SIGN-UP to receive our weekly update of openings & events at Metro Detroit galleries.
SIGN-UP to receive our weekly update of openings & events at Metro Detroit galleries.
Florencia Pita/FP mod through June 16.
Organized by the University of Michigan Museum of Art, FlorenciaPita/FP mod explores the provocations and intersections of digital technology, material experimentation, femininity, and ornament in the work of Argentina-born, Los Angeles-based architect and designer Florencia Pita. The exhibition and its related publication, part of the UMMA Books series, trace the evolution of Pita’s design ideology through installation pieces, urban design, tableware, furniture, and architecture, as well as small adornments. Pita’s boldly colored works draw from literary, art, and biological sources; employ cutting-edge architectural fabrication techniques; and cross borders of visual art, architecture, and design.
Francis Alÿs: Guards through March 31.
Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s video Guards (2005) documents sixty-four of the Queen of England’s guards on a “walk” throughout the City of London. There is perhaps no more symbolically unemotional character than that of a bearskin-hat-wearing guard of the Queen of England. Yet even with no break in the guards’ indifferent exterior, the tale still manages to be a powerful metaphor for the human condition. Many of the elements of Guards are found throughout Alÿs’s work: walking, rhythm, the use of the street and bridges are all common tropes in his oeuvre. These strategies, evoking the poetic and sonic palette of the urban environment, involve a sometimes loose and other times overt relationship to social resistance and to the symbolic and often political implications of these actions.
