Making Waves

Posted by Doreen on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Jordan Bernier: New Waves at Nudashank successfully combines two seemingly very different bodies of work: the intricate drawings long associated with this artist and new experiments with technology hinted at in his installation at Baltimore Liste at The Contemporary Museum last spring.

Jordan’s graphite drawings assert the primacy of the artist’s hand and eye. Highly structured and patterned like his more familiar pen-and-ink drawings, these are simply made—graphite on paper, period. Each drawing is comprised of a multitude of small individual gestures, short lines placed side by side or one on top of another, not continuous lines, but broken, reiterative strokes.

In a series of drawings identified simply as Lines, these gestures settle into a series of bands, sometimes thicker or thinner, in some examples horizontal in orientation, at other times tilted up and down, so that you feel that something has slipped.

The edges of these rectangular compositions have a rippled character, a little like they have been torn or perhaps woven with the raw edges of warp and weft left visible.  In fact, much of Jordan’s work seems to allude to textiles from around the world, whether the patterns of Oriental carpets, crocheted afghans, or flattened Japanese kimonos. Grid, a rather baroque interpretation of the minimalist format, culminates at its upper edge with crenellations not unlike the pointed pleats of a schoolgirl’s skirt.

A number of abstract drawings create spaces that are slightly disconcerting, suggesting recession and movement. Zig Zag constructs a dizzying maze that rises upward precipitously. Tunnel recedes to a distant passageway defined by ever-narrowing concentric rectangles, their edges surprisingly in their unevenness, another reminder of the handmade quality of these works.

The undulating lines in Waves will make you blink. For a moment, I became convinced the paper was actually warped and that this must really be just another one of the rectilinear lines on buckled paper.  A series of Stacksrepresent uneven rows of geometric shapes that rest uncomfortably, one on top of another, some closer to collapse than others. These are like fantasy block-building projects ran amuck.

One of Jordan’s largest drawings, Fill, is so densely covered with black and blacker bands of drawing, some glistening with graphite, that that you feel as though you are peering between the stalagmites of a dark cave, deep within the recesses of the earth. You need to get close and let your eyes adjust to the darkness of this work, but once you do, you will be drawn into this mysterious space.

Three of the video pieces seem closely allied to Jordan’s drawings.  Black and White Drawing, displayed on a small television screen, records the progress of a drawing or its erasure in monochrome silhouettes created using stop motion animation.  Another bank of 30 small monitors, five high and six wide, plays photographic images of his drawings, their colors creating rectangular columns of patterns not unlike Grid. Cube Installation zeros in on just one three-dimensional shape—it could have been pulled from any of the Stacks—and empowers us as viewers to make it move and change its color and orientation based on your relationship to it.  A small, unseen camera plots your position and causes the cube to morph.

http://www.vimeo.com/30094703

Computer Lab Installation captures a late-night performance in a darkened computer lab at Towson University.  A shadowy Jordan moves among two dozen bright white screens.  As he turns each monitor on, it chimes and glows with color—fuchsia, yellow, blue—and occasionally, broad brushstrokes of color sweep across their screens.

A MICA grad, Jordan is now working on his MFA at Towson University.  I can’t wait to see what’s next.  But in the meantime, stop by at Nudashank, on the third floor at 405 West Franklin Street—and hurry, it’s nearly sold out!

Posted in Contemporary Art Museum, MICA, Nudashank, Towson University | No Comments »

Prized at Home & Beyond

Posted by Doreen on Friday, January 6th, 2012

Recent art world news causes me to reflect about just how lucky we are here in Baltimore—not only to have such a vibrant art scene, but to have visionary leaders who have made it a priority to recognize living artists by awarding prizes to artists in our community.  The deadlines for both prizes—the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize and the Baker Artists Awards—are rapidly approaching, so I am hoping to encourage any artist who meets the requirements for these awards to get going on your nomination.  Of course, the prizes are most welcome—what artist would not welcome financial support, whether $25,000 or $1,000—but it’s the recognition and visibility that have a huge enduring impact long after the grant is won and spent—or even if it isn’t!

 You can’t win if you don’t nominate yourself!  And even if you don’t win, you’ll likely get your work in front of a larger audience.  Taking the two different awards into account, that audience will range from expert judges, some named, some anonymous, to exhibition visitors to media to a worldwide list of viewers on the Baker website.

MICA exhibits the Sondheim Semi-Finalists every year, and in recent years, the BMA has been privileged to partner with the organizers of both prizes—the Baltimore Office for Promotion & the Arts (BOPA) and the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund—exhibit work by the winners of both contests. Imagine how thrilled I was that last month, two extraordinary artists in our midst, already award-winners at home in Baltimore in 2011, received much deserved national attention in the final days of the year. 

Filmmaker Matthew Porterfield, the 2011 Sondheim winner, was invited to participate in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.  Curated by longtime Whitney curator Elizabeth Sussman and former dealer Jay Sanders, this much-anticipated New York event opens in March.  This year, there is a special emphasis on film—documentary filmmakers Werner Herzog and Frederick Wiseman are also participants—and so it is an incredible opportunity for Matt and for Baltimore. 

So many of his films involve a wide range of talent from our own community—a scene from I Used to be Darker, for example, is set in the Station North Arts & Entertainment District and features Baltimore band Dope Body. Of course, his films have been lauded worldwide at festivals, but in some way, his recognition here in Charm City is likely to have helped move things along. (I admire Matt’s steadfast determination almost as much as his creativity! He was a Finalist in 2010, submitted the next year, and then won.)

Also last month, 2011 Mary Sawyers Baker winner Gary Kachadourian was awarded a $25,000-Painters & Sculptors Grant from New York’s Joan Mitchell Foundation.  You cannot seek this award: they seek you!  Its outcome is determined by an anonymous jury that includes artists, curators, and art educators, who clearly were impressed enough with Gary to include him among the 25 artists chosen nationwide.

