Exhibition Description

NADA Miami 2018
Kylie Lockwood and Michael Luchs
Dec. 6 – Dec. 9, 2018

Booth 9.14

Ice Palace Studios
1400 North Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33136

Kylie Lockwood, Eyetrophy in incremental scale shifts, 2018, Aluminum, Installation.
Download Preview of Kylie Lockwood Works

Michael Luchs, Untitled (Rabbit), 1990, Mixed paints, marker, and metallic paint on vinyl, 27 x 52 inches.
Download Preview of Michael Luchs Works

For NADA Miami 2018, Simone DeSousa Gallery is pleased to present the works of artists Michael Luchs and Kylie Lockwood. Separated by nearly five decades, Luchs and Lockwood have a fundamental connection to Detroit. Michael Luchs received his degree from Wayne State University, Detroit, in 1968, and was a pivotal artist in the Cass Corridor era, the first avant-garde movement to form in the city. His work was recently seen in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Lockwood was born in Detroit, and returned to the city after getting her MFA at Hunter College, New York, in 2010.

For both artists, the making of an artwork is a performance, or even a ritual. Their relationship to material is intimate, and untethered to perfecting the materiality’s capability. Luchs and Lockwood each produce their own idiosyncratic language guided by an internal logic.

While the material processes are central to Michael Luchs’ artwork, he resists virtuosity. Conventions are replaced with an astute psychological language of marks and gestures that exploits the raw, the awkward, the careless. Here and there, flashes of precision, grace, and subtlety heighten the emotional effects of aggressive gestures.

In Kylie Lockwood’s work the process of making sculpture has become a way to ask questions about the object’s true identity and essence. Her metal and ceramic works are able to imbue objects of contemporary life with the aura of deep, historical time, and often force us to look at things in different and surprising ways by upsetting or transforming the conventional relationship between inside and outside of the body.

Both Luchs and Lockwood are producing relevant work to the context of their time, that also present a timeless quality. Simone DeSousa Gallery is excited to present these two works in a combined setting that heightens the experience of their complementary qualities and distinct manifestations.

Kylie Lockwood
Kylie Lockwood (b. 1983, Detroit, MI, USA) received her BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2005, MFA from Hunter College in New York City in 2010 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. Solo and two person exhibitions include: “The Fingertip is an Image Forming Organ of Sight,” Coop Gallery, Nashville, TN, “Statue Maker,” Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY, and “Thinking Colon,” Popps Packing, Detroit, MI. Lockwood’s work has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Reyes Projects, Birmingham, MI; Lord Ludd in Philadelphia, PA; Synchrotron Radiation Center, Stoughton, WI; Interstate, Brooklyn, NY, Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit, MI, among others. She currently lives and works in Detroit, MI.

Michael Luchs
Michael Luchs (b. 1938, Portsmouth, OH, USA) was among the celebrated Detroit Cass Corridor painters and sculptors in the 1960s and 1970s. Luchs graduated from Olivet College (Olivet, Michigan) in 1961, and attended the University of Michigan in 1964 before moving to Detroit, where he studied at Wayne State University (1966-68). Luchs’ work was featured in the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition, Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963-1977, which took place in 1980, and also traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and written up in Art in America as part of a major spread on the Detroit’s art scene.

Michael Luchs has worked in rural settings for the last several years, and currently lives in Lewiston, Michigan, with his wife artist Kathryn Brackett Luchs. His work is part of several collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wayne State University James Duffy Collection, University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), and the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, as well as several private collections throughout the United States. He was recently part of the 2017 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in New York, where he was the recipient of the Academy’s 2017 Art and Purchase Award.

Michael Luchs’ most recent solo exhibition, Fictitious Character, took place in the summer of 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).