Review of Miles to Empty by Shannon Goff @ Detroit Art Review
At first glance, there is little common ground between the two sides of Susanne Hilberry Gallery; unusual, because both sides are part of a solo show, Miles to Empty, by Detroit native Shannon Goff. Goff has two distinct bodies of work in the show: a playful collection of pastel-shaded ceramic pieces, and an exacting full-scale replica of Lincoln Continental rendered in crisp while cardboard.
“I first started working with cardboard in grad school, as an intermediary material when my ceramic work grew more ambitious in scale,” Goff says, “I needed a material to help me figure out how to scale up while defying gravity.” Indeed, the sheer scale of the cardboard construction (also called “Miles to Empty”) draws the viewer in immediately, but the attention paid to detail really underscores the meticulousness of the hand-building work involved in Goff’s process. This, of course, mirrors the labor-intensive process of assembling actual automobiles—a process that is collectively well understood in the birthplace of the automobile assembly line, but largely invisible to most end users of cars, on the whole.