How terrific that Joan Mitchell would leave an estate that benefited a future generation of artists. An important abstract painter in the generation after Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, she lived as an expatriate in France, where she died in 1992. 

So, our artists’ prizes sometimes have delightful but unexpected outcomes—exponential recognition of the talent they highlight.  We should thank those who created and support these wonderful opportunities. 

For Sondheim, we’re extremely grateful for Bill Gilmore and his colleagues at BOPA, as well as the admirers of civic leader Walter Sondheim, Jr. and his wife Janet, a dancer and teacher.  Many came forward generously to fund the prize—The Abell Foundation, Alex. Brown Charitable Foundation, The Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation, Charlesmead Foundation, the Sondheim’s daughter Ellen Dankert, France-Merrick Foundation, Willard Hackerman, Hecht-Levi Foundation, Legg Mason, and an anonymous donor.

The Baker Artist Awards emerged as the Trustees of the Baker Fund, under the leadership of photographer Connie Imboden, decided to dedicate their resources to the arts in 2007, making this the largest private funder of the arts in the Baltimore region.  Executive Director Melissa Warlow and the late Nancy Haragan, Founding Director of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, cooked up the brilliant idea for an online nomination process, taking this competition decisively into the 21st century. The William G. Baker, Jr. Fund generously covers the expenses of its prizes, as well as the exhibition at the BMA.

So, if you’re an artist, submit your material to both competitions; Sondheim closes January 9th and Baker, January 15th.  And if, like me, you’re a viewer, click through the nominations on Baker Artists Awards or read about this year’s Sondheim jurors  to warm up for the two great exhibitions that await us in the year ahead!

Posted in Baker Artist Awards, Sondheim Artscape Prize | No Comments »

(Great Photography)

Posted by Doreen on Thursday, December 29th, 2011

From left: Marian Glebes, Dean Alexander, Jill Fannon, J.M Giordano, Josh Sisk / Photo by Seanscheidt.com/blog/

In (Parentheses), an artist’s collective that hopes to bring new exposure to contemporary photography and imaging media, has curated its first exhibition, Fields of Vision, on view at Urbanite@Case[wërks] Gallery until later next month.  Each of the founders of the collective—Dean Alexander, Jill Fannon, J.M. Giordano, Marian April Glebes, Sean Scheidt, and Josh Sisk—has identified a broad theme around making or meaning, and selected two or three photographers they believe advance the conversation around that idea.  They take up, as their manifesto proclaims, “what the image has the potential to be, as an object, as an idea, and as a tool for communication.”  The exhibition is distinguished not only by its beauty, but its breadth and diversity: it brings together artists from Baltimore and beyond, from multiple generations, and from a remarkable range of approaches to the medium.

J. M. “Joe “ Giordano, whose enthusiasm and conviction helped propel  this collective into existence, contributes two characteristic works, portraits of people, printed on metallic paper. They show poignant figures whose secret lives remain so because they are masked.  In Kink 1, a bound woman, her face completely obscured, wears a necklace that proclaims WHORE.  She has been divested of her identity and thus her humanity.  Beside her, in Kink 2, a heavily tattooed, bound young man peers through the round hole in his mask, his bloodshot and battered blue eye suggesting physical as well as emotional pain.   

Joe was chosen by  Dean Alexander, whose large shots of women share technical and thematic connections with his—just look at the flickering image of an elegantly bound model printed on metal.  Joe then selected Baltimore photographers Rita Minissi and collective member Jill Fannon.  Both women record performance, Rita in work that resonates with the masked subjects of her selector. Rita portrays a masked woman sitting forlornly on a row of plastic chairs, her white gloved hand grasping her throat. Jill shows a young man arranged and re-arranged on the pristine floor of a carefully staged interior. Once he is headless (or hiding); another time, he is conjoined with cleaning supplies bound to his back and leg with saran wrap, a mysterious monument of man and man-made (but historically woman-used).

Photo by: seanscheidt.com/blog/

Jill’s choices continue the performance theme.  Milana Braslavsky takes a new turn, eliminating the figures that have been hiding beneath purses in her recent work.  Here forlorn flowers, wilting roses or a lonely purple wildflower, actually stand in for people, climbing into shoes or the neck of a sweater and offering a comment on the fleeting fragility of beauty.  Mark Alice Durant, photographer, UMBC Professor, and the writer we know from Saint-Lucy, captures a nocturnal dance of wolves at the Berlin Zoo in a 1983 pigment print that seems to choreograph these wild creatures with the grace of ballerinas.

J. Aiden Simon’s Untitled 1 from Twin Lakes, 2010, combines the immediacy of an identifiable figure—a near naked young man, the artist—lying in an abandoned place that is incredibly beautiful in its neglect, a teetering picket fence succumbing to grass and weeds.  This is a summer camp filled with childhood memories, some difficult, and Aiden takes us back there now, inserting himself as he is, transcending who he once was.  As Aiden explained the process of editing memory and his personal journey as a transgender person in Metro Weekly in 2009: “I have this theory that anytime you access your memories, you kind of rewrite them because you imagine yourself yesterday as yourself today.”

Photo by seanscheidt.com/blog/

In Lightly Tethered, 2011, collective member Sean Scheidt expands our notion of how a photograph is made and displayed.  A digital image of an entranced—and entrancing— nude woman is mounted on wood, embellished with acrylic and framed by a flat, grooved wooden frame.  This image, created by a photographer who began as a painter, would feel comfortable in the BMA’s Jacobs Wing, with the old masters as its companion. 

