Michael E. Smith

For his first exhibition at Detroit’s What Pipeline, Michael E. Smith explores themes of mortality and consumption with elegant economy. The show comprises two works (both Untitled, 2018): a camcorder with a small potato stuck in its lens, resting on the floor of the gallery’s main space, and a sea turtle skull seated on a scuffed white plastic lawn chair, stationed in the small back room.

This interplay between the organic and the synthetic speaks to the relationships between humans and things. In both artworks, the organic object impedes the synthetic, domestic object’s utility. If the former

picks August 15, 2018

Michel Parmentier

For Michel Parmentier’s first US museum exhibition, twenty-seven artworks represent the phases of his life’s work—from his imposing paintings of the 1960s and early 1980s to his delicate works on paper, in which his antigestural stance chafes against his scrawls of graphite and oil stick. Rounding out the show are archival materials and his writings on art, as well as a documentary film by Bernard Bloch depicting the artist at work, demonstrating the centrality of critique to his practice. While these are essential to contextualizing the works, it is the remarkable consistency of his principles