EXHIBITIONS | POPPS PACKING

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project by Ingrid LaFleur

Opening Reception:

Saturday May 5, 2015

6-9PM.

Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Guided Meditations on Sunday May 6, 13 and 20 at 2PM

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project outlines how to attain turiya, pure consciousness, in Hindu philosophy and investigates the theory that de-colonial futures can be created only when all trauma is cleansed from the body.

For this installation, Lafluer created a series of sculptures that utilize over twenty varieties of crystals such as pyrite, black tourmaline, amethyst, and bismuth, which she believes can heal traumas and help us transcend into the cosmos. The sculptural installation is accompanied by a sound essay that brings together the wisdom of Audre Lorde, Eartha Kitt, Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

Transcending the human experience is the only safe place where futures can be imagined freely without limitation. LaFleur believes the map for the future can be found within the transcendent music meditations created by jazz musician and Hindu practitioner, Alice Coltrane. Inspired by the composition Galaxy in Turiya, LaFleur finds a kinship with Detroit born Coltrane and regards her as a Patron Saint of their hometown.

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project

May 5- May 26, 2018

Popps Emporium

2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Ingrid LaFleur is a cultural producer, arts advocate, pleasure activist, founder of AFROTOPIA, and former candidate for mayor of Detroit. LaFleur has developed and organized art exhibitions both nationally and internationally with a curatorial focus on
Afrofuturism. In 2013, LaFleur founded AFROTOPIA, an evolving creative research project that investigates the possibilities of using the arts movement Afrofuturism as psychosocial healing.

Within her artistic practice, using sculpture, sound, site-specific installation and performance, LaFleur further unpacks ideas around trauma, which have arisen as a result of audience engagement through AFROTOPIA. She has exhibited in BOOM City Detroit curated by Dashboard Co-op (2015); the Something Else Off Biennial, Cairo, Egypt curated by Simon Njami (2015); Future Africa-Visions in Time at the Iwalewahaus at University of Bayreuth, Germany (2015-ongoing); Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College; Take Root Among the Stars at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

LaFleur has presented at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA),
TEDxBrooklyn, TEDxDetroit, Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth, Germany), Ideas City, New Museum (New York), AfroTech Conference (Dortmund, Germany), and Black in Design at Harvard University, among others.

LaFleur is based in Detroit, Michigan.

The Lounge of Saturn- A winter salon exhibition

Opening Reception: Saturday, December 9, 7-10PM

Popps Packing is pleased to present our winter salon show, The Lounge of Saturn. Saturn is known as the mythological god of generation, dissolution, plenty, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation as well as the god of time. During the month of December the Romans celebrated Saturn during the Saturnalia Festival, a time of feasting, role reversals, free speech, gift-giving and revelry. The Lounge of Saturn is our way to pay homage to the season, to the god of renewal, to honor the cycles of life and death and all that lies in between. The Lounge of Saturn will be an actual lounge space that folks can hang out in and relax while also viewing, sitting on and interacting with the art on display. The exhibition will feature both functional works and non functional works, video, installation, fine art, outsider art, printed matter, found objects, ceramics, sculpture and more.

Some of the featured artists include: Jessica Frelinghuysen, Ryan Standfest, Millee Tibbs, Marie Hermann, Scott Hocking, Clint Snider, Chris Schanck, Ryan Haas, James Viste, John Rizzo, James Collins, Peter Dunn, Adrian Hatfield, Anders Ruhwald, Alex Buzzalini, Victoria Shaheen, Teresa Petersen, Virgina Torrence, Henry Crissman, Chris Riddell, Michael McGillis, Noah Mantei, Graem Whyte, Faina Lerman, John Charnota, Alison Wong, Andrea Eckert, Nathan Tonning, Vince Troia, James Collins, Tim Van Laar, Rosie Sharp, Jonathon Rajewski, Kevin McCoy, Andrew Mehall and a few special guest performances.

NEIGHBORS by Paolo Marino at Popps Emporium

NEIGHBORS, an exhibition of new works by Paolo Marino

October 28- November 25, 2017

Gallery hours: Saturdays 12-5PM and by appointment.

