Art-Full Life

Posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 10:03 am

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.