Doug Cannell: Backstories
108|Contemporary
February 7-March 22, 2025
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.
The unreality, the blatant abstraction from the truth, is very much part of the point. A URL on the poster, FeverPlug.com, links to Cannell’s website, where the piece is displayed in a variety of trendy and attractive positions, with slogans like “THIS PLUG SATISFIES” or “PLUG AND PLAY NIGHT AND DAY” or “FEVER PLUG: FIND JOY NOW.” These uncanny pieces of advertising would make more sense for, say, a personal massager or a mass-market recliner than for an abstract piece of gallery sculpture. That’s what makes them so funny, and so good.
Extended work like this—which intentionally diverts attention away from the piece itself and onto secondary and tertiary material (from the Fever Plug to the "information" poster to the website, for example)—has its limitations, and its caveats. I found myself wanting more and more of the extraneous material with every successive sculpture. While the diversion can take away from the work itself, it can also make for a genuinely pleasurable experience.
That’s why my favorite piece here is “Metropole,” a small sculpture of wood and steel backed by a few dozen letters that hang on the wall and detail the “history” of the sculpture. In every letter, written on hotel stationery—the hotels, at least, are real—the piece is explained to have been left behind, year after year, in 1956, 1967, 1969, and so on, at hotels from Hungary to New York to Birmingham. “I am writing to inform youthat [sic] an intriguing and bea utiful [sic] object was found in your room following your recent stay at our hotel,” writes one “Chirstophe W. Favre” in the year 1955. “Metropole,” it seems, is always getting forgotten.
This is, of course, a fiction. “Metropole” is an obviously new object, with an elaborate backstory—there’s that word again—being created behind it. This is the case with many of Cannell’s works, which obfuscate reality as much as they pull the viewer into it. This work cannot possibly exist, he tells us, even as he presents that very work to us. With each new letter, each new ridiculous situation in which “Metropole” was supposed to have been left behind, I gasped and laughed. Cannell’s devotion to the bit of his work makes for a remarkably fun viewing experience.
I mainly came to the show to see “Apparatus,” an undeniably dildo-like work whose adjacent poster does not shy away from such an interpretation. “Apparatus performs well from the bedroom to the boardroom,” the accompanying poster tells us, without exactly saying what it is the thing performs. We know, from a bulleted list on the poster, that “Apparatus” “Works without cords or batteries,” has “Proven design and functionality,” “Works hard so you don’t have to,” and “Installs in minutes (Phillips screwdriver required).” The joke, I think, is that this is simply an art object: a piece of sculpture to be hung on a wall. In that sense, every advertising slogan, every joke about performance, is true.
This, really, is what I come to art for. I love an experience that is both real and unreal, like the book of matches (which you can take) next to the sculpture “Tensioneer,” which seems to advertise a company named “Tensioneer” that does not exist. But “Tensioneer” exists. This tension between fiction and truth is at the heart of Cannell’s work. It’s both very thoughtful and subtle and very obvious and surface-level. You can read it however you want, or not at all. These are indeed “intriguing and bea utiful” objects that reward extra attention, and Cannell has plenty of playful diversions ready to reward that attention. The only question is: which parts of all this, exactly, are real?