Paolo Marino was born in the city of Rochester, NY, and was raised in one of the surrounding suburbs. He has worked as a movie theatre employee and manager, an assistant at a Montessori school, a teacher, a pizzeria janitor, and a drummer in several bands and a bar. He Graduated with a BA in Studio Art from Nazareth College in Rochester, and an MFA in Print Media from Cranbrook. Most recently, he has shown work at the International Print Center in New York, Big Car Collective in Indianapolis, and curated a show of mainly Detroit based artists for his residency at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, PA.

“I think a lot about fantasy. I used to play a lot of video games, and the older I get, the more I realize that the screen I spent so much time looking through was the most accurate representation we have now of how fantasy exists in reality. It is thin but not see through, and goes on into perceived infinity.

I find that in all I do, there is some sort of a threshold between fantasy and reality. I work from observation and from my head. I take experiences that I have had and turn them into vignettes, much the way a film director might – or a fiction writer. I think action movies are modern day history paintings. All of my work references the ways we ingest fantasy in some way – I make posters, film stills, dolls, models, and videos. And I do so in a way that improvises with my surroundings in order to better reflect them.”

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

THELONIOUS BONE & JIMBO EASTER

OPENING RECEPTION SAT. JUNE 10TH,

7-10PM

SHOW RUNS THROUGH JULY 8TH

These two great and pure artists have joined forces together to present to the world a haunted vision of midwestern american punk art, in it’s most majestic state.

Thelonius Bone. Previous works include, but are not limited to: Bronx, Pussy Boys, Rock N Roll Pool Boy, Turn to Crime Roadie, Total Trash, Hard Rock Cafe, Die Hard Christmas.

Jimbo Easter. Previous works include, but are not limited to: Piranhas, Druid Perfume, Diamond Hens, Jim Beam and the Throw Ups, Salvador, Odd Clouds, Redford Civic Parade.

In an art world populated mostly by ultra soft, unimaginative, reductive, generic, soulless, fake ass, out of touch, narcissistic, vapid, shitty, jerk off, con job jokers…these two true idiot fool savage maniacs of art, through a diligent practice of primitive and ancient recognition and conjuring rituals, have gained access to an underground mind world where dreams, emotions, and existence sit still like a toad in the heat breathing fast so you can see into yourself and the others and into a higher plane, and think what you want to think, and feel what you want to feel, move closer to the mystery, and in the end, experience an actual, real transmission of spiritual communication.

You may notice the collaborative work and individual works in this show share certain commonalities and explore some of the same spirit land. Gnomes, rock n roll landscapes, beasts, monsters, mistakes, creatures, cowboys, psychedelic minds, youth, family, destruction, absolute irreverence, strange freedom, death, birth, etc. You may notice, even within the contrasting variety of means and techniques employed by each individual, these artists are indeed working towards certain creative goals in stereo. A real Laurel and Hardy of the contemporary Detroit art scene!

Please enjoy the show and take the time to speak to these very special artists. I, myself, will use the opportunity of this opening to congratulate both of them on remaining real in a society that is blanketed in falsehoods.

JK, 2017

WELCOME BACK

OPENING RECEPTION, SATURDAY MAY 20

6-9 PM

SHOW RUNS THROUGH JUNE 17

Popps Packing is excited to present “Welcome Back” an exhibition of selected works by Cristin Richard (some of which have never been shown in Detroit). After 6 months away from her practice, Cristin has chosen this moment to reflect upon the existing narratives found in her work and to explore them wihtin a new context.

“Sometimes things happen in life that force you to change the ways of which you would have typically operated. It takes a good period of observation and discovery to find your new way.”

Through an interdisciplinary approach, Cristin leads an in depth reflection around the notions of the body and identity. She examines the human condition and the fact that the body is physically and mentally determined in this condition.

In her artistic practice, installation and performance hold an essential place. Particularly interested in the manipulation of organic matter, these materials build a dialog of what it feels like to be human. The human being is like nature. It transforms and regenerates in poetic and unpredictable ways. In the majority of her work, she reconstructs animal intestines into tangible objects. Playing upon the ambiguity created by the presence of this material, she develops metaphors loaded with complexities, and also explores the experience of the body in its perception and transformations. Her most recent works take the form of a participatory performance, where the audience unconsciously becomes an active part of the project.

Cristin Richard was born in Detroit, and currently lives and works in the city. She received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies
and has exhibited her artistic work locally, as well as in New York, Paris and Iceland.

