Two galleries in the Detroit area are celebrating Motown’s automobile – related history with exhibitions dedicated to cars and the automibile industry. As the move of car factories to foreign countries and recent (and past) economic problems have caused an increase in Detroit’s crime, poverty, unemployment and the abandonment (and subsequent demolition) of factories and warehouses, Ferndale’s Susanne Hilberry Gallery is currently exhibiting a relevant – and fabulously oxymoronic – display of beautiful pictures that show industrial collapse.
Susanne Hilberry’s “Drive” shows the work of Detroit sculptor and photographer Scott Hocking, who combines formal landscape and architectural photography to create eerie images of apocalypse-esque scenes. Images include those of an East Side Detroit neighborhood with roads to nowhere and a skeletal Shanghai factory juxtaposed to a dense forest. Hocking tends to pair pictures of plush rural land with destruction and ruins in his creatively creepy works. It seems the artist is expressing a (hopefully) exaggerated view of how badly Detroit has deteriorated and how strangely abandoned Detroit, containing only about a million people, looks and feels.
Contrastingly, the David Klein Gallery‘s “Drive” contains less gloomy works by Liz Cohen, Timothy Buwalda and Cheryl Kelley. In this exhibition, the three artists display their talented pieces whose connecting theme is America’s love affair with the car. Cohen’s glossy, elaborate, and humorous images depict the artist during her ongoing quest to fix up an old East German Trabant (apparently, a notoriously mediocre vehicle) and take it apart piece-by-piece to transform it into a Chevrolet El Camino.
Kelley takes a different approach; her photorealistic oil-on-aluminum portraits of classic cars shimmer as light reflects on shiny panels. Buwalda concentrate’s on a car’s strength, displaying cars as heroic and powerful.
The two exhibitions are unique in the messages and moods they convey as well as in the diversity of materials and techniques each artist used to create his / her varied works. However, both convey visions and views of America’s fascination (and perhaps, in Hocking’s case, a love-hate relationship) with cars and industry and the history behind them.
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