Sean, choosing “alternative processing” as his theme, has chosen two colleagues from MICA, each of whom produces images using old-fashioned means that appear amazingly of the moment.  Laurie Snyder’s four cyanotypes from 2004/2005 utilize surprisingly simple, old-fashioned, photographic means to create delicate images of flowers, leaves, stems, and seeds that are then folded into accordion pleats like Chinese scrolls.  Laurie has claimed elsewhere that these elegant images “draw themselves,” the result of a somewhat unpredictable interaction between the plants and the sun, but their elegance tells us that the artist’s hand has intervened. Regina DeLuise shows two platinum palladium prints, taking a demanding historic process and using it to record vignettes of contemporary life in Bhutan.  These beautiful monochrome images capture details—a book of drawings left open or a man pausing with a towel over his arm—but they are suffused with a soft light that gives them the emotional power of a memory. 

Photo by Seanscheidt.com/blog/

John Wood, Sean’s final pick, has been pushing the boundaries of photography since the 1960s, incorporating painting, drawing, and collage into his work in ways that anticipate the manipulation of imagery now achieved so much more easily with digitization. In Angle of Repose-Potatoes, 1993, he takes a silver gelatin print of a heap of dirt-encrusted legumes and plots one angle formed by  their rounded shapes, slices the image and rearranges the pieces, somehow enabling us to see these root vegetables anew.  His inscriptions underscore the presence of the artist’s hand and mind.

Collective member Marian April Glebes exhibits two stop motion animations that record the passage of time outdoors.  One documents six failed attempts at lighting a coal, each of the images disappearing from the computer screen as its flame dies and its smoke disperses.  In One Push: From Origin to Settle (post harvest & construction, in natural habitat), 2010, a swing seat, the type familiar from many American porches, in life and in film, hangs from a building under construction.  Marian has captured its narrowing arc of motion from two different directions, with very different lighting, our view switching from the open meadow beyond to the increasingly enclosed space around the swing.  These mesmerizing images underscore the broad theme, landscape, she had in mind when she invited James Luckett and Edward J. Winterto participate in the show.  James records walks around Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2009. Three archival inkjets, hung like banners, are inscribed with a date and location, with six images viewed that day arranged in pairs. These seem to show a progression of increasingly defined boundaries—from nearly untouched nature, a true walk in the woods; to farmland where man’s intervention becomes more visible; to a suburb, where human presence has imposed multiple fences to separate houses and lives.  Edward exhibits three works, an interior, a portrait, and finally, a landscape. Tightly arranged, these three images seem meant to be read serially, to tell a visual narrative reinforced by shapes, lines, and light, and perhaps even to tell a tale.  He told me that he has constructed a landscape of his own practice: each work is from a different series, but together they convey the full range of his work.

Photo by Seanscheidt.com/blog/

Josh Sisk, well known for photographs of area bands that make you believe you were really at the show, exhibits a single diminutive but powerful black-and-white digital image.  It depicts a protest over the tragic shooting of police offer William H. Torbit, Jr.  In the midst of a crowd and confusion outside a downtown club, police fired 41 shots—and one of their own was a victim.  Josh’s choices all share the immediacy of his work; these feel like views of action as it happens, with the photographer in the thick of things, and often representing tragedy, whether dramatic or quotidian.  Kansas native Julie Denesha, a documentary photographer, has spent time in Slovakia recording the difficult lives of Roma or Gypsies, outcasts in their own land. Here she shows a woman in a wretched hovel, peeling potatoes for a meager meal.  Monica Lopossay, a former Baltimore Sun photographer, captures two very different moments, each skillfully composed—in one, a hand hovers above a flag-draped coffin in a lingering goodbye and in the other, a wheelchair-bound figure, consumed by flames , is stopped in a crosswalk.  Matt Roth’s Fencer is all eyes and no sword, but we can feel the penetration of the model’s gaze.

Collective members have said they won’t appear in subsequent shows of the group, but I’m hoping they change their minds! Catch this show before it closes on January 27th!

Posted in Urbanite@Case[wërks] | No Comments »

Riches at Open Space

Posted by Doreen on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

For a really absorbing visual experience, see Riches & Ruin: New works by Benjamin Kelley on view at Open Space until December 17th. It furthers the notion that sculptors must be good at choosing sculptors. The show is curated by artist/musician Neal Reinalda, who graduated from MICA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2009. Only four Kelley pieces, all made this year, make up the exhibition, but each one is compelling in its making and meaning.

To understand these works, it’s helpful to know about the artist.  Benjamin Kelley, a graduate of MICA’s Rinehart School of Sculpture, now works in the college’s studio shops and teaches skills in wood and metal.  His own skills are breathtaking. As you look at his sculpture Hypovolemic, you will find yourself asking, as I did:  “You mean, he cast that? Really? That meat grinder isn’t a found object?”  But even more important, Ben’s work is a thought-provoking commentary on our time and the price we might have to pay for our excesses. 

Ben’s biography provides some potential clues to his intentions.  He is from Michigan, and we see in his work references both the production of sleek automobiles—glistening metal, flawlessly welded, or  bright colors, perfectly cast—and to the destructive forces of industrialization—a dried out whale bone, the rotten wood of a sunken ship,  or the threatening coal dust left behind by miners.  As he comments in his artist’s statement: “After screaming through the age of industrial worship, progress of the tangible is flattened, our immediate environment comes to a sharp focus. All prey has fallen. We have hunted energy, material, commodity, design, and we shall not be celebratory, as a formidable distance stands gray between the relic and modernity.”

Mistress Fallen Martyr expresses the push-pull of Detroit and its products. A soft black shape, cast in coal dust and resin, preserves the graceful curves of a Motor City relic, a Model T fender. Enshrined atop an aluminum and plastic structure that is a pedestal or a table, it inexplicably casts a flat rectangular shadow on the floor below.  The cast fender is clearly a ruin left behind by the riches of another time, but its aged, pitted surface tempts you to touch.

