Dylan Spaysky: taz

March 21 - April 24, 2015
Opening reception: Saturday, March 21, 5-7pm

Dylan Spaysky (b. Waterford, MI) lives and works in Detroit, MI. Selected exhibitions include: Susanne Hilberry (Detroit, MI), NGBK (Berlin), Michael Benevento (Los Angeles, CA), and Cleopatra’s (Brooklyn, NY). Spaysky is Co-Director of Detroit artist-run space Cave, and has organized exhibitions around the area in venues such as Center Galleries and the abandoned car wash at Norwalk St. and Buffalo St. in Hamtramck.

"The objects on display vary in our impression. All meld found components with minimal manipulation. Some function as forgotten tourist relics lost in the wake of foreclosure or death. Most are unequivocally pathetic. Others, like a fringed knitted cylinder hanging from the ceiling, evade the funerary in refreshingly nimble sways and clacks. The artist doesn’t shun conversations with grunge or Bad Art or Oldenberg, but he doesn’t court them, either. He avoids a moral claim on thrifted archaeology and lets his creatures talk, regardless of the weird or worrisome timbres contingent on that trust. The artist toys with the social and economic implications of taste and the decorative impulse, of home-making as privilege, even, without necessarily staking a foothold in a larger political conversation. This cultivated ambivalence allows Spaysky to craft dialogues between transience and permanence that never swell beyond the sphere of their installation.

Across media, Spaysky analogizes the human body, or, perhaps more precisely, the body’s human limits. Plastic pearls glint like gallstones beneath cellophane skins. Biomorphic glue accretions clump over supports that may or may not be molding, stains and tears abound, and the fountains come far closer to weeping than spewing. Their posture is phallic, and that specific, thwarted slouch wrestles with the mother tongue of masculinity in ways too slippery for definition."  —Torey Akers

View CATALOGUE

Full catalogue essay: Boyhood by Torey Akers

Photography by Joseph Conder.