Art-Full Life

Works from 30 of the region’s most interesting artists are on view for only one more week at MICA in the Sondheim Artscape Prize Semifinalists exhibition. Now that Mount Royal has quieted down from last weekend’s Artscape, it’s the perfect time to see the noteworthy exhibition.

The first piece you’ll see there is Cory Oberndorfer’s Bath Time, a sunny yellow mural inside the Fox Building’s two large picture windows. On the left, a roller girl (Cory’s signature subject) and a gigantic rubber duck stand poised to move; on the right, a heap of rubber ducks create a delightful pattern with their curved backs, wings, and bills. We all recognize these ducks from child-or parenthood. They are always wide-eyed, but here I’m willing to believe they are truly as startled as they look—they hear the thundering approach of the Charm City Roller Girls!

Shaun Flynn’s drawing Andrew Field-Pickering  welcomes you on the show’s title board. In this portrait, the head and shoulders of Andrew meld into a house and forest. Spiky tree leaves flow into the hair on his balding head; his glasses seem to grow out of the limbs of a tree; and his beard becomes a platform for an outdoor deck complete with table and chairs. Water streams across the base of the drawing, blending with his shirt. This composition doubles as an LP cover for the subject’s alter ego, Maxmillion Dunbar. What could be more Baltimore than Shaun, a visual multi-media artist/percussionist creating an LP cover for a writer’s on-stage persona, Maxmillion, a DJ/music star?

Kim Domanski, who organized the Sondheim Semifinalist exhibition, tells me it was just a coincidence, but on the interior wall directly behind Cory’s Bath Time, you can see Yours, Mine, and Ours, another allusion to bath time.  Here Sebastian Martorana’s amazing installation consists of three white marble towels hanging on metal towel racks. Each one is beautifully carved to represent the personalities of those who use them—one neatly folded, another tossed casually, and the final towel (perhaps the shared) somewhere in between. 

My favorite work from Sebastian is 8 ½ x 11 Inch Frustration, a pile of paper with the top sheet slightly crumpled. Beside the pile is a sheet of paper crushed into a tightly creased ball. Any writer will relate.

Throughout the exhibition, I found artists and art works that seemed to be in conversation with one another, most likely unintended but very satisfying.  Across one room, Adam T. Rush’s collage Liar—a figure with a snake slithering from its mouth—calls out to Oletha Devane’s encrusted sculpture, where a fabric snake wraps itself around the shaft of the piece.  (You may know Adam from his performance at the BMA’s Cézanne Fast Forward event in May, when he presented ambient noises interlaced with recordings of viewers’ spontaneous reactions to the exhibition Cézanne and American Modernism.)

In another gallery, you can see Brent Crothers’ Pipe Dream/Synergy, a welded sculpture made of used copper pipes. Somehow Brent has made the detritus of plumbing disasters beautiful, weaving their metallic and green surfaces into a dense pattern.

Nearby, Michelle Hagewood’s three works explore other aspects of urban infrastructure—the poles and wires of alleys are drawn or photographed. In one digital print, Michelle creates a web of delicate lines connecting vines and iPod ear buds. (Check out Michelle’s other work here where she weaves plumbing parts into her compositions!)

Multiple artists in the exhibition seem fascinated with string and rope. Is it because so much in our world has become unraveled? In Don’t Give Up, Brent Crothers uses discarded string to create a perfect egg balancing on its narrowest point.  Elsewhere, nine jute-wrapped squares, each covered in a different pattern, comprise Annie Farrar’s installation. In Weight, she arranges several wooden, rope-wrapped poles against a wall.  Dawn Gavin’s video, Untethered, is a dizzying Rorschach of string, hands, and body coming together and separating repeatedly. It’s a mesmerizing piece that for me recalls childhood hours playing “Cat’s Cradle.”

http://www.vimeo.com/13443405  

Kelley Bell’s videos are one of the great joys of the exhibition. Twice her birds are slyly projected, one onto a beam and another onto an air-conditioning duct. I discovered them endlessly pecking, at times extending their necks to reach higher.  Her Inspiration and Realization (The Eureka Machine) is a must-see for fans of David MacCaulay’s The Way Things Work. In Bell’s digital video, a silhouetted machine noisily crushes various items with a hammer (actually a human head that occasionally blinks and smiles).  Each object—everything from a cocktail glass to a shield—is raised, smashed, dropped into a bowl, mixed or squirted, and dumped into a vat that belches smoke.

And, finally, check out Travis Childers’ Brickscapes, two dozen bricks arranged on shelves, described by the artist simply as “different modeled landscapes.”  Each one is topped with a unique terrain—verdant landscapes, snow covered hills, sand swept deserts—with its own climate conditions.  You will easily lose yourself in these miniature environments.