In Spoils, Ben makes a similar juxtaposition: a whale vertebrae with a large gold tooth inserted into its side sits on two bent pieces of plastic, one side gray, the other bright orange.  Here color is insinuated—as it is in each of the exhibited works—a pleasant surprise in a world of industrial metals and black/white/gray modernism.

If this piece alludes to the impact of industrialization on the environment, Gitche Gumee takes us deeper into these waters. Found wooden relics from sunken boat, their scarred surfaces covered with worn, chipped paint and dried barnacles, are strewn over three pristine white planks.  The old and rotten bears down on the new.  The ruined hull has been shot by a hot pink arrow, which, of course, has been fabricated and assembled by the artist so that its “feathers” are made of wood.  Maybe it isn’t clear who (if anyone) is winning this battle!

In the library at Open Space, Ben and Neal have selected books around the subject of Detroit and industry.  These range from a 1934 publication on mechanical drawing from the Henry Ford Trade School in Dearborn, Michigan, to Ford’s own treatises to a book on strip mining. A great, open-ended opportunity for connecting with the issues Ben explores!

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Gripping!

Posted by Doreen on Thursday, October 27th, 2011

 

In Strange Grip, the current show at Nudashank, gallerists Seth Adelsberger and Alex Ebstein move away from their recent trend of thematic shows, instead inviting three artists to create site-specific environments where their work could be experienced in a more complete way.  The results are captivating—sometimes even overwhelming—in their visual richness and demonstrate just how much context and visual relationships impact our understanding and appreciation of singular works of art.  Here Philadelphia artist Bonnie Brenda Scott greets us in the foyer and Andrew Liang and John Bohl, both MICA grads and incredibly productive artists familiar to us from the Baltimore scene, commandeer opposite ends of a large white cube gallery and transform its space magically. 

Andrew fills a dark galaxy with stars and new constellations that glow brilliantly in their ever nighttime sky.  A few evoke the classical mythology of astronomy—bears and a horse or unicorn— and he has even noted that in conceiving this amazing project he was “mesmerized by Albrecht Dürer,” but most of these highly original images seem to emerge from popular culture, lightened with Andrew’s usual humor and imagination.  A grimacing frankfurter struggles to crunch a sit-up from his comfortable bun; a grinning cactus dances across the sky; a grieving carrot reclines woefully; a twisting worm emerges from a cup, replacing its straw, and then uses a straw to drink from his own miniature cup; a jubilant snowman stands aloft on an ice cream cone, waving his stick arms.  Circular stars twinkle everywhere, as though they too might suddenly coalesce into yet another charming image. Each star and constellation is machine stitched, white on black fabric, and stuffed, but these are definitely not toys suitable for children!

The edge of this crazy galaxy is bounded by a mural that takes advantage of an existing vertical element in the space.  Painted in the flat areas of bright color we have come to associate with Andrew’s work, it represents two legs of a walking figure, with a black-and white plush cat—modeled on his beloved pet Bling Bling—clinging for dear life to this human companion, his long claws leaving bloody marks as he sinks closer  to the floor.

The new tact with materials in Andrew’s installation (the components are sewn, not painted) was inspired by several artist friends and crafts people who encouraged Andrew to sew—among them, Jenny Strunge, who is best known as the Maker of Cotton Monsters.

Across the room, John Bohl takes a very different but equally ambitious direction with his new work—paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture arranged in ways that make the whole so much more than the sum of its already beautiful parts. 

The principal wall is covered with red and blue screen prints, a maze of elegant lines that recall the paintings of Brice Marden, abstract but with a fluidity that allies them to the natural world. 

What I like best about John’s work is that I can find these resonances of art history—echoes of Pop or Surrealism or even maybe ancient art—but that it is so of the moment, this moment in 2011 in which we are all living.  From time to time, a figure or a landscape will coalesce among the abstract images, then recede into a beautiful pattern.  The layering of John’s  images and indeed of his entire installation reflects for me the new and rapid way in which see, think, and communicate inspired by the connectivity and access of the internet.  Here at Nudashank, in this actual “digital” scene, there is wallpaper on our enormous screen; the works are arranged like “see all” photographs mounted on Facebook; and the imagery reflects the fresh graphic design of a new generation.  Despite these everyday associations, John, a digital native, has found a way to make art that is both beautiful and original.

You still have a chance to catch Strange Grip at its closing reception TONIGHT, October 27 from 6 to 9 p.m.  Don’t miss it!

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Middle Passage

Posted by Doreen on Friday, October 14th, 2011

 

Joseph Norman, a resident artist at the Creative Alliance this year and last, takes over its Main Gallery with a project that sums up not just his time in Baltimore, but also the thought and passion of a lifetime, maybe even more than one lifetime. In Middle Passage, a four-part, room-sized mural, he recreates the traumatic experience and painful remembrance of a horrific practice by which Africans were captured and transported to the New World.

Over 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, some ten million Africans were wrenched from their home continent and transferred to the Americas and enslaved for generations.

The project, in progress for eight years, was developed in four campaigns of drawing, almost all in black-and-white drawings, assembled on the wall so that as viewers, we are embraced by three walls of calligraphic imagery.  These he creates with remarkable speed and confidence.  Joe intends to use these drawings—401 arranged in a 13 x 150 composition—as a basis for a lithographic series on the same subject.

The first movement of the mural, Mother Africa, was completed in Norman’s studio at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Athens, where he teaches. This section represents the verdant flora of Africa and the varied animals that inhabit it.  It begins with a grid of separate drawings, eight high and fourteen wide, each one reducing a plant element—bamboo, palm fronds, leaves, flowers, and fruit— to its essential lines. The pattern is interrupted only twice, and pointedly, first by figures that represent a man and a woman, suggested by a few quick strokes, and a few lines down, a vessel, most likely for carrying water. The figures represent African ancestors and they will appear repeatedly throughout the mural.  Norman’s paper mosaics are tacked on the wall on their upper edges so that their bottom edges project, sometimes lifting gently as someone walks past. 

