal, public relationships. The backstage is the zone of the more personal, a place where we may, among other things, prepare for our front stage presentations. A gallery exhibition is a front stage: the work on view has been curated from a larger set of objects and installed to represent a particular point of view, be it to show a unified body of work, the evolution of a process or idea, or an artist’s development over time. "Mary Gillis: Studio Views" gives us a rare glimpse into all of this. The studio is an artist’s backstage, the place where ideas and processes incubate and develop and ultimately take shape in works of art that are intended enter the public domain. A visit to Mary Gillis’s studio offers an opportunity to glimpse the backstage of her creative process. 

Her current studio located on the second floor of an older brick building in a light industrial area south of downtown Lansing with a view of a bend in the Grand River. It is divided into several smaller spaces, some having different elevations. Works from various series, from different periods, and in various stages of completion can be found within proximity of one another. Some of the space is devoted to production, some to storage, and some where Gillis is working out how to present certain works when they are to be exhibited or enter a collection. Amidst the diversity of materials, scale and subject there is a sense of a dialog of elements feeding off one another and thereby informing Mary’s ongoing creative practice. 

In the catalog to a 2018 exhibition entitled, "Metalscapes," at K.OSS Contemporary Art in Detroit, Gillis notes: “My work historically shows a balance of movement versus stasis.” Juxtapositions permeate Mary’s work, between the loose brush work contained within geometrical forms, between abstract and more representational imagery, between paintings and sculptures that combine manufactured elements with expressive handwork. 

True to her penchant for experimentation with various media, in 2016 Mary began using recycled highway guardrail. This unexpected material offered a pronounced sculptural element and with-it surprising opportunities and references. 

In contrast to the exposed brick of much of Mary’s studio is a pristine white wall upon which is a new series that harkens back to the late 1970s when she lived and worked in Venice. The original works were large drawings made by building up layers of pastel and then removing the pigment with an eraser to create skeins of calligraphic gestures. 

“The Venice series of drawings on paper, were influenced by the movement of the surrounding waters of Venice, and the exuberance of my 25-year-old self-discovery in the luxury of a studio in the Palazzo Grassi situated on the Grand Canal. The drawings evolved into works on canvas, later exhibited at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York.” – Mary Gillis.

The current iteration reproduces the imagery on aluminum panels, where we see her original gestures on a high-tech substrate, the personal touch with the manufactured product. 

Blue is an important presence in Mary’s palette, especially in the recent “441” paintings but also across many of other works. On one level, this reflects the environment in which Mary works, with the Grand River within eyeshot of her studio, but also the Great Lakes which have such a major impact on our local consciousness. On another level, the fluid brushwork in the paintings, contained as they are in horizontal bands, registers a broader recognition of the nature/culture divide, juxtaposing the desire to impose order on seeming chaos, both physically and expressively, concerns that have long occupied the artist. 

An almond-shaped image is found in many of Gillis’s works. This image is often associated with the intersection of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The image actually dates back at least two millennia to Euclidean geometry, and perhaps even earlier to Pythagoras, where it is known as the ichthys (fish) or in Latin the vesica piscus (fish bladder). (Turned sideways the ichthys is also the “Jesus fish” icon that emerged in the 1970s in charismatic Christianity.) Other associations read the symbol as the dividing cell, the process of one becoming two and the opening through which the lifeworld comes into being. While not necessarily a conscientious reference to these associations, the form resonates along similar lines in Mary’s work that signal emergence, such as the paintings titled Breaking Through and Amphibious.

The form is also evoked in the form of the Valais blacknose sheep that occupies the center of the Mary’s most recent painting Juliet Goes to Italy. Juliet appears isolated on an expanse of ground suggesting the ancient walls of Italy, warm in the undertones and textured with age. The lamb is a favorite image to Mary and she deliberated for months about placing Juliet center stage. 

With this exhibition, a portion of Gillis’s work leaves the backstage of the studio to enter the front stage of the gallery. For the moment, the artist’s work is done. It’s now the public’s turn to take up the conversation.

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024)

Richard Serra at the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 28, 1982. (Photo: Vince Carducci)

RIP sculptor Richard Serra. One of my first pieces as an art writer was on Serra, who had come to the Detroit Institute of Art in the 1980s after they had acquired one of his sculptures, Mozarabe, currently installed in the sculpture garden at College for Creative Studies. I got the assignment and was working at my day job when I got a call at my desk. The voice on the other end said, "This is Richard Serra. Do I know you?" I told him that I was assigned to cover his lecture for Detroit Focus Quarterly, the publication of the nonprofit arts space I was associated with. We agreed to meet at the museum before his lecture where we had a conversation. He invited me to be his guest at the patron dinner being held in conjunction with the lecture. I hadn't been to one of those things at that point and declined, not only out of anxiety but because my grandfather was in the hospital and I needed to see him before visiting hours ended. (Click here for a PDF of the article, and remember I was pretty much just a kid when I wrote it.)

Many years later, when I was living in New York and working on my MA at The New School, I went to his opening at Gagosian Gallery, which was kind of a coming out party for the New York art world after September 11. Serra's show had been postponed as his studio was in the frozen zone of lower Manhattan in the wake of the World Trade Center attack and he was unable to move his sculpture that was supposed to be part of the exhibition. The opening was over the top. There was a cornucopia of food and drink, something New York galleries rarely did especially when it came to the great unwashed. Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg were there as was Gwyneth Paltrow. The artist Alfred Leslie was also having a show in Chelsea a couple of blocks away and he ditched his own opening to attend the Serra event. I literally ran into Julian Schnabel coming out of one of the sculptures. (I made him say "Hi" first 😉) I wrote about the show for Sculpture Magazine (September 2004, pp 72-73), a pretty decent piece of writing if I have to say so myself. (Click here for a PDF of the article.)

I love his work and was fortunate to have one of his prints in my office when I was a corporate exec.

The Street Portraits of Carlos Diaz

Photographer Carlos Diaz approached me a while back about writing something for a show he was mounting at the Detroit Historical Museum of images he took in 1984 during the Detroit Tigers run up to winning that year's World Series Pennant. I've known Carlos for many years, almost back to when he first started teaching at College for Creative Studies 40 years ago. In 1991, I wrote a review for Detroit Focus Quarterly of an installation he did at the Pontiac Creative Art Center called The Unemployed Auto Worker. I also included it in an exhibition I curated that year at Buckham Fine Arts Project in Flint. (The other artists in the show were Robert Bielat and Lynne Avadenka.) I like to rib Carlos about that review as it was initially pitched to Artforum when I was doing reviews from Detroit for them. The review focused on issues of class raised in Carlos's installation, which went against the grain of so much contemporary art of the period that foregrounded identity politics, as it continues to do. The Artforum reviews editor sat on the piece for months until he declared it "stale" and therefore too far past its prime to be published. That seemed like bullshit to me, having waited similar periods for reviews to see the light of day at Artforum, Art in America, and other art magazines I had written for. The editor sidestepped the issue of class in our conversation, but coincidentally my career at Artforum ended after that. (Click here to read the article, which was published in Detroit Focus Quarterly.) At any rate, below is the essay I wrote for the Detroit Historical Museum exhibition, which is on view until November 17, 2024. I thank Carlos for the opportunity to do this piece and for permission to reproduce his work. (All images Ⓒ Carlos Diaz.)

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Carlos Diaz, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A Professor Emeritus of Photography at College for Creative Studies, Carlos Diaz has focused his lens on the world around him for more than four decades. In addition to a sustained and distinguished career as a practitioner, with many exhibitions and inclusion in museum collections to his name, he has mentored several generations of students onto professional success, many to national acclaim. The photographs in this exhibition were taken in the fall of 1984 when a young Diaz, not long out of graduate school at University of Michigan, obtained his first full-time teaching job and relocated to Hamtramck. The setting for these images was the three home games played by the Detroit Tigers in pursuit of the World Series Championship, which they won. The Tiger baseball season of that year was a galvanizing one for the city, not unlike this past fall and winter with the Detroit Lions nearly clinching the NFC Championship and a first-time trip to the Super Bowl.

An abiding concern for Diaz has been what he terms his “interest in the fluidity of history and memory, the connections between people and place.” The relationship between photography and memory is one often considered in the literature on the medium and with the fortieth anniversary of the Tigers’ triumph, the photographs in this exhibition provide an apt occasion to reflect on the connection.