A SHAMEFUL ENLIGHTENMENT

Opening Reception Sat. March 11th,

6-9pm

Show runs through April 8th

This is an exhibition and book release occasioned by the publication of “BLACK EYE No. 3,” the final and timely volume of “Black Eye,” the anthology of humor and despair published by Rotland Press. This all-comics issue compiles 136 pages with a jaundiced eye on the zeitgeist. Subtitled “A Shameful Enlightenment,” it is a riff on the absurdity of our times, as charted by a coterie of 36 international cartoonists. “Black Eye No. 3” will thrill, sicken, amuse, titillate, horrify, and fortify.

The event is an opportunity to bring together five of the contributing artists who are based in Detroit: Lucy Cahill, Mark Dancey, Francis Kulikowski, John Maggie and S. William Schudlich. Each artist will be exhibiting recent work made for Rotland Press. “Black Eye No. 3”, a limited edition companion book “The Sightseer’s Complement”, and “Rotland Dreadfuls: The Most Frightening Hole” by John Maggie will all be available for purchase.

“Ryan Standfest brings together an exquisitely curated collection of funny, dark, and beguiling comic art for Black Eye No. 3. I’m going to read my copy by a roaring arson blaze.” —Kaz, Creator of the comic strip “Underworld”

The contributors to “Black Eye No. 3” include: Alexis Beauclair, Tom Bunk, Andy Burkholder, Max Clotfelter, Mark Dancey, Kayla E., Vincenzo Fagnani, Penelope Gazin, Julia Gfrörer, Anna Haifisch, Corinne Halbert, Eric Haven, Ian Huebert, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Clara Bessijelle Johansson, Francis Kulikowski, Meghan Lamb, David Lynch, John Maggie, Nicolas Mahler, Jérôme Mulot, Erik Nebel, Paul Nudd, Onsmith, Pierre La Police, Helge Reumann, Josephin Ritschel, Martin Rowson, Florent Ruppert, Johnny Sampson, David Sandlin, S. William Schudlich, Santiago Sequeiros, Sammy Stein, Brecht Vandenbroucke, Chris Wright The cover is by Joan Cornellà. The book is edited by Ryan Standfest.

Founded in 2010, ROTLAND PRESS is a small publishing house located in Detroit, Michigan, USA. It is a publisher of printed projects that promote subversive humor— be it black, dark, gallows, satirical or absurd. ROTLAND PRESS aims to occupy a place between the mainstream and the avant-garde, the philistine and the genteel, industriously manufacturing the finest in despairing entertainment. Ryan Standfest in the Publisher and Editor-In-Chief.

Visit rotlandpress.com or follow Rotland Press on Facebook

Untitled Experiment of the Modern Gaze

Popps Packing is excited to present a new video installation by Oren Goldenberg utilizing 360 degree video, featuring Biba Bell.

Untitiled Experiment of the Modern Gaze is a contemporary approach to depicting the gaze of the viewer. Appropriating new Virtual Reality technology, Goldenberg is utilizing video to create an immersive environment that explores how we gaze, and how we are seen gazing. Through camera and body movements, a contradictory relationship is born between the viewer and the subject.

Oren Goldenberg is a producer and video artist living and working in Detroit where he uses video to explore the dismantlement of the public sector, subvert the assumed and create catharsis. His work captures society’s effect on the spaces around us, as well as, on the body. Selected projects included: Art as Ritual Conference, A Requiem for Douglass; and Detroit (Blank) City, to name a few. He is a 2016 Bernard L. Mass Prize for Fine Arts recipient and 2013 Kresge Artist Fellow.

Biba Bell (b. 1976, Sebastopol) is a writer, dancer, and choreographer based in Detroit. Her work proposes a modernist threshold between between architecture and dance, and is more recently focused on social dance. Bell’s performance work has been seen at JACK (Brooklyn), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami), Kunstlerhaus (Bremen, Germany), Cranbrook Art Museum, and in a Mies van der Rohe apartment in Detroit. Bell is a 2016 Kresge Fellow in Live Arts, is an Assistant Professor in Dance at Wayne State University, and she earned her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University.

Check out the Facebook event.

August Residency Exhibition

Marion Neumann, Isamu Krieger, Yi Zhou and Franziska Klose

Friday August 26, 2016

6-10PM

Please Join us for this special event that spans the whole Popps compound and highlights the wonderful work created by our current AIR.

