108|Contemporary rarely fails me. Their shows are better than most downtown, with more thoughtfulness put into the art, and a focus on craft which bucks the painting trend of the typical art gallery. “Doug Cannell: Backstories,” their current show, is a perfect instance of everything this place is getting right.
Cannell is a sculptor and graphic designer based in Detroit who creates modern abstract forms out of scrapyard materials like steel, lumber, rivets, and screws. He’s also very funny. Large works of wood and steel dominate the space in confounding and delightful ways. In “Errata,” a steel sculpture covers portions of an asteroid safety statement from NASA. The steel is suggestive of a spaceship’s hull; are we looking at a piece of spaceship, destroyed by said asteroids?
These are the sorts of questions that Cannell both brings up and deftly refuses to answer. Context here—or, perhaps I should say, backstory—is everything. Cannell blends myth and reality in the presentation of the sculptures, as in “Fever Plug,” a red, yellow and silver piece of wood and chain. It’s not uninteresting to look at, a little abstract, maybe, but beautifully colored and presented. Next to the piece is a poster presenting some “information”: this Fever Plug, it tells us, is one of a model that “meets all mid-size international standards” and is a “genuine artisanal Fever Plug,” an item which, the poster suggests, almost every home now boasts.