Kicking off the season, MOCAD is pleased to present Detroit-based artist and designer Chris Schanck’s first Detroit solo museum presentation A Surreality, featuring a collection of fantastic objects, sculptures, and furnishings that explore the expansive nature of science fiction, myth, and fantasy in crafting our reality. Located in Woodward Gallery, Schanck’s distinctive design practice prioritizes imagination and celebrates the transformative power of extraordinary experiences and otherworldly narratives. A Surreality features shimmering coffee tables, mirrors, tables, light fixtures, and ethereal chairs that transport you to another dimension. Schanck creates a new reality by sparkling and shimmering to underline the blurry nature of experience from science fiction to fantasy. Schanck’s work explores multiple layers of meaning, transforming each object into a vessel for discourse. His work contributes to the lexicon of craft practices, where objects, sculptures, and installations create undefinable and amorphous experiences.

In Wander + Pursuit, ASMA creates a visual metaphor merging biological and artificial life as the office space. They use material technology, surrealism, organic shapes, and craft processes. Their installation is a site for two functions; an environment that instrumentalizes the body as a labor source and a place to transform into a recreational space, such as a romantic garden. Wander & Pursuit is populated with images of the pursuit of romantic love projected onto objects of immaterial labor, such as computers, printers, and other office components. In the words of ASMA, this space is “a ruin from a time in our past when life was divided into work and leisure”. Wander & Pursuit is the first museum exhibition in the United States of the Mexico City-based artist duo ASMA, formed by Hanya Beliá and Matias Armendaris.

Magic Circle, Clare Gatto and Kara Güt’s first museum exhibition as collaborators, centers on fantasy roleplay video game design and motifs as points of departure and offers a glimpse into an alternate realm or reality. Through hybrid assemblages, the artists transform the gallery into an ambiguous “in-between” world that collapses the boundaries dividing the virtual from the “real.” They push and pull once-familiar images of the natural environment, including volcanic rocks, sand, and bricks, in and out of virtual space to create a library of textures that intentionally elude easy recognition. In Magic Circle, Gatto and Güt create a momentary glitch in the system and give us space to embrace a sense of fluidity and uncertainty in the ways we define what’s real.

Rounding out the season is Portal Fire: Shrine of the Torchbearer, a presentation of new work by the Detroit-based artist Levon Kafafian. Borne from MOCAD’s partnership with New York based residency program International Studio and Curatorial Program Residency, Kafafian presents a series of immersive vignettes that invites viewers into the imaginary world of Azadistan, a sophisticated and highly stratified civilization where textiles have become symbolic markers of class and power and act as a narrative guide to the nuances of society. Portal Fire: Shrine of the Torchbearer demonstrates Kafafian’s creative approach to channeling the evolving realities of the Armenian diasporic experience. Inspired by the concept of ‘Armeno-Futurism,’ the exhibition centers a commitment to envisioning expansive futures in the wake of the historical and ongoing loss of ancestral Armenian homelands.

Please join us on Friday, November 22, to celebrate our Fall 2024 Exhibitions. Doors open at 5:00pm for MOCAD members to view the exhibitions followed by a 6pm opening to the public. A talk featuring ASMA will begin at 6:15pm. 

ABOUT CHRIS SCHANCK

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.

ABOUT ASMA

ASMA is an artist duo based in Mexico City, formed by Matias Armendaris (Ecuadorian, b. 1990) and Hanya Beliá (Mexican, b. 1994). Combined, they hold an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Emily Carr University, as well as a BFA in Visual Arts from the Facultad de Artes y Diseño (UNAM). The duo has exhibited internationally, including Manifesta Biennial, Marseille, Museo Tamayo, México City, The Chicago Artist Coalition, and Denver Art Museum.

ABOUT CLARE GATTO + KARA GÜT

Clare Gatto and Kara Gut are image-based digital media artists who have collaborated and shown work together over the past 10+ years alongside their independent practices. They attended Ohio State University and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Güt’s work investigates the shape of human intimacy formed by internet lifestyles and constructed detachment from reality, while Gatto uses 3D rendering software to create and explore simulated bodies, egg sacs, and interstitial space. They live and work in Cleveland, OH, and Detroit, MI, respectively. In February of 2024, Gatto and Güt were artists-in-residence at The Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University. They both exhibited nationally and internationally as collaborators and independent artists. Güt is a 2023 Knight Art + Tech Fellow, and Gatto is a recipient of Culture Sources’ 2023 Creators of Culture and Flourish Fund.

ABOUT LEVON KAFAFIAN
Based in Detroit, MI, Kafafian holds a BFA in Fiber from the College for Creative Studies and a BA in Anthropology from Wayne State University in 2014. Kafafian has forthcoming exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI, and CUE Foundation, NY. They co-led a 7-week public educational weaving program in partnership with Trapholt Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, in 2022, and regularly lecture and teach workshops across the U.S. Kafafian has notably exhibited their work at the University of Michigan, Stamps Gallery, MI, and the Arab American National Museum, MI. They have participated in the International Studio and Curatorial Program Residency (2023) and the Arab American National Museum Residency (2019).

ABOUT MOCAD
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents exhibitions and programs that explore the best of contemporary art, connecting Detroit and the global art world. MOCAD focuses on art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, reflecting our community. We encourage innovative experimentation by artists, musicians, makers, cultural producers, and scholars to enrich all who participate and to educate visitors of all ages in the power of art. Whether from Detroit or worldwide, we welcome creative voices who can guide us to an equitable and inclusive future. We believe that art can change us, and it’s our responsibility to hold a space where challenge, acceptance, hope, and beauty can coincide.

CONTACT
Carolina Adams
Sutton Communications
[email protected]