Scott Hocking: Detroit Stories is the first museum retrospective of the artist, who has been living and working in Detroit for more than twenty-five years and who was born in the adjacent community of Redford Township, Michigan.
Emerging in the 2000s to become one of Detroit’s most important contemporary voices and chroniclers, Hocking possesses an embodied knowledge of the city and its idiosyncratic histories. While rooted in the city of Detroit, Hocking has also produced projects in different places around the world, responding to the particular circumstances of each location. His unique artistic process combines aspects of urban archeology— uncovering layers of history, meaning, and memory—with a historian’s sense of discovery and a writer’s craft of storytelling.
The exhibition includes pieces from Hocking’s major bodies of work, including his site-specific installations, large-scale sculptures, found object assemblages, photographic series, and videos of his journeys. Also known for his writings, Hocking will punctuate the galleries with some of his stories—tales of (mis)adventure, episodes from history, reflections of a changing city, ruminations on art and life, and more—offering a narrated tour for visitors on their own journey through the exhibition.
Monumental scale allows viewers to physically immerse themselves in this installation generating a visceral response to a wall of ornamental statues and the monsters that haunt them. Salvaged fiberglass figurines abandoned to the mercy of nature’s changing moods render stiff, plastic faces and outreached, decaying hands terrifying, the precise opposite of their original purpose. A couple of oversized mushrooms are nestled into the scene. Perhaps an avenue to spiritual epiphany?
Hello Lover. Arkansas Traveler reclines seductively across the gallery floor.
The Relics collaboration with Clinton Snider presents physical residue from generational incarnations of Detroit and its inhabitants. Only a tiny fraction of what is discarded on a person’s life journey, this collection begins to describe the magnitude of the trail of trash humans leave behind. The piece becomes personal as any viewer can find at least one element they can identify with. What was once prized or useful now joins a heap of deserted items reduced to merely a memory.
Hocking and Snider have spent their careers exploring and recording Detroit and its varied surrounding areas through ground and water expeditions, digging into to details most never see or pass by without noticing. Observation is an artist’s keen tool in producing a narrative that lights where there was apathy, explains where there was ignorance and sparks a conversation that inspires a shift in perspective and attitude.
On view through March 19th at Cranbrook Art Museum 39221 Woodward, Bloomfield Hills MI
*images are mine
direct quote from museum materials
**program note: This is the final review for 2022. Next week will be a shout out piece to an unexpected champion of Detroit art and this publication, which will close the year. Real Art Detroit will be back mid-January, publishing a new review every Thursday morning.
SHOWS OPEN THIS WEEKEND
Brain Candy Monday Dec 19th only