PLEASE TOUCH

"This was one of the best openings I've ever been to here at Forum," blurted Kimberly McClure at the opening for the show this last week. The premiss for the show Please Touch was to gather an audience to critique and explore the idea of physical interaction as a key component in a work of art. Five Cranbrook artists (Tom Friel, Seth Keller, Corina Reynolds, Tricia Stackle, and Erin Yuasa) showed their work inviting the visitors to interact. Some of the works were playful, looking to children's toys as inspiration for ways to entice viewers to touch. Other works evoked the language of tools to communicate the message "please touch."

Erin Yuasa's sand boxes functioned beautifully in the space between aesthetic object and tool, inviting visitors to handle the paddles and funnels in the box while at the same time creating a space to think about the action of interacting, both with the object and the other people sharing the experience with you.

PLEASE TOUCH

Trisha Stackle. Wall Installation I: Moonlight Melody, 2009, fabric, rice, foam, wood, latex paint, 4' W x 8' H x 6" D

PLEASE TOUCH opens this Friday at Forum Gallery at 6pm in Bloomfield Hills, Mi.

Artists:

Tom Friel

Seth Keller

Corina Reynolds

Tricia Stackle

Erin Yuasa

For more information about PLEASE TOUCH visit detroiter MOTORCITYBLOG.net motorcity motorcityblog detroit music art events: PLEASE TOUCH - Cranbrook Forum Gallery Bloomfield Hills - Fri 2/19

Martha Mysko—5x5 cube

Containment, control, concealment, dependency, memorialization, obsolescence, and erasure. Martha Mysko's new work, a 5x5 cube sheathed in clear vinyl, showcases a tight collection of objects all depending on one another in an intricate network of viewer associations. Throughout her work, Mysko carries a mixed bag of tricks including links to memory and forgetting, puzzles and critical observation, and a firm control over the dependency of a large array of elements. In our discussion of the work, ideas of light and memory were strong veins of dialogue. The cube, lit from inside—red and yellow—by an overhead projector, took on two personalities as the environmental life changed from day to night. These personalities line up with Mysko's previous works relating to home/residential spaces; furthermore, these personalities, coming from the daily light and living cycles a house goes through, seem to question who's home. The lights are on. Is someone home, is this a memory of events past, or is this a cleaver way of deterring trespassers. In this work, like others, Mysko utilizes a white washing technique to further remove information allowing the red and yellow light to wash over the installation, bathing it in an empty, questioning glow.