As we move toward the right, the composition achieves greater visual integration, with images united across multiple sheets of paper.  A tall giraffe peaks out at us between two trees.  By the far side of this mural segment, the animals move into the foreground and the plant life recedes. Sometimes we only see their heads—a lion or elephant staring directly out at us—and at others, only their familiarly patterned bodies, like the spots of a tiger or the stripes of a zebra, but taken together they convey the beauty and fecundity of the African land.

The second movement, Conflict & Confrontation, fills the rear wall.  At first, events are represented abstractly–hands reaching upward as though begging for freedom, release; a series of grimacing faces; bare foot prints pursued and overcome by feet wearing shoes; and the image of the ship introduced for the first time.  Suggestions of violence, suffering, bondage, and death are woven throughout.  At one point, a phalanx of swords, then a group of people, confront an exploding cannon. 

The infamous Door of No Return marks the center of the composition. A figure stands in the doorway, his head framed by a rectangle of pale blue sky, one of only a few notes of color in the entire mural. This marks a critical shift in the story, from the events of capture to the mind- numbing realization, there is no escape.  This figure is about to descend into the bowels of the captor’s ship.

The remainder of this movement is about the horror of compressed, tight spaces, with human beings piled one on top of another, much as we imagine hell to be. The geometric wooden structure that frames the figures reminds us that they are confined, unable to move, maybe unable to eat, drink, even breathe. Hands reach desperately up the staircase, toward air and sky and freedom. They will not get there.  It is hard to find a full recognizable figure in the contorted, interlocking pile of human parts, but we know that there are many, many people trapped there, all suffering pain and indignity.  The ancestors we first saw in the jungle, then followed through their chase and capture, now peer out at us through the wooden structure of the ship, their faces contorted with terror.

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Nowhere in this epic struggle do we actually see the perpetrators of this mammoth injustice, those who stole the freedom and lives of those forced to leave Africa, but we sense their callousness.  In their ship, the supplies, bottles of liquor, baskets of fruit, and a chicken remain in a higher level than the people they have captured.  We only see the conveyance, the ship with its tall masts and lines. Deeper in the hold, miniaturized by their placement in the bottom of the hold, we can see twenty figures, standing side by side.

The third movement, Dark Voyage / The Middle Passage, begins and ends with a sea turtle, a symbol of spiritual transformation.  It frames writhing figures that sink deeper into the water, engulfed by fish and other sea creatures.  These grimacing faces become skeletal, reminding us of the fate of those Africans in the Zong Massacre.  A ship owner threw captive Africans into the ocean to assure collecting insurance on his cargo.  This section of the mural is drawn with white lines on a matte black background.  It underscores the terrible destination of these Africans—the impervious darkness of the ocean floor.

Finally, in Capitulation of the New World, we see the summation and, for those who survived the transatlantic trip, the outcome of the Middle Passage. 

It begins with the crated captives on left, chronicles the crossing in center, and suggests the cruelty of the auction block on the right.  In the center of this section, a skeleton lies horizontally in front of a deep purple background; below him, a line of four boats, part of an endless chain carries boatloads of the enslaved; in the next register down, line after line of tiny figures march along, headed further and further from freedom; and perhaps most frightening, the artist creates a horizontal panel where we see only frightened eyes and supplicating hands begging, unsuccessfully, for release. Even at their final destination, the life these Africans were dealt was as controlled and miserable as the actual middle passage. In this final movement, the geometric organization of registers and panels remains strong, perhaps a reminder that the enslaved Africans remained under the continued control of their oppressors.

The mural remains on view until October 29, but try to stop by tonight, Friday, October 14, at 8 pm for performances, film, and a discussion by scholar Dr. Raymond Winbush, psychologist Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and  artist Joseph Norman, speaking to the living legacies of the transatlantic slave trade.

Posted in Creative Alliance | No Comments »

Guardists

Posted by Doreen on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Imagine this: you get to find out what your colleagues are doing when they are not working with you—and it turns out to be incredibly interesting art!  That’s what’s been happening at the Towson Arts Collective for the past month at Guardists, an exhibition of 13 BMA security officers on view until October 14.

Leo Hussey’s recent mixed-media pieces Secure Constructions take his assembled works in an increasingly three-dimensional direction.  Drawings that capture dense urban patterns—maps of streets, views of the rears of row houses, wood paneled walls—and fragments of similar drawings snipped into calligraphic mosaics are mounted on pieces of wood and sometimes heightened with color.  Assembled into an irregular shape, the wooden components in turn function like individual paper mosaics, creating larger patterns of shapes and shadows.  Here Leo strives for “a subtle interplay between the natural shadows created from the ‘canvas’ of each piece and the manufactured gradations of color I that I create in each arrangement.”

A.J. Visgil’s understated mixed media pieces, each one but a few inches of carefully layered surface, are inscribed with an evocative title and encased in shadow-box frames. In Choosing, the first thing you notice is the simple outline of a house, a familiar geometric symbol slightly obscured by a layer of paint.   A blue square is drawn around it and an arrow suggests that it is about to be relocated to the opposite (empty) side of the paper.  What are we choosing?  A new place to live?  A new relationship? At least the right half of the composition is brighter and lighter!

Nick Clasing, a film maker who in 2010 won the Citypaper competition Shoot. Score.  Baltimore, shows a powerful video, A Spiritual Look at the Life of Marlon Harris. We are following two crude and mean guys around a darkened Baltimore as though seated in the back seat of their car, trailing too-close-for-comfort behind them as they get out and stomp down the street.  I mean, we are there.  There, as they gush profanities and hurl invectives at a homeless man panhandling on a dark corner; there, as they grab his HOMELESS sign and toss it to the ground.  The ending is abrupt.  We don’t really know the whole outcome, but I’m rooting for the homeless man, who has proclaimed: “No matter what you say to me, I’m still gonna love you.”  Maybe this could become a new call to civility in 2011.

