What does it mean for an artist to ‘push boundaries’? Seven established and emerging regional artists from the Detroit metro area have been invited to answer the question in an ambitiously scaled collection of individual installations at Janice Charach Gallery. The result is an extended visual conversation among different but complementary sensibilities.

        “Pushing Boundaries” was conceived and developed by well-known multimedia artist Nanci LeBret Einstein in cooperation with the gallery’s director Natalie Balazovitch. The seven artists have interpreted the theme of the exhibition according to the boundaries they perceive their work to be moving beyond. Unsurprisingly, each has come up with their own idiosyncratic response amplified by individual methods, mediums, and preoccupations.

        Meighen Jackson’s four abstract wall pieces appear near the gallery’s entrance. At first glance they seem to be traditional, though accomplished, abstract paintings. But the lines, shapes, and colors of these twisting and turning “paper paintings,” as she calls them, are made from the materials of which they are composed—papier-mâché, wire, cardboard, India inks, and decorative papers. Figure and ground have been fused and the artwork on the wall is both image and object. Breaking out from the confines of the wall, Jackson has leveraged the expertise of partner Jim Mumbly and his son Brandon to create a fully three-dimensional version of the wall pieces. With Celebrate, made of wire and tomato cages welded into a multicolored tornado of movement, Jackson pushes beyond the boundaries of two dimensions to three.

        No matter how far an artist departs from their roots, some part of their life’s story remains, a fact evident in the mixed media constructs of Terry Lee Dill. As a young native of Hutchinson, Kansas, Dill became an assistant to the head structural engineer for the first nuclear reactor in Blair, Nebraska. Though he subsequently went on to art school and a successful creative career, the preoccupations that characterize Dill’s early life persist. The elaborately crafted sculptures in the exhibition provide a sampling of his sculpture practice. His fantasy architectural forms recall early Constructivist sculptures by Vladimir Tatlin but add hints of space age technology and defy easy categorization. Dill explains, “I want them to feel like art, but I don’t want them to be art, if that makes any sense,” he says. “You don’t get a sense of reality, why they exist. You want to know why they exist, but you’ll never know why they exist—there’s no reason for them to exist.”

        Nanci LeBret Einstein has interpreted the theme of pushing boundaries in a variety of ways that interlock and amplify each other. Dominating the main floor of the gallery and ascending through the oculus in the center, she has created a large, weightless seeming trapezoidal mesh installation called Fruition that builds conceptually upon her more modestly scaled artworks. Einstein’s many wall-mounted assemblages represent taxonomies of small, found, and upcycled industrial objects in orderly arrays. She has also amplified her personal themes by creating, with photographer Allen Einstein, some mysteriously compelling photo collages that combine floral forms with blobby textures suggestive of industrial waste.

        Trained originally as a photographer, David Velez Felix departed that highly technical discipline and moved into the more emotionally expressive medium of ceramics when he moved to Michigan from New York in 1999. His colorful group of wall-mounted and free-standing figurative caricatures show figures moving, mixing and melting into each other, their facial expressions ambiguous. He says of his gesticulating, bug-eyed bodies that “Silent screams and distorted expressions echo the harsh reality that even with such diversity lending an air of unity, these characters stand painfully alone.”

        The three artists who occupy the second floor of the gallery in “Pushing Boundaries” are distinct—and distinctive—but in visual dialog. Beginning from the starting point of fiber art, each departs from the medium’s arts-and-crafts roots in a different way.

        Jay Knapp’s full body of work encompasses painting, constructed, and carved wood sculpture and photography. For purposes of this exhibition he has focused on a recent collection of fiber pieces that involve the deconstruction of everyday objects—paper money, books, natural materials and the like. He transforms them into handmade string which becomes the basis for his fiber artworks. The particularly beautiful Still Life is created from dried iris stems woven into string and hung on a found wooden plank. Through a process of loops and dips an elaborate tapestry emerges. In another series made from deconstructed baseballs, their insides now exposed, Knapp seems to be commenting on performative masculinity as a suspect construct.

        Across the gallery, Indiana-born Jeanne Bieri’s elaborately pieced, hand-embroidered and intuitively appliqued quilt hangings bring together improbable fabric components to tell an intriguing visual story. Army blankets referencing her father’s military career are juxtaposed with vintage quilts recalling the farm wives of her childhood. The combination honors her family’s resourceful and creative American past, weaving the masculine and feminine together into an unorthodox collage of personal history.

        Boisali Biswas was born in India but has lived in the U.S. for 30 years. Traversing the boundaries of her birthplace to settle into another culture has provided the animating impulse for her art practice. She explains, “As an immigrant artist, my work is constantly informed by my existence between the two cultures. Most often I find myself drawn to my roots, and I strive to explore and express the complexity of cultural identity and belonging in my work.” In her formally ambitious installation work, Diaphanous Illusions, she has woven a forest of light and warmth. The narrow vertical bands of found fibers, wires, and up-cycled produce bags press into service unconventional materials that push the limits of traditional woven work.

        It can be argued that “pushing boundaries” is precisely the job description for every contemporary artist. The exhibition now at Janice Charach Gallery turns out to be seven solo shows that interlock and offer a rich visual and tactile demonstration of this universal impulse. Each artist keeps creativity moving by reaching for an as-yet-unknown point that just exceeds their creative grasp.

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.