Benjamin Kelley's ambitious installation features bone fragments sucked through a plastic tube between two vacuums.
Just as Baltimore’s streets became passable in the aftermath of Snowmageddon, gallerists at the H&H Building threw open their doors with a suite of provocative works.
The most cohesive and sophisticated presentation was Gallery Four’s Terms of Use, a four-person show that combines photographs by Norwegian Mats Sivertsen with sculpture by Chicago’s David Moré and MICA graduate students Colin Benjamin and Benjamin Kelley. The show was curated collectively by the artists who live and work in the space, including my BMA colleague Eddie Winter, a photographer.
I’m told Moré flew to Baltimore between blizzards with two suitcases full of materials and then worked around the clock to make something unique for Terms of Use. His And I kissed Her on the mmm-mm occupies half of one entire room with: a busted banjo, a tower of foam bricks, a figure of Slash (the former guitarist for Guns N’ Roses) inside a bottle, a sinking model boat, a minuscule model boat, a miniature figure clinging to an electrical cord for its life, and vibrating speakers that tossed debris and violently shook a miniature lifeboat. For me, the journey through the model boats and the music (and even the piece’s title) evokes many a guy’s passage from boy to man. And, in every way, it rocks!
Colin Benjamin’s sculptures employ found objects with elegance and whimsy. In Enough Already, (that story’s over), a hammer is frozen in mid-action as it pulls a huge nail from the floor. The piece is just waiting for one of us to trip over it. Scattered throughout the gallery are pairs of janitor’s brooms with bright orange bristles. Their positions defy the possibility of their actual use. All of the brooms stand inexplicably upright, as if they were really intended for this artful purpose and not for cleaning—or maybe that cleaning is done by brooms on their own. For an amusing and coincidental connection, check out a recent YouTube frenzy over magic brooms.
Benjamin Kelley’s sculptures are sleek mechanistic forms covered in hard white plastic and grey leatherette. In But It Is Not Everything, vacuums inside two enormous cylinders shoot human bone fragments back and forth between them through a clear plastic tube.
These and other pieces in the exhibition complement Sivertsen’s photos, where mysterious mechanical objects are inserted into people-less interiors and urban landscapes. A jet engine rests comfortably on a double bed. An unidentified object hangs above a kitchen counter, its dials and lights forming a mechanized face. In Unity, several microphone-like objects fall from the sky into a canyon of modernist buildings; one of the microphones is growing roots.
Terms of Use seems to me a statement on the powerful presence of the object—whether created, found, or digitized.
A few reminders:
- There will be a closing reception for Terms of Use on Saturday, March 27, from 5 to 10 p.m.
- Look soon forArt-Full Life posts on other worthy exhibitions inside the H&H Gallery at Nudashank and the Whole Gallery.
- This surge of creativity has been supported by the Baltimore Community Foundation’s inspired “confetti grants,” awarded last December. Thank you, BCF!
Filed in: Gallery Four, Terms of Use.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 