About the Artists of In Depth
In Depth is the gallery’s first all-sculpture exhibition. It features work by Simon Anton, Sofia Bicego, Austen Brantley, Scott Vincent Campbell, Patrick Ethen, Amy Feigley-Lee, Robert Mirek, Scheherazade Washington Parrish, Tony Rave, India Solomon, Elizabeth Youngblood.
Tony Rave
Tony Rave (b. Detroit, 1986) started creating art at a young age with the support of his family and teachers. His undertakings exhibit an audacious proficiency of craft and intentionality. Rave’s work has received wide appeal in national and international forums, and as part of solo and group exhibitions from Detroit to New York to Rio de Janeiro. Rave believes in the role of art in community-building. He has supported his community by initiating a number of platforms and spaces for local artists, including 48 Hour, an artists’ platform aiming to create a global dialogue with Black artists living and creating in Detroit.
Sofia Bicego
Sofia Bicego is an interdisciplinary artist from Warren, Michigan and currently working in the Metro Detroit Area. She grew up in a house full of women, both caring for and being cared-for by her mother, one older sister, and one younger sister. Her focus is on investigating grief, trauma, and healing as they exist simultaneously within the body. She does this by using labor intensive and meditative methods of making, particularly through sculpture, site-specific installation, and drawing. Through these processes, Sofia creates codependency between object and author, balancing the taking from and caretaking of material. Sofia has shown works at Huron Valley Council for the Arts (Highland, MI), Reyes | Finn (Detroit, MI), Swords into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery (Detroit, MI), Socra Tea Detroit (Detroit, MI), U245 Gallery (Detroit, MI), and 333 Midland Annex Gallery (Detroit, MI). Sofia also exhibited site-specific installations at the Herman Kiefer Medical Complex (Detroit, MI), and Bulk Sanctuary (Detroit, MI). Sofia is a recent graduate from the College for Creative Studies with a BFA in Art Practice and a minor in Ceramics.
Robert Mirek
Robert Mirek (b. 1957) is a painter and sculptor from Detroit, Michigan. His current imagery can best be explained as simultaneous. The visual language that he is developing is a form of self-dialogue that resides in objects, systems and scenarios that are at the edge of abstraction. Developing the imagery is a non-linear, or perhaps best phrased as, a personal rationale. He works through a thought process that keeps as many doors open at once. The conceptual connections, which eventually become visual signals, are drawn in simultaneous moments. Often they have their origins in mythic or universal themes.
India Solomon
India Solomon is a Detroit-based, abstract visual artist raised on the city’s Westside with family across the globe. India creates as a means of ancestral wayfinding through the cultures that make her whole, creating micro-maps of experience that comprise a non-verbal monologue of how she came to be. As a self-taught artist, India’s work is a direct manifestation of the latent creativity within those who came before her – people who lived less freely, waded through less favorable waters, and created out of necessity nonetheless. In pursuit of radical self-determination, India uses her artwork as a platform for broader activism around truth, clarity, freedom, and liberation, particularly for women of color. The full spectrum of her practice includes paintings, garments, home goods, digital works, and murals, all created with the objective of ensuring that as many people as possible find relevance, access, and belonging in her work. Through abstraction, movement, music, color-making, and energetic balancing, India strives to achieve universal appeal while redefining how cultural work is expressed and recognized. Understanding the importance of representation, India is committed to a highly-visible practice; you can find India taking her work to the streets, live-painting at community gatherings, and hosting guided workshops for creators of all ages. She owns an art studio in Ferndale, Fluid.Spaces, and she is a proud product of Ferndale High School and the University of Michigan.
Elizabeth Youngblood
Born and educated in Detroit, Elizabeth Youngblood is an artist, educator, designer and maker of interesting things. She has always maintained a dual interest in making by hand and in design for production. Youngblood’s art making practice includes working in the mediums of drawing, ceramics, weaving, book binding and more. She’s been a faculty member at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and SUNY Purchase, NY, managed branding with Unisys, and designed at the New York Times. After a stint on the east coast, Youngblood has returned to Detroit where she maintains a studio practice and continues to investigate the intersection of her range of interests. Currently leads workshops and special studios in experimental ceramic techniques.
Patrick Ethen
Patrick Ethen is an architecturally trained artist and designer, living and working in Detroit, MI since 2015. His work is centered around light and the production of visual affect, utilizing a hybrid of digital / analog techniques to craft ethereal and immersive experiences. Ethen’s projects range from bespoke, wall-mounted light objects to room-scale design-build projects. He is a member of the sonic / spatial afterparty, Texture, where his atmospheric installations have become a mainstay of the Detroit underground.
A primary focus on light means the work is able to flit between the tenets of art, architecture, and design, existing in a state of synthesis that Ethen describes as more of a New Age Craft than any singular discipline. The process often resembles textile weaving, if one were to replace thread with wire and electronic circuitry. Ethen’s work seems to suggest that art is an experience in time, a dance which exists primarily in the mind of the observer.
Scott Vincent Campbell
Scott Vincent Campbell (b. 1983) is a visual artist and curator born in New York, and currently based in Detroit, MI. He received his BFA from Haverford College in 2005. Working primarily in drawing, collage, and mixed-media sculpture, Campbell, in his studio practice, examines the social and cultural constructs that inform our identity, motivate our behavior, and ultimately shape our societies.
Visually inspired by semiotics and African-American material culture, his work takes the form of serial projects, each created around a set of aesthetic guidelines that dictate the form, materiality, and imagery in a given body of work.
Campbell has exhibited widely in New York and throughout the Midwest. In 2016 he was awarded an artist residency at Red Bull Arts Detroit, and in 2017 was the inaugural Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He was recently included in HOMEMADE, a group show curated by artist McArthur Binion at Detroit’s Library Street Collective.
Austen Brantley
Through the exploration of form and texture, I strive to create a visual representation of our emotional landscape, revealing raw and vulnerable aspects of ourselves that we often hide from the world. Each sculpture in the Unearthed series embodies a unique combination of strength and fragility, inviting viewers to confront and reveal their own hidden emotions and vulnerabilities. These sculptures serve as a catalyst for personal introspection and growth, encouraging individuals to embrace their own complexity and embrace the beauty in imperfection. By pushing the boundaries of traditional sculpture techniques and experimenting with unconventional materials, I hope to challenge viewers' perceptions of what sculpture can be and the emotions they experience. In the end creating a visceral and emotional experience for the viewer, one that transcends language and culture and speaks directly to the human experience.
Amy Feigley-Lee
Amy Feigley-Lee is a contemporary artist from Detroit, Michigan. She earned her MFA in 2007 from Cranbrook Academy of Art with an emphasis on Sculpture. Her current studio practice has evolved to focus primarily on creating intricate and labor-intensive collage pieces composed of found vintage wallpapers. She is inspired by the colors, patterns, and textures found in wallpaper, as well as the formalist aesthetic sensibilities that come with being an art foundations educator. Amy's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in venues such as the Freud Museum in London, The Daimler Chrysler World Headquarters in Berlin, and The American University in Cairo, and was selected to participate in Andres Serrano Pick Detroit, at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Her work is held in the private collections of renowned interior designer, Lois Wienthal, the Mercedes Benz Financial Services Headquarters in Farmington Hills, MI, and Grand Valley State University. Outside of her studio practice, Amy helps build community among artists/mothers in the Detroit metro area by facilitating studio visits and critiques. She also holds the title of Special Lecturer of Studio Art at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan where she has been teaching for nearly fifteen years.
Scheherazade Washington Parrish
Scheherazade Washington Parrish is an interdisciplinary artist and creator of “Tools of Redaction” a multimedia interactive installation. Her practice weaves poetry, visual, and performance art into wry, unapologetic narratives that challenge the arc of western humanity by offering new paradigms centering Black women within historical narratives. Her work has appeared on large scale murals, Detroit Public Television, as well as galleries including Womxnhouse Detroit. She has published and exhibited work on with Driftwood 9, Detroit Metro Times, Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Detroit Artist Market and M Contemporary Art. Parrish lives and works in her native Detroit with her son.
Simon Anton
Simon Anton (b. 1988, based Detroit, MI; he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and educator that collaborates across the fields of architecture, interior design, furniture, art, and jewelry. He is the co-founder of Thing Thing, a design collective that experiments in the transformation of post-consumer, hand-recycled polyethylene plastic sourced from surrounding communities and from industrial manufacturing. He also runs “Transforming Trash,” where he works with youth in Detroit to transform community plastic waste into art. His work has been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Hong Kong Shenzhen Biennale, Expo Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Anton received a Master of Fine Arts in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
