Exhibition Reviews

After the Blueprint: All Things Architecture

Maus Haus Gallery, September 5–26, 2025

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Cheryl Maus, owner of the Maus Haus Gallery and curator of the current show in Hazel Park. She told me that thirty artists are represented in After the Blueprint and that a couple of works had already sold in the first days, a sure sign of energy surrounding the exhibition. The show isn’t an architectural survey but a lively conversation among artists about how imagination can transform architecture.

Architecture balances between utility and art, now Maus Haus has tilted the balance toward imagination. Here, walls, windows, and rooftops are not fixed, they sprout, warp, glow, and sometimes bare their teeth. The result is an exhibition that feels less like tracing a city plan and more like wandering through a dreamscape of imagined streets.

The range of voices is striking. Joel Henry-Fisher’s Monster House is a textile marvel, a plush structure with googly eyes and a hungry grin, playful yet uncanny, daring us to see our homes as sentient beings. Nearby, Suzanne Allen’s cyanotypes, rendered in deep Prussian blue, turn skeletal towers into ghostly apparitions: architecture as memory, spectral and unresolved. In contrast, Dave Christiansen dazzles with hard-edged color and mirrored glass, showing that modernist surfaces are as much kaleidoscope as they are façade.

Detroit is a strong presence throughout. The Belle Isle Conservatory, etched into metallic texture, appears in relief while a glowing bridge evokes Mackinac at night, bathed in aurora-like light. Linda Boyle’s The House Decorated surrounds a Detroit porch with a constellation of painted circles, as if confetti had taken up residence. Meanwhile, Rosemary Lee and Bonnie Weinreich push toward abstraction: angular red, black, and ochre compositions that feel less like buildings than the emotions they summon. Photography anchors the exhibition with moments of clarity. Black-and-white studies of skyscrapers reduce the vertical city to hypnotic grids, while a series of smaller prints catalog abandoned houses, each façade whispering its own history. John Hadala’s Curacao photograph reminds us that architecture wears culture like a second skin.

Several works take delight in bending the blueprint beyond interpretation. A house floats above the canvas, its foundation a tangle of octopus arms. Another emerges blood-red against a crimson sky, more gothic apparition than dwelling. A digital print places Detroit’s skyline surrounded by blossoms, architecture made jewel-like and precious. Catherine Peet pushes the mood further into the mythic, her sculpted skyline pressed under a storm-darkened sky and rose-window sun, part apocalyptic, part reverent. Melissa Valenti’s Botanical Bean offers a gleaming wink, reframing Chicago not in steel and plaza concrete but in petals and vines, a city softened into an organic jewel. Leslie Abraham’s Local Lore brings things back to the ground with a Detroit street corner, a weathered brick building, and an abandoned scooter: a modest but dignified marker of lived experience. What makes After the Blueprint succeed is its refusal to settle into a single register. Instead, it speaks as a chorus: playful in one corner, reverent in another, satirical just a few steps away. Abstraction brushes against precision, fantasy folds into memory. The show insists that architecture is never mute; it’s a living character, shaping our days as much as we shape it.

The Gallery has woven painters, sculptors, photographers, and textile artists into a restless conversation that refuses the notion of architecture as background. From the very first work, it’s clear: a blueprint is not a destination but a beginning. After the Blueprint is celebratory, an affirmation that to build is also to dream. Cities are memory, imagination, and aspiration layered like brick. This exhibition captures that truth with warmth, daring, and zest. 

Aura and Icon:

Considering the Paintings of Timothy Kelley.

Donald Brackett

“I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how

myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of this fact.”

Claude Levi-Strauss

“Pandemic Series I” 2022, pencil, acrylic and ink on paper, 19 x 24 inches

Seeing is touching. To be seen is to be touched. Some artists remind us of

the haptic quality of viewing handmade images and objects, a quality that

can never be approximated by either digital technology or even by the finest

reproduction in print. Some artworks also alert us to the primacy of our

relationship to images, to what the visionary culture critic Walter Benjamin

called “our great and primitive passion”. For me, to see a captivating series

of images such as Tim Kelley’s “Pandemic” series for instance, is to witness

an arresting array of fugitive glances, glimpses which peer inward rather

than solely outward and by doing so capture the essence of two interrelated

phenomena: aura and icon. Kelley’s latest work is part of an intriguing

current four person group show of local Detroit artists curated by Cheryl

Maus of the Maus Haus Gallery, located in Hazel Park.

As a curatorial installation, Lifelong Threads might contain an embodiment

of the ethos expressed by each artist’s aesthetic and it might likewise contain

a touching reference to the fact that the works shown emerged from four

schoolmates who grew up in the suburban Detroit area of Warren Michigan.

Half a century is a long time to be intertwined together in the art making

process, and it’s fair to say that the four artists and their works are engaged

in a dialogue which the curator has described as “tracing life’s path through

materials, memories and form”. Indeed, when some of the images are

paintings and drawings, while others are sculptural (small enough in scale to

be worn as adornments for the body) it becomes clear that we are dealing

with an intimate kind of quantum level perceptual and conceptual endeavor.

“Pandemic Series II”, 2022

While I’m less familiar with his three fellow exhibiting artists, I have been

closely following Kelley’s diligent process from a distance for several years.

