Electric Feels in the D

This weekend I attended Dlectricity – a sprawling festival exhibition of Art and Light installed within Midtown Detroit, along Woodward Ave. starting at Kirby and stretching down past the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (affectionately known as MOCAD), the purpose being an interaction between old spaces and new media of expression, developing a sense of community, literally allowing the crowds of wide-eyed onlookers to see these public structures in a new light. Some things I saw:

Beginning at Detroit Artist’s Market where Endi Poskovic (Internationally acclaimed and prolific artist/teacher at A&D) has curated a show called Landscape and Abstraction, bringing together six Michigan printmakers whose work wanders between fields of relief, collage, reduction woodcut, hanging installation, and even prints with city lights punched out of the paper, leaving it full of holes and shadows – here also is projection on screen by another A&D teacher Heidi Kumao, shadows and video shot onto stack of books, small silhouette climbing spines like ladder rungs, well done –

on to MOCAD where two projections outside talked across from each other: a girl slowly beatboxing really barely making any noise and opposite her a dancer man in a sweat suit pop locking and turning to her occasional rat-tats and fwooms – farther behind in shack-like side building more projection on garage door, through door are shadows interacting with footage of guests donning paper and rubber masks and walking through this hall of shining mysteries, us watching from outside, adjacent to this real time journeying are shots of disco retro dancer couples, strange contrast, ritualistic but jiving, the dancers all smiles, us moving on –

big steel MOCAD doors, wander inside, pass gift shop, ponder art – I saw paintings of lacquer and varnish, garish portraits with worms of paint squirted from tube over bodies, farther in was a room of rooms, pairs of artists filling small spaces, like IP studios, I saw videos, tables of books with hanging headphones that don’t work, moldmaker casting things he likes, wants to try, saw buddhas and large quarters and rock mobiles, collections of plants, a room of hayfloor and wooden puppet at table of horrors, a room of college essays and notebook sketches and writing stapled behind plexiglass all four walls and floor – in the next room a performance, two girls on stage, purposely caked makeup, dumb wigs, blacked-out teeth, cartoons, sing karaoke ballad about freedom of self, hop around stage, having fun up there, us deciding it was about performance culture and our expectations of performers and the realities we don’t see and don’t want to – onward, pop-up shop of forgery containers in corner gallery, soup cans and boxes of crayons and spam, cigarette cartons, candy packaging, all plastic and empty with little lamps inside, free, on necklace or fishing pole stick dangle, bouncing light –

there was a bike parade in the street, wheels and wheels spinning by all a-glow, whistles and hoots and hollers from riders, music blares, mingles, moving, us following flow of bikes up Woodward  – stopping next at a big open field on Warren, perspective box confusing, supposed to distort scale, make small and tall people look same size, can’t see while inside walking through, unsure, design tent of wares, projection on wall on back of porto-potties (a woman in a blindfold sitting on a whoopee cushion over and over again, on three screens, somehow each clip a little different, done multiple times) – onward again, a glowing inflated set of four fingers gyrating in the sky, reminding of rocketship alien arms, scheming above bystanders, lighting up and spreading, buzzing, down the street hugeing projecting on façade of DIA, madness, landscapes and faces with trees and scales growing, a cube with cameras, projecting immediate audience onto various backgrounds (traffic, fields of color, crowds of people), a cathedral with echoey glowing windows, ineffective from up close, craning neck to see nothing faint glimmer of orange light above – us reaching Woodward and Kirby, turning, walking block to see Osman Khan (yet another A&D Prof) installation, a house shape in LED tubes, fluorescent, a diagonal bulb in middle occasionally blinking while house frame dims –

in addition to all this ART I saw faces, all the faces gaping and looking around, searching for meaning in awe of illuminations, seas of crowds flowing over street corners, intersections, tides of feet and eyes, heads turning in Look – and the space really was transformed, not even so much by the light itself but what the light causes which is community, everybody here for the same thing, all the souls searching for one thing or another, the real deal being something there worth searching for, this the effect of light, to make us see what we hadn’t before – and you can be sure I’ll be back next year.