Henry Crissman & Virginia Torrence @ Hyperallergic
DETROIT — When two artists are married it’s tempting to draw connections between their work and assume they are in conversation with one another. And although the artists, experimental ceramicists Virginia Rose Torrence and Henry James Haver Crissman, have been together long enough to serve as primary interlocutors — and to finish each other’s sentences — they have radically different practices, interests, and artistic priorities. These differences are showcased in side-by-side presentations at Trinosophes, a hybrid art, café, and performance space that is in itself a bit of an art experiment by owners Rebecca Mazzei and Joel Peterson.
Virignia Rose Torrence’s mosaics are constructed entirely from found objects, principally the content of several bins of hoarded ceramic shards saved over the course of three decades by an adjunct ceramics professor at Marygrove College, where Crissman just finished his term as a professor (due to the closure of the undergraduate program).