On a recent visit to one of MICA’s three thesis shows, three projects caught my eye …
For his thesis show, Calder Brannock parked a 1967 camping trailer outside the Fox Building. His project, Adventure: The Camper Contemporary Residency Program, takes groups of artists on excursions around Baltimore and beyond. Artists create work and Calder then exhibits their art works in this portable museum space. “I trust them to make the work,” says Calder. And they trust him to take the camper out into the world. In late 2009, he and his colleagues traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach, where they attracted visitors from the global marketplace to this authentic space.
Calder is an artist who doubles as a docent—that person museum visitors wish stood at the ready in every gallery of contemporary art, able to explain anything that puzzles you. I met him at his exhibition’s opening, where he was dressed in a bright blue one-piece uniform, looking professional and official. He stood at the camper’s door, ready to greet visitors or to lure passers-by inside.
The exhibition inside Calder’s camper featured work from two trips to Curtis Bay on the Chesapeake coastline along the border between Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County. The first group designed and fabricated boats out of children’s pool rafts and then floated in the water. They found sunken boats and floating marine debris. Colin Benjamin’s assemblage of found objects—pieces of wood, a buoy, some tape to hold its parts together—is inscribed poignantly “Send help, please. Thank you sincerely.”
A second group visiting Curtis Bay explored the abandoned shoreline, where they discovered a colony of makeshift huts decorated with pornography, apparently a popular cruising place for lovers. Adam Junior responds with a miniature bronzed sculpture, Monument for Fort Armistead. At first glance, it looks like two movie heroes struggling on a stage, but on closer examination, it is a record of a clandestine tryst.
Following the camper, MICA’s thesis show continued inside more conventional gallery space, but with the usual MICA lack of convention. Graham Coreil-Allen presented The Typology of New Public Sites. On maps (available for viewers to take with them), Graham renamed various parts of the urban landscape with titles—Zoomscape, Unseen Field, Monumental Isolation. As the artist declared, the sites are described “playfully,” yet in a way that “challenges the authority of how public space is represented.
Graham has conducted tours of these New Public Sites—by car, bike, and light rail—but however his audiences pass through these spaces again, they’ll see it with fresh eyes.
After taking in Graham’s work, I left the exhibition and as I walked to my car, I saw five young men who had applied a bucket of blood-red paint liberally to their arms, legs, faces, and clothes. One white t-shirt looked like an Abstract Expressionist print, with the addition of a large hand print. I couldn’t resist asking what they were doing. “We’re making a zombie advertisement,” said one zombie pointing to another with bloody lips. “It’s his final project.”
Ian Farmer, the artist orchestrating this project, was kind enough to share these photos. Don’t worry, even after you’ve seen these zombies, you won’t be afraid to visit Mount Royal!
To follow up on how non-zombie MICA graduates fan out into the Baltimore art and culture scene, go see Graham Coreil-Allen’s fabulous video piece, Specter Polis, on view at Creative Alliance through June 18, or catch his talk at 7 p.m. on May 27.
Filed in: MICA.
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. 