Gallery Exhibition & Opening Celebration “John Gutoskey/Peter Sparling: Liminal Landscapes”

Gallery Exhibition & Opening Celebration “John Gutoskey/Peter Sparling: Liminal Landscapes”

Join us on December 3, 2021 from 5 pm - 8 pm during Ann Arbor's Midnight Madness for our opening celebration of John Gutoskey and Peter Sparling's new exhibit at CultureVerse Gallery, Liminal Landscapes. The exhibition is free and open to the public. The space is wheelchair accessible. We invite everyone to enjoy this exhibition with us!

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Ann Arbor artists and married partners Gutoskey & Sparling share an exhibit of their works for the first time. Gutoskey’s featured monoprints from his “Liminal Landscapes” series provide the show’s title. Liminality is defined as a disoriented, in- between state, and a state that facilitates the disruption of both spatial and temporal dimensions.

As a gay artist, Gutoskey “queers” his mixed-media monoprints (with collage, maculature, pochoir, and alcohol gel transfers) and invests in them a site for transformation, transition and self-reflection.

Moving freely between video, dance and painting, Sparling creates hybrid liminal worlds based on the moving body with calligraphy-like brush strokes on black canvas and large-scale murals. Traces of motion accumulate to create kinetically charged impressions or energy fields of a dancer’s presence.

This exhibition opens on December 3, 2021 and continues through January 2022. CultureVerse Gallery is open Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and by appointment. Please check our instagram for our most up-to-date schedule.

Gallery Hours
4 pm - 8 pm Friday
10 pm - 4 pm Saturday
12 pm - 4 pm Sunday

CultureVerse Gallery & Scanning Lab is located at 309 S. Main Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 between Jolly Pumpkin and Shalimar, across from The Ark and Blue Llama.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

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Peter Sparling is the Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Dance and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan. A graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and The Juilliard School, Sparling was a member of the José Limón Dance Company (1971-73) and principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company (1973-87). As Graham’s assistant, he coached Rudolf Nureyev and collaborated with her on many new works. He has performed and staged Graham’s works all over the world and has appeared with the company twice on PBS Dance in America. His video curtain warmers, Beautiful Captives: Martha Graham and the Cinematic Id, Variations of Angels and Sacred/Profane have opened three of the company’s New York seasons.

Sparling has had extensive experience as artistic director, (Peter Sparling Dance Company 1979-1983 NYC, 1993- 2007 Ann Arbor), choreographer, performer, teacher (U-M Distinguished Faculty Award and 1998 Governor’s Michigan Artist Award), lecturer, video artist, writer (Ballet Review, Choreographic Practices, Michigan Quarterly Review, and the recent anthology, Dance’s Duet with the Camera), collaborator, administrator (former chair, U-M Dance Department), dance/arts consultant, and activist (co-originated U-M Gay Faculty Alliance in 1993 to secure partner benefits). Sparling was a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2010. He has presented papers at Society of Dance History Scholars and European Association for Dance History; he co-chaired the groundbreaking conference Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance at U-M. His dances for video have been selected for numerous international festivals, including the 2007 & 2020 New York Dance on Camera Festivals, the 2008, 19 & 20 American Dance Festival Dance Film & Video Festivals, Lisbon’s InShadow Festival 2010 & 2019, DANCE:FILMS Glasgow and 2017 & 2020 Ann Arbor Film Festival. His made-for-TV work, Climbing Sainte-Victoire, was broadcast on Michigan Television in 2009. His screendance, The Snowy Owl, was featured in the Court Métrage of the Cannes Film Festival 2015. In 2014, he created a five-screen installation, the Pop-Up Projection Pavilion, featured as the centerpiece of U-M’s 2017 Third Century Screens Competition and Symposium. Sparling sustained a ten-year residency at the U-M Life Sciences Institute, where he collaborated with cell biologist Dan Klionsky and maintained a painting studio. Since retiring from U-M in June, 2018, Sparling has completed his memoir, Confessions of a Dancing Man, and continues to create videos and paint at his home studio. He has presented three solo shows of paintings at Gallery 22 North in Ypsilanti, MI and produced a cycle of 24 short videos to Schubert’s Winterreise for its premiere with live performance in June 2022. His paintings and videos have been included in group shows at Ann Arbor Art Center, Buckham Gallery and Crooked Tree Art Center. Sparling is currently collaborating with New Theater of Medicine as assistant director and choreographer on a production dealing with physician suicide.

John Gutoskey is an artist, designer, printmaker, & collector living and working in Ann Arbor, Michigan. John earned his BFA in theater design with a minor in sculpture from Webster University in St. Louis. He earned his MFA from the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design where he studied printmaking & installation art, and also completed a certificate in LGBTQ Studies.
Early in his career, John worked as a costume designer and as a specialist in costume crafts, where he worked on productions in New York City and across the US in theater, opera, dance, film, and television. He has taught classes in millinery, mask making, and fabric dyeing at the University of Michigan in the Department of Theater.

John has shown his work across the US, including the Detroit Institute of Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Indianapolis Art Center, Kinsey Institute, Ella Sharp Museum, and in galleries in Chicago, NYC, Detroit, Toledo, & Ann Arbor. His series of monoprints honoring the victims from the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida in 2016, “PULSE Nightclub: 49 Elegies”, won the prize for Best Juried 2D at Artprize X 2018 and the Alpha Omega Award for Religious Art 2018. John is the owner of JG Studio and the A2 Print Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan.