The sense of freedom within the spaces of a city like Detroit is immeasurable. From carving quadrants of an abandoned space and home, walking the streets or going through the city via van- buildings running by the glass of a window and bridges traversing through the inner sections of downtown while fall falls outside- there is a never-ending sense of freedom and a blank state to the surface of things here, as if every moment were malleable and able to be formed with whatever ideas or art you have to work with. There is no hidden song or cypher lingering long or around- things here are taken much as they're presented: completely whole and of / from the surface.

The houses on Moran Street where Swoon, Ben Wolf, Monica Canilao, RETNA, Richard Colman and Saelee Oh are working form a sort of square formation if seen from an aerial view. Across the street, neighbors of every order move through the veins of Moran, Klinger, Connant and Lawley Street.

If driving down Moran Street, one can see segments and fractions of the house that Monica Canilao is working on from afar- large sculptures of found objects culled together from all the abandoned spaces and places taken from either the late hours of the day or those early embers of a Detroit morning with sections of the front façade carved out in proportions resembling a plume of smoke or the body of a snake which makes up the majority of the second floor amongst the planned placement of clutter from ornate wooden table legs to fragments of glass and mirror organized in coruscant shapes.

Next to Canilao is the house that Richard Colman and RETNA are working on together- a once abandoned, ailing site: white paint crumbling in lattice-like patterns and sections. The house now sits blinding in its grayscale contortion, with an outside wall written obsessively and elegantly in RETNA's familiar calligraphy. Inside the home, a labyrinth of rooms with sections of RETNA's written words and painted prayers and Colman's familiar and brilliant geometric patterns.

Across the street, a figure attached via wheatpaste from Swoon: a woman's face in angelic proportion with a small city making up the majority of her person- thighs, calves and torso emerging from the shapes of houses, homes and apartment buildings with small figures and strangers walking throughout the image. Inside the house, a section of the floor cut out in a prism. Encased beneath in the basement: numerous and many more pieces from Swoon as if the house were a geode- a rough, broken-down exterior with an inner sanctum/interior of jewels and remnants in the form of Swoon's pieces which line the walls and floor in intricately cut portions of paper pasted together along with images of children in profile or dead center- eyes staring agape with hunger while light from the glass nearby comes in through the small slits which make up the basement windows. 

In back of the house, numerous dormers and sections of homes / houses sawed off forming the beginning sections of several sculptures by Ben Wolf. Wheatpasted around the house are fragments of bed sheets and a pattern of colors and shapes spray-painted at the base resembling those natural formations of a feather.

Next to the Ben Wolf / Swoon house, a home with a façade of blue water painted over at the base. Up the stairs and into the home: numerous installations from previous artists interacting, merging and moving to the spaces and sculpture of artist Saelee Oh; her ideas filling up the space completely, engulfing the insides of the home as if a flood came through. Notes written on sections of loose scrap paper adorn the floors and walls while the sculpture of a miniature house and one even smaller sit in pastel color with roofs made up of books found at random sections of street surrounding the city on a night run. Further into the house a previous installation and stair structure re-purposed into the spaces of a forest, with fallen limbs from nearby trees spreading out, upward and toward the ceiling.

All of these houses and artists coming together in a community which is already coming together more and moving away from the previous blight and abandonment which had hindered these spaces previously. With the ways that things are progressing, it wont be long before the majority of the spaces here are occupied to admire the art at first and then the burgeoning revival that lingers on the lips of everyone's mind.

Text / Images by Jason Jaworski

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