Call of the floating sheep: Gladden Space opens in Old Town with the art of Mary Gillis

Lansing’s Old Town is an ever-changing coral reef of creative culture, packed with boutiques and galleries of every stripe, but Gladden Space is a new species in this ecosystem.

Owner Ian Stallings is committed to displaying and selling art, period. There’s no frame shop, gift boutique, snack bar or any other distractions in this small, serene space on César E. Chávez Avenue, near the Grand River. Aside from special events such as openings, meet-and-greets and artist talks, visitors have to make an appointment.

Stallings hopes to tap into local demand for high-end art, especially among corporate types, but all art lovers are welcome. As the name implies, Stallings wants the space to “gladden” the art scene.

“There are lots of people with huge, blank walls all around mid-Michigan and the capital region who will invest in art, hopefully,” he said. “Something that’s authentic and real, not mass produced.”

The first exhibition at Gladden showcases the work of Mary Gillis, a bold and thoughtful multimedia artist who has lived and worked in New York City and Venice, Italy, and is now based in Lansing.

About 250 people circulated through the gallery at the Feb. 10 opening reception.

Considering the variety of the work on display, from prints to sculptural wall hangings, free-standing metal sculptures and very large canvases, it was hard to believe that Stallings and Gillis only met a few months ago.

“It happened quickly,” Gillis said.

As soon as Stallings saw Gillis’ second-floor studio on River Street in south Lansing, overlooking the Grand River, he knew he had the first show for his new gallery.

Stallings, who’s also a member of the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum’s board of directors, is a recent Lansing transplant and enthusiastic booster of the city’s artistic and architectural strengths. He graduated from the California College of the Arts in 1999, started a design firm in San Francisco in 2004 and moved to East Lansing in 2020 to marry an Ingham County native.

He fell in love with the 1,300-square-foot space on César E. Chávez Avenue, with its weathered brickwork, natural light and Mediterranean feel, and decided to take the plunge.

Natural light and weathered brick give Gladden Space, a new art gallery in Old Town, a Mediterranean feel.

“There are a lot of creative people doing different things here,” he said. “It’s a wonderful enclave of arts and crafts. Not everyone’s doing the same thing, and it’s exciting.”

In short order, he settled on a logical, eye-pleasing selection of Gillis’ art that takes advantage of every wall, corner and lighting variation without cluttering the space.

“He did a magnificent job,” Gillis said.

Some of the larger canvases in the show had to be assembled inside the gallery because the door wasn’t big enough.

Gillis traced her affinity for big works to a decade and a half living in Brooklyn and Manhattan. She went to the Pratt Institute in New York as an undergrad, taught art at a girls’ prep school and worked part time on Wall Street to support herself while working on her art.

“I went to galleries constantly,” she said. “I loved it. The idea of working big was all around me.”

Gillis grew up in Detroit and returned to Michigan to live with her husband, Jan Stokosa, director of Stokosa Prosthetic Clinic in Okemos. (She called him “an artist in his own right.”)

Several large canvases dominate the gallery’s east wall, many of them rendered in pearlescent paint that reflects and deflects natural light in surprising ways. Fish-like forms and pulsating cutout shapes float freely throughout.

The ovals suggest to Gillis “a feeling of breaking through, whether it’s a psychological or physical ‘through,’ through water, ice.”

Gillis’s most recent work, “Juliet Goes to Italy,” builds from a subtly textured, almost luminous linen surface coated with gesso, pastels and swaths of white paint.

A mysterious floating sheep with a blank face at the center of the canvas is a rare touch of realism and a sight that’s not easily forgotten. Some viewers tell Gillis the sheep haunts their dreams. She considers it a symbol of peace.

“We can use that right now,” she said.

Tucked into the back of the gallery is an array of 4-inch-square canvases, each containing a unique world of texture, color and form.

“Sometimes things need to be big, and sometimes they need to be small,” Gillis said.

The detail in these tiny artworks is so dense and rich that she and Stallings created a set of high-res enlargements, 20-by-20 inches in size.

In the late 1970s, after attending grad school at New York University, Gillis spent several years working in a dream studio on the Grand Canal in Venice.

A set of vigorous images whooshing across a white wall at Gladden Space are recent creations, but they hark back to her Venice days, when she created 8-foot-wide drawings by building up layers of soft pastel on paper and literally running across them — “with velocity,” she said — while holding an eraser. The unorthodox technique resulted in jagged, dynamic ripples that dazzle the eye like the sunlit canals of Venice.

Taking advantage of new technology, Gillis worked with RCP Artist Services, a custom printing company based in Portland, Michigan, to create high-res scans of the drawings and print them on aluminum, endowing them with a new life.

“It’s been really fun to revisit something I did when I was 25 years old and make it new and fresh,” Gillis said.

Later, she branched into large-scale works incorporating aluminum, stainless steel, glass and other materials. In 2016, she seized the chance to work with discarded highway guardrails, exploiting their bulbous curves and smooth recesses in myriad ways.

Visitors will have fun tracing the many formal, stylistic and practical elements linking the diverse works on view at Gladden. Metal or canvas, print or sculpture, all of Gillis’ works reward a patient, unhurried gaze.

“One thing that has set my work apart from a lot of work that has been happening for a while now is that it’s decidedly not pop,” Gillis said. “This work isn’t popular culture.”