Painting is alive and well here in a wide range of styles!  Jeff Valluzzi shows four expressive portraits, some speaking of the impact of psychiatric distress and substance abuse, but my favorite is his self portrait as a night guard at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.   Jeff is seated at a desk, a book open before him, for a moment lost in thought, perhaps immersed in the creative process that resulted in this painting.  Across the room, in conversation with these intense works, Emily Campbell’s Francine depicts a little girl who is both frightened and frightening, her disturbing expression mirrored in the dark landscape behind her.

 

Lucie Ferguson’s quartet of small, square paintings, represent a quieter, more intimate world, one we might encounter or hope to encounter as we pass through our everyday life in Baltimore.  Lucy explains:  “My favorite places are the nooks and corners of a city or home, especially the old bits that seem to have stories in them.”  Whether a view of a bedroom or shared urban space, each one is a delicately painted miniature that relates a narrative, or perhaps preserves a fragment of memory.

Linda Smith, the show’s Curator, contributes “a body of work inspired by film, texture, and working the night shift at the Baltimore Museum of Art.”   One of these is a view of the monumental fan window in the Museum’s Antioch Court, through which we see a vivid pink sunset or sunrise— a magical moment only known to those left behind by BMA visitors and office workers.  Two others, in soft brown and sepia tones, capture the shadows of windows and objects that together create beautiful patterns that hover between representation and abstraction.  These are titled with a specific moment in time—3:02 p.m.—but they evoke the timeless quality of remembrance.

Painter Laura Marden begins with a color in mind and works/reworks a wet surface so that we can see her brushstrokes and scrapes, layer after layer creating surprisingly rich textures and patterns within a controlled palette.  Laura identifies these paintings, completed in 2011, as “a return …to abstract expressionism.”  In Abstract White, the center of the composition is suffused in light, but in the delicate green strokes around its edges, we sense the presence of nature, perhaps leaves and petals in the summer sun.  In Orange Composition 1, Laura’s brushstrokes form more solid shapes—fluid marks that sometimes resemble letters, at other times,  leaves or petals, maybe bugs or even small figures, all pressed to the surface in a pattern that fleetingly bring to mind the camouflage pictures of Andy Warhol.  These reward quiet looking.

Nature has a definitive role in the photography of Melissa Pangan, who finds moments outdoors where death and disintegration are taking place and intervenes.  In one, a venerable tree has been chopped down, its remains forming a series of moss-covered plateaus.  Melissa has painted the remains of its vertical trunk blue, creating a miniature Niagara Falls.

In another of these intriguing views, we see a single dead tree trunk rising among more verdant companions; or a blasted stump, perhaps the victim of a lightening blast; or a leafless, flowerless, vine twisted in curls that wrap around one another.  In each case, Melissa has inserted artifice into nature, painting some of the wood shades of purple or blue.  The naturalness of these colors—they could be pools of water or reflections of the sky—always fools you for a nano-second. Then you realize that these photographs are about the artist’s ability to intervene in nature, not just to record is appearance, but to change our understanding of it.  As Melissa tells us:  “I’m drawing from the existing characteristics of each site and leaving my trace behind.”  I will be hoping to encounter these poetic moments on autumn walks in the woods in and around Baltimore.

You will not be surprised to learn that Bernard Stiegler has studied theater—his prints and drawings are each a vignette in a larger performance, often one where we know we will be on the edges of our seats until the final act.  Burning Man, his dark form engulfed in flames and smoke, extends a hand out from the flames toward us.  His eyes connect with our gaze, but we cannot save him from his fiery end.  In Ben’s screen print, Uranium River, a gigantic mechanized figure stands in front of a post-apocalyptic landscape that is viewed through his transparent body.  Figures, not quite human, wander through a desolate valley below a sky where the moon is dwarfed by swirling disturbances, perhaps cyclones or harbingers of the arrival of alien spaceships.

Nearby, Chris Reuther  takes up a similarly dark mythology, his eloquently drawn subjects inspired by comic books and video games, films and literature.  Vampire captures the dark eyes, sunken lips, and incredibly wrinkled flesh of a human being drained of spirit as well as blood.  This empty shell of a once vibrant person sinks to the lower right corner of the Bristol board as if he is slowly disappearing—or perhaps just fading away from our view.

Joe Gallagher  offers us Fun Hole Photograph and Music, complete with a set of instructions.  I read them, put on the earphones, and listen to his music while exploring the fun hole, an image that is white at its center but then expands in concentric auras of color. As I listen, the colors–yellow, orange, red, then cranberry to black–seem to pulsate and I am completely drawn into this experience of sound and color.  Joe’s piece reminds me how many of Baltimore’s visual artists are transdisciplinary, moving with ease between both music and visual art and even combining the two.

Debby Markowski , also a painter, creates clay pieces that reference music and nature, as well as family and culture.  These diminutive vessels are also inspired by artists Gustav Klimt and Chuck Close, whose use of pattern may account for delicate but expressive marks that appear on the surfaces of her vessels. In Blue Melody, the surface is striated with fine, reiterative lines that animate the biomorphic shapes that entwine the piece.  These are as much for contemplation as for use!

I’ve always known that I was surrounded by art at the BMA—but now I am certain that I am also encircled by artists!

Guardists is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from noon to 5 p.m., or by appointment (call 410-916-6340).

Posted in Baltimore Museum of Art, Towson Arts Collective | No Comments »

Disorderly Construct

Posted by Doreen on Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Disorderly Construct, a collaboration between David Armacost and Nikholis Planck, is on view at Open Spaceat 2720 Sisson Street until October 15. As Katherine M. Reinhart explains in her accompanying essay, these artists “challenge visitors to see their work not as exalted and sacred, but as immediate and disposable; the exact opposite of artists who slave for months over a single canvas.”

