Fore-Site (Phase 3): The Stamps Gallery Pillar Project

From September 2025 through December 2026, Stamps Gallery is partnering in a curatorial collaboration with two Southeast Michigan-based, artist-run project spaces led by Stamps alumni: C.Y.N.K. Studios, directed by Sally Clegg (Lecturer III and Student Exhibition Coordinator, MFA ​’20) and Abhishek Narula (MFA ​’20); and Sometimes Space, directed by Nathan Byrne (Lecturer I, MFA ​’21). Each space hosts dozens of artists annually for exhibitions, performances, and events, fostering experimental work and building community. For this project, Byrne, Clegg, and Narula have been commissioned to reimagine the pillars on Division Street that flank the gallery. In response, they’ve curated six artists to create new work for the pillars over three cycles:

• Phase 1 (September 12 — December 12) artists: Amelia Burns (Cranbrook MFA ​’23) and Erin McKenna (MFA ​’20)
• Phase 2 (January 12 — August 12) artists: Sally Clegg (MFA ​’20) and Kim Karlsrud (MFA ​’20)
• Phase 3 (September 11 — December 11) artists: Abhishek Narula (MFA ​’20) and Nathan Byrne (MFA ​’21)

Phase 3

Curated by Sometimes Space: Abhishek Narula (entry pillar)
Curated by CYNK Studios: Nathan Byrne (courtyard pillar)

Artist Statements/​Bios

Abhishek Narula, Compressions
Compressions is an installation comprised of 416 industrial-grade zip ties, cinched around the entry pillar of the Stamps Gallery. The pillar measures roughly 110 inches in circumference, requiring two ties per row to wrap around it, resulting in 208 rows. The humble zip tie, typically used to hang and bind other material, is relegated to its functional properties rendering it unprepossessing and easily dismissed. The zip tie in this installation, instead serves as an object of aesthetic possibility, pulling it out of its usual background role to become the work itself. The resulting composition is a proposal to dwell, to slow down, and to simply see the pillar.

Abhishek Narula is an artist, designer, and educator who works across sculpture, installation, sound, and video. His practice takes the form of interventions, working with what is already present. He reorients and disrupts objects and sites in order to open up formal possibilities and poetic experiences within the familiar. He is influenced by physical and digital infrastructural systems that sustain modern life and culture. His work treats this ambience itself as raw material for aesthetic inquiry, exploring themes of labor, precarity, temporality and the sublime. Narula earned his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design and his MS/BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work has been exhibited at national and international venues such as the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, Science Gallery Detroit, Speculum Artium Media Festival in Slovenia, New Media Caucus (NMC), WaveFarm, The Boulder Public Library, The Hyde Park Art Center, Sector 2337 Art Gallery & Printing Press, Tangible Embedded Interaction (TEI), International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), among others. He is a Robotics Systems Designer and Lecturer in the Robotics Department at the University of Michigan. Website / Instagram

Nathan Byrne, Equally To Be Loved
Equally To Be Loved is an image / object scaled to and installed upon the courtyard pillar of Stamps Gallery. The image is of a spontaneous sculpture made in 2017 during the first day of an artist residency at the Recology San Francisco A.I.R. Program. The sculpture was constructed in a storage container studio using 14 discrete objects that were in his studio upon entry. For Byrne, this work embodies the energy and spirit of a studio at the start of a particularly fecund period of making. This work speaks to the artist’s interest in embodied experience of space, archival and site responsiveness, as well as his ongoing engagement with found materials. Byrne considers this project to be a far-flung sequel to his MFA thesis exhibition Equally Empty, which was shown at Stamps Gallery in 2021. Equally To Be Loved is the second line of the Buddhist mantra from which both titles are derived.

Nathan Byrne is an artist / educator / curator currently based in Detroit, MI. Through spatial and archive responsive projects, he reimagines, and explores within frameworks such as language, the passage of time, and contemplation. Intrigued by the potential of conveying phenomenal, transformative, and emotive states through materiality, process, and placement, he negotiates the pliability of the viewer’s encounters with objects and environments. Byrne holds an MFA in Art from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design and a BA in Studio Art and Art History from San Francisco State University. He has been a Lecturer at Stamps School of Art & Design since the Fall of 2022. His work is exhibited widely nationally and he is a recipient of the VSC Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. He has been awarded numerous artist residencies including Anderson Ranch Arts Center, I‑Park, KHN Center for the Arts, Prairie Ronde, Recology San Francisco A.I.R. Program, and Rockland Woods. Website / Instagram