With Snacks and Refreshments

“Mounts & Marvels” , by Isamu Krieger (Switzerland) at Popps Emporium.

“Like an unfold origami, the flat paper that however keeps the lines of the architectural volume, offers though a new surface to write one’s tale. In front of a nearly blank page, I develop my practice of drawing and I search to combine natural elements with abstract shapes and to compose patterns of landscapes based on graphical systems. My proposal here is to play with visual tensions using optical games, illusions of crossing lines, horizontal panoramas and vertical cliffs, deep caves and a plane plateau…All of this is in order to create obviously an effect of vertigo. A dizziness between absence and presence, between rising and falling… ”

“Wild Plants” directed by Nicolas Humbert with cinematography by Marion Neumann (Switzerland)

Film Screening of at 9PM,

People’s associations with flora goes back a long way, taking us back to our own roots as well as to new ways of life and creative potential that reveal themselves as we deal with plants. ‘Wild Plants’ is a film that traces these clues and takes us to urban gardens in Detroit, to Native American philosopher Milo Yellow Hair in Wounded Knee, to the wild plantations of Zurich’s legendary ‘Guerilla Gardener’ Maurice Maggi, and to the innovative horticulture cooperative ‘Les Jardins de Cocagne’ in Geneva.

The New Wild–Detroit“. by Franziska Klose (Germany) www.frzlkrzl.tumblr.com,

The New Wild–Detroit is part of a long-term project that pictures postindustrial landscapes worldwide. It will combine pictures of urban and industrial vegetation and various farms in Detroit with historical images and texts to describe the permanent change of Detroit’s urban and social landscape.

Klose studied at Bauhaus-University Weimar, at École Supérieure des Arts Visuels Genève/CH and at Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. She lives in Leipzig, Germany.

“Body Memory Clinic” by Yi Zhou (China)

Demonstrations from 7-9PM

Practicing from her Pop Up, Body Memory clinic and wearing her trademark Doctors coat, the self confessed “collector of human body parts”, takes a ‘faux-scientific’ look at body form and the role that our body parts, rather than our brain, play in storing our memories.

Fingers, noses, lips, ears, breasts and even belly buttons are covered with resin and then plaster bandages to create unconventional, quirky jewellery pieces and accessories.

Mycelium Give-Away

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Marion Neumann will be giving away mycelium left over from the Radical Mycology Workshops earlier this month. She’ll show you what you need to do in order to grow your own mushrooms at home. First come first serve, so come early and get you spores!!

Light snacks and refreshments

Residency Exhbition,

The Big Art Show

with current AIR, StudioPlusminusnull
Tuesday, August 9, 2016

7-10PM

ONE NIGHT ONLY!!

Studio Plusminusnull is an art collective based in Northern Germany. Tom Korn, Claudia Kulenkampff ,Susanne Klingenberg, Ulli Bomans, Brozilla and Gilta Jansen have been collaborating on projects since 2014. During their 1 month residency at Popps they have been taking advantage of the shared space and time to create new collaborative works as well as individual works that explore a range of mediums including, active media, painting, installation, urban art, object and collage. Please join us for this one night only exhbition of new works created while in residence at Popps.

Friday, May 27 6PM- 9PM

Open Studio with Vincenzo Fagnani and Tana Santos

Please join us for an open studio with visiting artists, Vincenzo Fagnani and Tana Santos (currently living and working in Berlin). Vincenzo & Tana will present a large body of work installed around the Popps compound and beyond that focuses on the relationship between symbols, ethics and public spaces.

This works is part of a larger project titled, “The Sea After Crisis: Reality is amorphous. Ethics is graphics”.

About the “The Sea After Crisis”:

From Pre-Hellenic cultures until today humans have been determining a number of ethical geometries that survived and strengthened over the most significant epochal changes, above all the accession of monotheism. Those geometries also represent the basis of a social model which imposed its will worldwide over the past centuries.

“The sea after crisis” is a project about the dynamics of moral structures and the role of graphics in society. It is a long trip across etymology and symbology narrated through visual paradoxes, poster campaigns and art interventions to realize in three emblematic cities: Detroit (United States), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Athens (Greece). The experiences made in those cities will be then collected in a single book.

Some of Vincenzos published works can be found at Printed Matter.