Just days after seeing it for the first time, I’ve already snuck back to see Lauren Boilini’s The Only Dance There Is in Creative Alliance’s Blood Weather exhibition.
Again, I was completely immersed in the magic of Boilini’s 2,000-square-foot painting. Seeping out from a blood red center wall, the painting fades to peach on one side and a gentle yellow on the other. Delicate long drips of paint read like mysterious veils, just opaque enough to prevent us from reading the shadowy shapes behind them. These are drawn in charcoal or suggested with vigorous brushwork. Are they birds? Schools of fish? The denizens of some unknown world? Or perhaps just memories from a dream? Whatever their meaning, you can lose yourself happily in the visual richness of this work.
Boilini, a CA resident artist and MICA instructor, covered three enormous gallery walls with The Only Dance There Is in roughly 70 hours over seven days. 
The three pieces in Blood Weather from Becky Alprin have a more disconcerting impact. Reminders of the fragility of our built environment and of the destructive power of nature, they look frighteningly like the aftermath of an earthquake or a tsunami, or steps along the path to the end of civilization. Given current events, it feels a little too close to reality!
As with much of her recent work, Alprin cuts shapes that form topography or roadways, buildings or bridges, often seemingly in the process of collapse or destruction. In Reclamation 2, these spill across recycled airplane windshields.
Alprin’s installation, How Short This Space of Time, fully engages the gallery space and seems a three-dimensional response to Boilini’s environmental painting.
For the installation, Alprin cut a gallery wall open with a jagged line, revealing the metal studs and drywall interior, then repeated similar silhouettes as its principal elements. These cut-outs are supported by metal studs and extend out into the gallery. They’re placed on top of lime green paper that forms their flat base. Along one side, a dark river flows surrounded and filled with the detritus of fractured buildings and roads.
The intensity of this work is relieved by the minstallation Forum of Forty Champions, curated by Gary Kachadourian, who is clearly continuing the work of nurturing Baltimore artists that he began at BOPA. In this 225 square-inch space, 40 champion artists display an original warrior with special powers, each created within the parameters of video game figures. These amazing mini-sculptures are arranged on a tiled floor below a black-and-white interior covered with drawings by Eamon Espey, who also designed the show poster where each artist reveals the powers of his or her figure.
Some of my favorite warriors:
- Karen Yasinsky’s Warren, a feline creature of many colors, who can “turn people into melting blobs of color;”
- Michael Farley’s Dazzler, a gorgeous blonde perched on a pink boombox, where she transforms dance music into “beams of crippling glamour” (a reference to his work with Dazzlestorm);
- Seth Adelsberger’s Ichthil the Bog Troll, a hot pink and lime green monster whose power is described by one word—regeneration;
- Ric Royer’s Negator, who wields a stop sign, ready to tell “other champions they don’t have super powers, and then they lose them;”
- and Andrew Liang’s Hal Hardy, a tooth surrounded by Mr. Potato-like accoutrements—he’s hard on everyone, but his weakness is sugar!
A closing party for all 40 artists and their warriors will be Saturday, April 10, from 5 to 7 p.m. Expect some game-playing—dice and measuring sticks will be distributed and the rules and booklet will be developed while the show is on view.
Filed in: Creative Alliance.
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. 