JEANETTE STREZINSKI @ neal davis gallery

It was a busy friday night and an interesting start to the fall season. I started north in royal oak and worked my way downtown. It's funny, I already am hesitating to comment - not just on the Neal Davis show but I am just starting to know too many people and my anonymity is something I no longer have. For me the worst thing is to leave a show and have someone remark..."I can't wait to see what you write..." — talk about pressure! I remember back to the beginning of this blog, to when if I spouted out about a lackluster show, almost no one would even blink. Things have changed and even now, when it is the last month in town for me, people assume I have already left. It is a strange and bittersweet time in the city.
OK, so Neal Davis. Strezinski, who also runs the great Detroit Industrial Projects (see their next show), has taken her time out from curating to create some new works on canvas. The paintings, which come from earlier studies on paper, are very reminiscent of the abstract expressionist period and she admits that these works were during a "Rauschenberg phase" and maybe a bit of Motherwell. Having known Strezinski for the past four years, I have never seen even a glimpse of her work before (despite requesting to) so I was very interested to see how her work might be influenced by curation. I, if anything, expected more experimentation and more rule breaking based on the recent shows she has put together at DIP, but from what we discussed it seems as though that is soon to come. I look forward to seeing where these works progress because she, like I, has moved past this period.