In talking about his work, Diaz speaks of the moment early on in his development when he first saw the work of Diane Arbus, whose photographs often surveyed the margins of society. With that encounter, he recognized that photography could be more than documentary. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus once observed, a comment about all that we don’t know about the subject of an image beyond what is visible within the frame. In the mid-1980s, Diaz explored this notion in a series titled “Unknown Landmarks,” where he went around the city with an 8x10 view camera searching locations and taking time to frame and consciously photograph otherwise mundane locations to question what might constitute the significant places and events we choose to remember, and more important those that are chosen to be memorialized from an official perspective.

One of those images, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984, is in this exhibition. It depicts Tiger Stadium just visible behind a commercial building in the background, with an alleyway between two Corktown houses in the foreground leading the eye to it. It is significant that Diaz used the medieval Latin spelling of “colosseum” in the title, connecting the now-gone ballpark in Detroit with the famous ruin in ancient Rome. The image evokes memories of spectacles – past and present – that have always been part of the public consciousness, fables of legendary contestants, victories and defeats, and the joys and disappointments of spectators, and the ultimate transience of those events and experiences, destined to be replayed again and again in different forms and different places and times.

Street photography, the genre of which Diaz’s 1984 Tigers World Series portraits are a part, seeks to capture chance encounters, typically in public places, rendered as “perfect moments.” It differs from documentary photography, which often operates with a predetermined message as in Jacob Riis’s late 19th-century photographs of the squalid conditions of the inhabitants of tenements in New York City in How the Other Half Lives. It is similarly distinct from photojournalism, which also tends to work in public places but with the intent of capturing perfect moments in the form of newsworthy events. For photojournalism, a perfect moment in October 1984 was Tigers right fielder Kirk Gibson swatting his World Series clinching home run in game 5. And yet, street photography can never be entirely free of the medium’s traditional documentary foundation as what Susan Sontag, in her famous book On Photography, terms “a trace, something stenciled directly off the real.”

In Diaz’s street photographs, it’s often the incidental that constitutes the perfect moment, details that evoke collective memory that may or may not have become part of “official” history. In a photograph in which the ballpark figures prominently, there is a billboard on the right promoting radio personality Dick Purtan, who was once one of America’s top on-air celebrities and who just a few years before had moved from his longtime spot in AM radio to the easy-listening format of “Cozy FM.” Still living, Purtan retired from the public airwaves in 2010. To the left is an ad for the Detroit People Mover, which had begun construction the year before and began service in 1987. Rendered idealistically in the ad, the Detroit People Mover promised to be a solution, if admittedly modest, to the city’s public transit woes, still yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

Carlos Diaz, Cap, Button, and Bumper Sticker Vendor, Detroit Tigers Stadium, 1984 World Series, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A major aspect of the moment captured by Diaz’s World Series photographs is the carnivalesque atmosphere that surrounded the ballpark on game days, when the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull and the surrounding neighborhoods bustled with activity. Conspicuous among the people Diaz photographed are vendors hawking their wares, including popcorn, peanuts, and other food items at prices that were likely lower than similar items available inside the ballpark, as well as a variety of Tigers-branded merchandise, all of it undoubtedly unauthorized by the team’s management. There is a photograph that focuses on a makeshift parking lot, one of many that would pop up for home games, providing locals an opportunity to take in a little cash off sports fans on their way to the stadium visible in the background. These images reflect a spirit of do-it-yourself entrepreneurialism that once ruled on the streets around the stadium.

Carlos Diaz, Detroit Tigers Fan, 1984.

And then there are the fans. A notable image captures a fan blowing a hunting horn and wearing a batting helmet; he holds up a makeshift placard that reads “Trammel, Morris, MVPs” with another, “Tigers Win Debate,” strapped around his neck. (Tigers shortstop Alan Trammel and pitcher Jack Morris were inducted together into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.) Another depicts a crew of three self-assured adolescent boys striking a pose, arms folded, looking straight into the camera, wearing matching caps with “The A-Team” printed across the crown.

In this age of the ubiquitous selfie, the perfect moment appears to be not an appreciation of an event but the tagging of one’s presence for which the event serves merely as a backdrop. With this series of photographs, Carlos Diaz turned his camera away from himself to bear witness to some perfect moments of a few glory days gone by.