U-M photography exhibition explores a dark Detroit

May 25, 2016
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EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: June 11-Nov. 6, 2016

EVENT: “Overnight,” a free photography exhibition by Detroit-based architect Catie Newell, who wants to capture her city’s darkness before it’s all gone.

PLACE: Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery, University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 S. State St., Ann Arbor

DETAILS: Once the worst in the nation, Detroit’s streetlights are being replaced by thousands of LEDs in a $185 million infrastructure project. Before all the lights come back on, Newell has been working to document that darkness in neighborhoods around the city.

“The lights are coming back, and we’ll lose that darkness,” said Newell, assistant professor at U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

The installation draws on Newell’s architecture background, and is made up of materials—copper, aluminum, piano wire, LEDs—that reference the city streetlights, and will be lit at night.

The most important element in her formal artistic vocabulary is light, not only as a “material” in its own right, but also as a condition. Varying in strength, form and duration, light constructs architecture as a situational experience rather than a fixed space.

Newell’s fascination with light is a fascination with darkness. Through urban interventions, installations, and photographs, she investigates how darkness creates alternate environments, with unseen geographies, untold histories and secret identities.

“I’ve always been interested in darkness and the night,” she said. “Colors look different. Things have a different hierarchy, based on what’s lit and what’s not.”

Exploring the neighborhoods around East Grand Boulevard and the Grand Belt in the middle of the night, Newell purposely avoids the now-clichéd abandoned structures around the city. As Detroit’s new LED streetlights come in, she said she looks for hot spots of light surrounded by darkness.

“I’m more interested in capturing these moments that are kind of impossible,” she said.

INFORMATION: UMMA galleries are open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday. Building is open 8 a.m.-6 p.m. daily.