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From: Linda Zapczynski
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 02 October 2004
Tyree Guyton Singing For Our Countries Exhibition of New Works Batista Gallery Ferndale, Michigan Tyree Guyton is growing. His new series of work follows his first trip to Australia last spring, yielding a plethora of work influenced by the aboriginal community.
His familiar dots, which Guyton had interpreted as international cultures, have evolved into patterns, reflecting the aboriginal art around him. Black lines integrate the colorful large dots, symbolizing pathways, another aboriginal influence. The series is structurally strong, colorfully intense, and completed in passion.
"Yellow Dress C" departs into representation, a mixed media composition of a yellow dress flanked by the signature dots. A universal humanness is evoked, a tie to all cultures.
Guyton's watercolors on paper are just as strong as his house paint on wood. The bright opaqueness echo Guyton's passion and forthrightness into culture and ties between peoples.
In "Series 4 Untitled D", Guyton includes smaller multicolored circles within curved lines, a borrowing from symbolic gathering places in Aboriginal art. In Guyton's work, perhaps the smaller, variously colored circles represent the children of various cultures? He is, after all, working with Detroit area children to create a project of decorated shoes with individual notes enclosed, to be displayed in Sydney next month.
As of now, Guyton is in Australia, installing "Singing For That Country", a child of his Heidelberg Project in Detroit. Nancy Thayer Nancy Thayer's work has thinned in impasto, but not in illustrious change. Her work at the Batista is combined with her trademark dripping acrylic, to a glowing, smoother landscape abstract.
"Morning's View" is a dark, impasto acrylic, flowing paint frozen on the edges, reminescent of Thayer's signature style. Depth and love of paint are reflected in her thick rendering, made more mysterious by the dark color flowing through the painting.
Another take on mixed media is "East of Eden", a tryptych in acrylic on wood, flanked on both sides by oxidized metal. The dark paint is complemented by integrated red, yellows and bright green. The combination of wood and metal supports is balanced in both simplicity of the metal and the complicated abstract.
The smooth brushstrokes and glowing sky is a visual peace in "Nightscape 1". Complementing "Morning's View", the difference in style is a huge evolvement. The whites overwhelm, to a heavenliness. Golds are carried through, as in all of Thayer's presented work.
Reds are deftly mixed in the golds of the rest of the pieces in the show, creating compositions of mesmerizing blocks.
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