His pieces are deeply contemplative and reflect an ongoing interest in the

metaphysical realm. While not ‘spiritual’ per se in any literal sense, they

nonetheless evoke this artist’s insights about the spirituality of matter, of

how spirit and substance may merely be two different names for the same

thing. When I look at vibrant Kelley paintings such as his “Pandemic

Series” I can’t help feeling that I’m being shown an x-ray of matter itself

and being brought into an sotto voce conversation between the physical

world and the immaterial world. More actual that realist, and surpassing a

scientific depiction of the interior of matter, they each share brief

illuminating forays into what feels like a veritable portrait of energy, and

also a powerful landscape at the sub-atomic level. All is in endless flux, as

the artist sums it up quite succinctly.

“My work has always been about invisible forces that seem to oversee us.

I have lived with a Lakota Sioux medicine man and also lived in a Tibetan

Buddhist monastery near Kathmandu, where I learned much more about

these invisible forces. This body of iconic feeling works really grew quite

focused when the recent pandemic broke out. In my work over the years,

icons have often emerged that feel as if they represent these all powerful

sentinels, guardians who could remedy everything on earth if they chose to,

or else destroy it all at their whim, something like gods or angels, but instead

they choose to just observe. I try to avoid making art as art: it's more a kind

of documentation I strive for. The desired overall outcome of the

juxtaposition of these icons though is a sense of foreboding -- as if

something either very good or very bad is impending.” I’ll cast my vote for

the former, since artists like Kelley tend to restore my sense of optimism.

To this degree, Kelley’s magical and occasionally spooky images are about

the mythology of matter and the music of molecules. They are a virtual

archive of alchemy and its attributes: they tell us that our agenda is

transformation. We are not always even sure where the transformation is

leading us. That, in the end, is the essence of transcendence: to accept

transformation without knowing the consequences in advance, another word

for which is evolution. And as we are all being tantalized deeper into a

digital and somewhat artificial world, one where instant information is

communicated in blurred fragments, the importance of visual art that

remains true to the aura of our physical and psychic environment will

become increasingly obvious.

Shining a bright light into the dark recesses of potential seeing: such is the

function of the art of 21rst Century painting. Ever since Benjamin explored

the fate of the original aura (the unique ‘truth content’ of the originally ritual

art object) in his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction”, historians have been lamenting its disappearance or loss.

However, now, in our present age of digital reproduction, that aura is still as

secure as ever, as long as it is as authentic as it appears to be in these visual

rhapsodies by the icon painter under consideration.

“Pandemic Series III”

The palpable desire of these images, and perhaps of their maker, to transcend

our everyday assumptions, is connected to their purity, simplicity, and near

trance-like vitality. Here is an artist who offers us aura and icon unbound,

via penetrating a reality behind, beneath, beside, on top of, or hidden within

the one we usually witness. Such an artist is also an eyewitness to a world

which can neither be confirmed nor denied, and therefore his works are a

gentle gesture toward the inexplicable. This kind of painting, the kind that

attempts to portray the ineffable or essential, like the poetry it sometimes

makes manifest, is simply always a relentless search for the intangible and

the inexplicable. As Antoine Exupery has said, “What is essential is invisible

to the eye and can only be seen with the heart.” Fortunately, the painted

surface is still a viable screen for transmitting thoughts and feelings. Tactile,

visceral, demanding and cranky, painting is a form of expression that

provides an antidote to the flickering screens and awkward extension cords

of our shrinking world.

“Pandemic Series IV”

And as a glimpse around the art world reveals, painting is not only alive and

well today but is thriving as never before. This fresh faith in painting still

relates to the aura of works of art, an emotional distance that does not

decrease no matter how close we get to an original work. What Benjamin

also called an approach to the inexpressible at which point the aura arises, is

invested in their physical properties and suffers significant loss when the

icon is reproduced or digitalized. Indeed, our visual appetite for the aura

around paintings will only increase as we continue to be dragged further into

that vague cyberspace dangling in front of us all. As such, paintings such as

Kelley’s are actually a documentary about time. Each one asks us puzzling

questions, kind of like the visual equivalent of zen koans or haiku poems.

“Pandemic Series V”

To some extent, his work resonates, in a good way, with Der Blaue Reiter

(The Blue Rider) movement in expressionist art which was championed by

Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky prior to the World War I. One senses a

shared interest in using abstract forms and bold colours in order to express

spiritual truths and emotional depths by moving far beyond mere realistic

representation and by emphasizing inner visions over external mimesis.

Indeed, there is a sibling-like aesthetic at work that evokes Kandinksy’s

quest for the spiritual properties of colour and the spiritual aspect in art

overall. Certainly a shared ethos and desire to transcend the physical world

through visual art is evident in Kelley’s fascinating recurring motif of the

dolmen-like sentinel forms which pose parallel questions sought by the

Blaue Reiter painters.

Why are these towering motifs standing in a kind of vigil around us? Are

they here to help, hinder or merely to collect information on our apparent

plight? Is time a dimension in a curved, four-dimensional universe? Is Time

the tangible of the fourth dimension? Is art only the visible bottom edge of

something largely invisible to us? Will there ever be a cessation to our

questions? Maybe the only answer is simply a striking visual image rather

than words. This answer is comparable to alchemy in action, captured in the

frozen music of paint, and shared in time. Kelley’s paintings are postcards

sent across acres of time from the past to the present, and from the present to

the future. Sometimes, perhaps the only correct response to all our

interrogative wonderment which the sentinels offer us is their elegant

silence. And among other things, one of the pleasures that Timothy Kelley’s

paintings provide for us is a visual vocabulary for that silence.

Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based art critic/curator whose recent book

Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, explored the historical origins of conceptual art.