CHRIS SCHANCK: A SURREALITY WITH WESLEY TAYLOR, JOVA LYNNE + STEVE PANTON

January 6, 2025

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Chris Schanck: A Surreality With Wesley Taylor, Jova Lynne + Steve Panton

Name: CHRIS SCHANCK: A SURREALITY WITH WESLEY TAYLOR, JOVA LYNNE + STEVE PANTON
Start: 2025-02-08T15:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-02-08T16:00:00-05:00

ARTIST TALKS + PANELS

Image credit: Info goes here…

Saturday, February 8, 3-4PM

MOCAD CAFÉ

ADMISSION: Free and open to the public.

Join MOCAD in a conversation that celebrates the artistic networks at the center of Detroit. Panelists include artists and designers Chris Schanck and Wesley Taylor, along with MOCAD’s Co-Director/Artistic Director Jova Lynne. The talk will be moderated by writer and curator Steve Panton. Anchored by Schanck’s exhibition, this panel will discuss the importance of collaborative studio practices across Detroit’s contemporary landscape and how legacies of art and design contribute to the sustainability of the city’s arts ecosystems.

Image credit: Chris Schanck. Courtesy of Chris Schanck’s Studio.

Designer CHRIS SCHANCK’S work embraces the tension between dilapidation and opulence, asking us to find unconventional beauty in the imperfect. Schanck was born in Pittsburgh in 1975 and grew up in Dallas, Texas. He received a Bachelor’s of Fine Art degree in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts and a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Upon graduating in 2011, Schanck founded a studio in Detroit employing over a dozen artists, students, and craftspeople. Based in a former factory in Banglatown, a neighborhood with a dense immigrant population, the local community plays a key role in Schanck’s egalitarian studio practice, which brings outsiders into design culture.

Schanck’s efforts deviate from the mass-produced, instead reviving mundane materials by transforming them into unique objects of uncommon luxury. Schanck is best known for his ongoing Alufoil series, in which industrial and discarded materials are sculpted, covered in aluminum foil, and then sealed with resin. “My work sits on a spectrum. On one end, it’s practical and functional, and on the other, it’s fantastical and speculative. Think of a child’s bed shaped like a rocket ship or a locomotive. The bed can’t actually fly or move, but it can inspire dreams of speed and adventure. My work is like that—it’s a mix of fantasy and reality, practical use wrapped in a dream-like form.

Image credit: Wesley Taylor.

WESLEY TAYLOR is a printmaker, designer, musician, animator, educator, mentor, and curator whose practice is rooted in performance and social justice. His work combines, oscillates between, and blurs the boundaries of various disciplines, embodying a multi-disciplinary and anti-disciplinary approach. Over the past 20 years, his individual practice has been deeply intertwined with a constellation of collectives and networks he has co-founded, including Complex Movements, Talking Dolls Detroit, Design Justice Network, Athletic Mic League, and All Faux Everythings.

Wesley Taylor’s work draws inspiration from elder knowledge, complex science, 90s underground hip hop, punk aesthetics, and science fiction. Currently an associate professor at Wayne State University, he splits his time between Detroit and Stockholm, Sweden, where he was a fellow in the OPI (Of Public Interest) Lab at the Kungl. Konsthögskolan.

He has received awards from Creative Capital, NEFA, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Knight Foundation. Taylor is a 2021–22 Sundance Art of Practice Fellow, a 2019 United States Artist Fellow, and a 2018–19 Santa Fe Institute Artist-in-Residence.

His writing has appeared in AIGA and MDWfair, and his work has been featured in Vice, Fader, Complex, The Wall Street Journal, and Art in America. Authors such as Robin D.G. Kelley, Jeff Chang, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Ijeoma Oluo have written about his work

Image credit: Jova Lynne. Photo: Bre’ann White.

JOVA LYNNE is a practicing artist, curator, and the inaugural Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), co-leading the institution alongside the Chief Operating Officer, Marie Ann Madison-Patton. Lynne first joined the institution in 2017 as a Ford Foundation Curatorial Fellow and in 2019 became the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator. Prior
to MOCAD, Lynne was Director at Temple Contemporary at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Contemporary Art and Architecture. Lynne worked in the education departments of the Museum of Moving Image in Queens,
New York and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. Lynne graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Arts with her M.F.A. in Photography in 2017. Lynne’s artwork can be found in the collections of Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan, and The Wedge Collection in Toronto, Canada, amongst others.

Image credit: Steve Panton. Photo: Jeff Cancelosi.

STEVE PANTON is the founder of 2739 Edwin and 9338 Campau Galleries and the co-founder of the Hamtramck Neighborhood Arts Festival, the Hamtramck Free School, and the writing/curating/research project Essay’d. He has produced over 60 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to other institutions or received national recognition. He has conducted seminal curatorial workshops at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and elsewhere, was the inaugural curator of the innovative Art@TheMax program at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall, and writes on Detroit art for The Brooklyn Rail, the Detroit Metro Times, and Sculpture Magazine. Outside of art programming, his background is in technology, engineering, and education. He is currently engaged in a long-term study of the relationship between art and the political economy in Detroit.