The result is a rare experience for art lovers—a total inversion of what we see and do in galleries and museums, maybe more like an engaging studio visit with lots of conversation, actual and visual.  The cover of Reinhart’s essay is inscribed “looking art/ talking about it/pointing at it/gesturing/emailing about art/texting/g-chatting.” 

Disorderly Construct is very much about how artists in this next generation will create and display work—in part, an outcome of quicker, more intimate, more transparent communication and connectivity.

In this turned-upside-down display space, there are no labels and authorship is a non-issue.  It gets us further from finished products and closer to the process of creation—in this remarkable case, co-creation.  It is a reminder that art is about making for the artist and about experiencing for the viewer.

In the large opening gallery, the traditional white cube is subverted by a huge black table.  Large sheets of particle board, six by three sheets, stand on saw horses and sturdy wooden legs.  It feels like a work table, underscoring the process-based intention of the show. The only open space is around the edges, where a relatively narrow corridor channels visitors around the room.  Across the room, you will encounter a digital print lying on the floor, stretching under the far wall and into the next gallery. I have to restrain myself from the museum-person compulsion to pick it up, protect it.

The table surface is simultaneously rough, just simply what particle board is (overlapping lines of wood fragments and torn fibers) but it is painted a glossy black that reflects the drawings and photographs arranged on it. Drawings lay on top of one another other, as though a random pile has been fanned out without deliberation or selection, sometimes with one drawing obscuring others as though it has been blown aside or its corner folded over carelessly. They are all just beyond our ability to view or read or completely comprehend.  An occasional cursive word is decipherable: “GOLDEN TOUCH.” Truer words were never spoken—or painted. A couple of piles of color photographs, the kind that are developed at one-hour services, lie tantalizingly out of reach. 

Suddenly, a group of visitors has grabbed the photos and have distributed them across the table for examination. Were they meant to do that? I ask. No, responds David, we are not supposed to be touching them and not all that information has intended to be shared! I peak anyway. 

Some are photos of a related installation David and Nikholis completed the night before the opening on the bulletin boards outside of Saint John’s, a few blocks away on 2640 Saint Paul Street, best known as a collectively run outpost of Red Emma’s and a favorite haunt for Baltimore artists and musicians. This intervention extends the reach of the show to one of the city’s most heavily trafficked arteries.

I ask Nick which drawings are his. I confess that they all seem so unified, so much of a piece, together, that it is hard to tell where he ends and David begins. It pleases him that their work and ideas have blended so seamlessly, but he does allow his work tends to be figurative, David’s abstract; that most of the color work is David’s and that a lot of the work on newsprint is his. 

Nick rewards me with a pin emblazoned with the letters CY, a memorial to the recently deceased painter Cy Twombly, one of the greatest mark makers of the modern age, and an inspiration during his exchange with David.

Two not-quite-identical paintings lean against the wall, a diptych of sorts that must reflect the collaboration between David and Nick. Did they each work on both canvases? Did they repeat each other’s gestures?  I can relax. It doesn’t signify. The paintings are their paintings.

In the second gallery, usually the Open Space collection of artist’s books, there are a series of works— piles of paper, a file, a sheaf of drawings and marks—displayed on narrow wooden shelves, each one standing on its corner, as though it could topple over at a moment’s notice.  In some ways anxiety- provoking, the arrangement makes us see the items displayed in fresh ways.  As in the rest of the show, we can only see part of what is there, and once again, we wonder:  are these art works we shouldn’t touch or books meant to be open and read?  

This month David Armacost begins his graduate work at Towson University, but for nearly two years he has worked in Visitor Services at the BMA, that tall guy with the welcoming smile. Kudos to his colleagues who pitched in to help—Katie with the essay, Anna Hoffman with the installation, and many others with their presence and enthusiasm. 

Open Space welcomes visitors Fridays, 4 pm to 8 pm and Saturdays and Sundays, 12 pm to 4 pm.  Don’t miss this one!

Posted in Open Space | 1 Comment »

Anthony Cervino: Editions of You

Posted by Doreen on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

Anthony Cervino’s sculpture or assemblages combine found and fabricated components to create narratives, within each piece and collectively, from piece to piece.  In his solo show, Editions of You, he speaks for himself individually, but also engages those who view his work in a larger conversation.   He describes it as “largely a reflection on fatherhood and aging” where “objects stand in for ‘characters’ and are placed in environments that hint at the complex relationship among identity, place and time.” 

Home at Last anchors the show, literally and figuratively.  A gigantic metal cleat—familiar to anyone who has returned to a harbor from rough seas—rises vertically beside a neatly wound nautical rope.  No longer tossed by the elements, we are about to be tied and tethered, maybe safe and secure, home at last, but the hefty scale of the cleat hints at just how rough the seas may be in 2011.  In his introduction, Anthony references entropy, the way in which life and the universe unwind, devolving always toward chaos.  Despite the seeming control he exerts over his work and the space it occupies, chaos lurks around the edges, for the artist and his audience.

A title like All’s Well that Starts Well (and Moves with the Sun) turns our usual optimistic view about the eventuality of positive outcomes upside down—especially if you are a snowman, represented here by half of a mold, painted brilliant yellow.  The half snowman, a negative volume of the shape he might become outdoors, stands below an awning, his black pipe resting inexplicably on top of his hat.  If the awning and the snowman are not contradictions enough, a black band saw looms on the other side of the platform wall, as though waiting to slice who knows what. 

Not far away, Typical Mother’s Son presents a related scenario in miniature.  A tiny yellow snowman, this time complete, stands atop a child-size pedestal, its top paved with small ceramic tiles.  He holds a lantern, perhaps a sign that there is light at the end of the tunnel—or maybe not, as a pool of resin suggests that he might be melting away.

