March 20, 2005

BY KERI GUTEN COHEN for the Detroit Free Press

John Cynar is well-known in Detroit-area art circles, mostly as an exhibitions curator for such popular nonprofit spaces as Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester and most lately the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center in Birmingham.

In the mid-1990s, he founded Start Gallery in downtown Birmingham to showcase local art by bringing Detroit's urban artists to the suburbs. In 2003, he led a coalition of four galleries -- Detroit Artists Market, Detroit Contemporary, Paint Creek and Meadow Brook Art Gallery -- in producing "Detroit Now," which showed local contemporary art at all four spaces.

Now the local arts advocate will reclaim the title "artist" as he makes his first major solo showing in more than 10 years.

Jumping at the chance for the show at the Museum of New Art in Pontiac with only a few months to prepare, Cynar produced two successful bodies of work for a whopping offering of 65 pieces -- all digital photographs, which hark back to his beginnings as a photographer before he branched out into sculpture, collages and multimedia art.

"We work hard and wear multiple hats," Cynar says of gallery directors, "but I have the firm belief that we're artists deep inside.

"It's about going in the studio and creating art you haven't done for so long. I'm in artist mode and feeling good about it."

He should. The work is fresh and engaging and makes you open your eyes to things you see every day but fail to notice.

In "Man/Made-Higher," Cynar pairs photographs of iconic church architecture with technological architecture -- mostly cell phone towers. By joining the two images side by side, he effectively blends traditional religion with society's new religion of technology.

He brings emotion, power and a painterly quality into the equation by using tonal filters to create images of singular colors. Seen together against sunlight from the gallery windows, they look almost like stained glass windows.

Unifying elements in all 65 images are the absence of people and a sense of loneliness and isolation, along with tightly cropped, well-composed frames.

In his second group, "Night Studies" and "Night Forest, " Cynar works with a simple idea.

"It's a whole world we don't see," Cynar says of the world from midnight to 5 a.m., which he photographed in black and white. "Our world is in daylight."

Cynar captures trees illuminated eerily by shopping center lights, by highway lights, by campus lights -- "trees that never see darkness."

A major portion of these images was shot in the middle of the night along the Woodward corridor from Birmingham to Detroit. His tight photographs are studies in light and dark, architecture and reflections. In many, he achieves a dimensional feel, with a layering of foreground and background. This is in distinct contrast to his color series, which is purposely flat.

Cynar's solo exhibition certainly puts the "artist" prominently among his roles in the art world. He shouldn't wait so long to do this again.

Also at MONA, look for multimedia installations by Audra Wolowiec, a University of Michigan art graduate who compellingly blends science with art. She creates a dress from ordinary straws backed by rubber, then photographs a model wearing it, capturing the hem of the dress and her bare legs. She then encapsulates the small photograph in wax and removes the material leaving a strong, painterly image. Other installations feature white broken test tubes submerged in liquid and encased in Plexiglas, and cell pods of fiberglass, resin and wire.

Upstairs at MONA, find the hauntingly honest paintings of Ed Sarkis of Troy, who works in quick, strong gestural movements to create reactions we might have to 9/11, the war in Iraq and other political hot buttons. His sketchy, minimalist, colorful paintings evoke plenty of emotion.