Group exhibition
LAY OF THE LAND
Carla Anderson, Ashley Marie, Marceline Mason, Rick Vian
January 9th - February 15th 2025
Opening Reception: January 9th, 6 - 9 PM
Lay of the Land presents five artists’ unique interpretations of the natural world. Creating a dialogue between painting and photography, this exhibition delves into the interplay of light, texture, and form while blending abstract, realistic and surreal perspectives. Each work invites viewers to see landscapes through a new lens and questioning how we perceive and connect with our surroundings.
MARCELINE MASON
Marceline Mason is a Detroit based artist. Her paintings are meditations on the urban landscape at night, focusing on reversing the role of the figure and the natural world.
“I believe that one’s environment can exist as an extension of the mind. In this body of work, I am creating portraits of nature set against a human landscape. In fleeting symbiosis, plant life and natural atmosphere exist alongside traces of human ephemera. I am drawn to environments that build on each other: quickly changing vines growing next to layers of fading, buffed out graffiti or flashing shop lights. I am capturing a specific moment in time, these scenes are based on lived experiences from night walks and moments of elation in viewing something beautiful alone. Navigating the natural environment during times of climate crises has brought me to a new place of reverence and intimacy with nature, as if searching for moments of existential resilience in the everyday.”
ASHLEY MARIE
Photo: CJ Benninger
Ashley Marie is a multidisciplinary artist in the Metro Detroit area. She attended one semester at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2011 for foundation courses and has been self taught since. In addition to exhibiting work throughout Detroit, Ashley’s work also appeared in the 55th Venice Biennale. Her work is derived from her life experiences. She hopes to inspire her audience thoughts on spirituality. She works in a variety of mediums such as oil paint, graphite, resin, and clay. These mediums allow her to achieve a simultaneously realistic and ethereal look, portraying the illusion between life and spirit.
Through my life experiences on navigating through grief and existentialism, my work explores the space between physical and spiritual realms. I work with a variety of mediums to allow for the creation of both realistic and ethereal qualities to portray this space between. I seek to inspire that we are eternal spiritual beings living a human experience.
CARLA ANDERSON
Carla Anderson was born in Philadelphia and moved to Detroit while still a child. She grew up in a left wing family who had interests in the arts. As a child she slunk around with a Brownie camera pretending to be a wildlife photographer while all the while attempting to photograph squirrels. In her teens and as a young adult Carla studied theatre. It wasn’t until her late 20’s that she made a commitment to photography.
Starting as a street photographer Carla soon began to photograph vernacular architecture. In the mid 1980s she began her first long term project. Traveling the rural South Carla photographed vernacular architecture, signage, roadside memorials, and outsider art. This project lasted fifteen years at which time she moved into the landscape. This current body of work began to take form in 2006 and has wound through various stages and growth since that time. Much of the influence for this work comes from painting.
In 2020, in conjunction with writer Bill Harris, she published Sight—Sound: 10 Haiku by Bill Harris after Carla Anderson Photographs. This handmade book, printed in letterpress with photographs tipped onto the pages, is the first of its kind to come out of Detroit.
S. KAY YOUNG
S. Kay Young (b. 1952) is a Detroit based artist, advocate, instructor, with a 44 year photographic career. A descendant of the Eastern Band Cherokee Nation, her work is in numerous private and corporate collections, including The Detroit Institute of Arts, The University of Michigan and Cobo Center (The Detroit Regional Convention Facility Authority) in Detroit.
S. Kay Young’s work is inspired by her love of, respect for and relationship with nature. Kay has a deep, personal reverence for trees. All her photographic series are initiated through messages she receives in dreams that come through her ancestors. Young has been given these detailed dreams since early childhood.
In 2014 Young and her Special Needs students were featured in and won an Emmy for PBS’s Detroit Performs series. In April 2019 Kay’s work was included in the curated exhibition Transformation at The Detroit Artist Market; the 106 ft X 155 ft installation was comprised of 98 self-portrait DNA images addressing identity and our DNA relationship to trees. The photographic installation reflected the quilts passed down by her mother and grandmother.
Young’s work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions throughout her career. In addition, she has lectured at The Smithsonian’s National Museum for the American Indian in New York addressing the colonization of Native people in partnership with the American Indian Community House in New York City. She has curated and judged numerous art exhibitions in Detroit and was one of the principal curators of the 2021 exhibition/event "Mighty Real, Queer Detroit" spanning six Detroit galleries, including The Detroit Institute of Arts.
RICK VIAN
Rick Vian has been painting and teaching in the Detroit Metro area since the early 1970s. He received his B.F.A. at the College for Creative Studies and his M.F.A at Wayne State Univeristy. He has taught painting at Wayne County Community College, Wayne State University, and was an Associate Professor at the College for Creative Studies until he retired in 2018.
He was active in the early days of the Cass Corridor, exhibited at the Willis Gallery in 1974 and has continued to exhibit in numerous venues locally, nationally, and internationally.
S. KAY YOUNG
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper
43 × 30 inches
Framed