This artist keeps us alert to the inevitability of change. The slide tray in Advanced Projects is a found object, coated and painted, immobilized as its technology becomes extinct.  In Boom Boom Box Box, his actual 1980’s boom box stands eerily silent beside a truncated park bench, which manages to stand upright despite its missing feet.  Both of these pieces evoke memories of daily experiences now forever altered by progress—the click-click of individual slides long gone from art-in-the-dark and music now streaming seamlessly across the internet.

Throughout the show, Anthony has created pedestals and platforms for his sculptural components that are integral to their presentation.  In Hurry with the Furies, an action-figure centaur stands on the edge of a marble architectural fragment, which in turn is mounted on a wooden pedestal.  A metal plaque, meant to hold a title or an artist’s name, remains completely blank.

He also takes control of the traditional museum/gallery text, his handout telling us only what he deems necessary: “The sculpture with the duck is called Tons of Fun.”  That yellow and orange wheeled duck, forever chasing a small red globe, is impaled by a rusted metal wire and anchored into a rounded lump of cement speckled with stones or fragments of asphalt.  The top corner of its tall pedestal is stenciled with bright green letters— ONS OF FU—the used stencil then hung vertically below.  Here we are made aware of the found and the created, the process and the product, and as in Hurry with the Furies, reminded of the role titles can play in our understanding of meaning.

Editions of Youis on view in the Elizabeth Prangely Rice Gallery at McDaniel College in Westminster.  The art is arranged beneath a stained glass ceiling in a classical, lofty space that was once the school’s library.  Somehow, I have to feel that Anthony was attracted to this beautiful space and its remembered purpose, an “advanced project” in its own right!

Take a drive out to Carroll County—it’s closer than you urbanites think—and see this and other contemporary shows curated by Steven Pearson, Associate Professor of Art at McDaniel.   He’s made viewing and writing about work a central part of the curriculum for his students and created a great opportunity for us too.   As he describes his work as an artist/teacher/curator:  “It’s the best job, you get to do what you love!”

Next up: Inferences and, a solo show of recent paintings and drawings by MICA professor Michael Weiss, opening reception on September 27, 7 to 9 pm.

Posted in McDaniel College | No Comments »

Art You Can Walk Through—or On—Just Don’t Try to Sit Down!

Posted by Doreen on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Detail view of Gary Kachadourian's Interior/Exterior. Photo by Mitro Hood

A monumental turquoise B, tilted on its side as if it’s falling over, greets you at the entrance off the BMA’s Antioch Court.  It announces the 2011 Baker Artist Awards, the third year to celebrate the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund’s visionary decision to encourage artists in Baltimore to create and promote their work—and, of course, a large carrot to encourage artists to stay here,  even come here. A tangible sign that Baltimore loves its artists!

As you enter the first gallery, you will ask:  “Where am I?  Inside?  Outside? Engrossed in a vintage film or lost in a dream?  Mary Sawyers Baker winner Gary Kachadourian  has papered an entire room with digital prints of his amazing drawings.  For me, this installation immediately evokes a sudden rush of memories of the black-and -white world of photography and television during my 1950’s childhood.   Somehow, despite the inundation of powerful color imagery we experience today—in print, online, even on our mobile phones— this colorless room feels even more real.  You cannot only walk up to the images on the wall, you can walk across the surface of the floor that Gary has created, almost as though you are a part of the art work, perhaps the only touch of color in the room.

Here we are both indoors and outdoors, with a domestic interior on one side of the room and the street on the other.  Only a change in floor surface and the narrow overhang of an acoustic-tile ceiling rimming the edges of one side of the room clue you to the transition between the two.  There’s a blurred line between private and public space, perhaps a reminder of just how much these two domains intersect, particularly in cities.

In the interior, you can contemplate a living room or den with two overstuffed sofas (drawn but not sit-on-able).  A large window in this wood-paneled room offers you a glimpse to yet another street, where a car is parked in front of a McDonald’s.  The view of this ubiquitous fast-food emporium is much clearer than whatever we might be able to make out on the television sitting nearby on a wheeled stand.   You can even enter a tiny faux bathroom, its drawn door frozen open.  Inside this confined space, you will find a bath tub that does not allow you cannot climb in for a soak and a two-dimensional commode and sink, complete with a mirror.  You won’t see yourself there; it bears the reflection of a huge post-industrial building–I like to think it is the majestic Copycat!

An urban exterior detail from Gary Kachadourian's installation at the BMA. Photo by Mitro Hood

The exterior side of Gary’s installation features the most familiar elements of the urban built environment.  A dumpster is filled to overflowing with bags of garbage. At first glance, you might wonder, could that be a homeless person, wrapped in blankets, sleeping on top of a pile of urban detritus?  There are sidewalks and jersey walls, a chain link fence and a light pole, cinderblocks and bricks as well as signs that nature struggles to remain a presence.  A tall tree reaches up into the gallery skylight; a row of topiary-like trimmed bushes stand proudly above a retaining wall; and a patch of grass, punctuated by rather delightful weeds, bursts from its boundaries onto a patch of asphalt.   

Join with all of us in the art community to celebrate the recognition of wonderful confluence of talent and generosity that resides in Gary.  For over two decades, he organized exhibitions for others at the Baltimore Office for Promotion & the Arts; now, while attending graduate school at UMBC, he still takes time to visit innumerable exhibitions and performances, particularly those of the city’s emerging artists.  The Mary Sawyers Baker Award is about artistic excellence, but it is gratifying to see it won by an artist who so often reaches out to encourage others. 

So–if you long to have a Kachadourian cinderblock wall of your own, or a cut-and-fold bathroom, or a miniature vacant lot, complete with chain-link blockade, visit his website!

Posted in Baker Artist Awards | No Comments »