Other tips:

• Don’t miss the Artscape sculpture installations outside at MICA.  For a special treat, check out the video screen outside the Semifinalist exhibition.  Entitled Here, There, and Everywhere, it features the sculptures “reinstalled” digitally wherever the artists chose to place them. Thank you, Jim Hillman, for picking several sites at the BMA!
• Catch more of Sebastian Martorana’s work in the current exhibition at Area 405, where he joins Ellen Durkan, Jesse Burrowes, Juan Rojo, James Rieck, RL Tillman, Patrick McDonough, Mary Frank, and Peter Boyce in Hammer and Thread. 

One day away from the exciting announcement of the Sondheim Artscape Prize winner, I did a little audience watching at the BMA. Visitors really love this show and I really love watching them love it.  I was delighted to be an anonymous fly on the wall.

So, here I am in the first gallery, standing beside Christopher LaVoie’s Energy Temple, a beautifully crafted sculpture, sort of a wooden ziggurat with one side sporting three large speakers. 

A really cool looking young couple enters.  She is tattooed, her hair in dreadlocks, dressed all in black, her leggings topped off with a metal-studded belt. I imagine that they are musicians on tour, wiling away the daylight hours while they wait to perform in a warehouse in Baltimore that night.  They look longing at the speakers.

I place my hand on top of Energy Temple and it makes an incredibly startling vibration.  Everyone in the room, including the couple, turns to look.  They think I have just broken the cardinal museum rule—no touching—and that an arrest is imminent.

“Can you touch it?” she asks.

“Yes,” I respond smiling.  The guard is also smiling benevolently. He knows it’s okay. 

“There’s no sign,” she says.

I look around and point to the label on a distant wall. It tells us: This sculpture is interactive. Touch the copper plate to activate.  I reassure her it’s fine and touch it again, more emphatically.  Another sound ripples through me.

By now, Energy Temple is surrounded by eager visitors and there is a surge of vibrations.  Musician Lady and her boyfriend are using their hands gracefully to create electronic pulses.  A teenage girl rat-a-tap-taps with her fingertips. Others join in, given permission by their peers.

I walk ahead to find a young father with a delightfully bald infant in a stroller. The two are pausing quietly before every one of Nate Larson’s photographs, studying each tweet paired with each photograph. The images show the place where the tweets were sent.  The baby is totally tranquil (mine were never like that). The father spends the longest time at my favorite one—a dense rack of clothing in a thrift store accompanied by the tweet, “When u come from nothing, anything is something.” 

Soon, the musicians walk from Energy Temple and straight into the darkened room dedicated to filmmaker Matt Porterfield.  They are transfixed in front of a black-and-white film of a band. A drummer is pounding away energetically.

Nearby, I see beautiful color sequences of Matt’s Hamilton flow across the wall. A quiet audience is absorbed in a scene where a grandmother speaks a few words to a child in a verdant garden, an array of brilliantly colored flowers lies in the foreground. The gallery’s low bench in front of the film is filled and an elderly couple leans back against a barrier wall, determined to see more. Their complete absorption is a tribute to the power of the mostly silent film.

I emerge from the darkness to confront two of Matthew Janson’s sculptures, monumental crystals constructed out of shattered mirrors.  I see myself reflected dozens of times, as broken and fragmented as the surface of the work.

On the other side of the gallery, another young couple leans over what from a distance looks like an elaborately decorated bassinet—a confection of fabric and fringe fit for a prince or princess. The girl is speaking excitedly to her companion. All I hear is “Rosemary’s Baby!”  I rush over and follow their lead, looking down into Carrion.  It is like encountering an eviscerated animal, all red and bloody, yet somehow the shape and texture and color is beautiful.

Off of the gallery where Ryan Hackett’s  enormous canvases hang, I slip into a darkened gallery, where Ryan’s video plays. Here you can contemplate a continuous view of a sunny, cloud-filled sky.  Puffy clouds slowly roll accompanied by whale noises.  A couple is seated on the loveseat, silent, taking it all in.

I move on to the final galleries and catch a fragment of conversation among two women. “I hear the average man swallows nine spiders a day,” announces one.  I know right away that they have just seen Karen Yasinsky’s You have to be very careful.  In it, an insect flies into the frame and dives into the mouth of an illustrated Elliot Gould.  Help!

The man who was just in Ryan Hackett’s video room enters Leah Cooper’s installation.  He reads the wall text.  He leans over to consider the pile of materials on one corner. He bends close to a point on the wall with a taped line. He looks down at his reflection in the mirror. 

An older couple walks by quickly, the man pleading, “You’re going too fast! I can’t see anything!’

They remind me how close looking requires time and patience—sometimes even a suspension of assumptions—and how lucky the Museum and the Sondheim finalists are to find such an attentive audience for contemporary art here in Baltimore!

The Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition is free and open until August 1.