“The show means a lot to me, and it also adds greater meaning [for it] to be in Baltimore. [The City] gave me so much while living there, and I’m happy to come back from wanderings with something to say.” – Curator Hayley Silverman
A Collection of Hideouts by Philippe Van Wolputte, www.vanwolputteprogress.eu/
A series of 4-x-3 ft. images at Open Space depicts the places we will squeeze into in the wake of a catastrophe, according to Belgian artist Philippe Van Wolputte. He captures these claustrophobic and cluttered spaces in black-and-white digital prints, each covered with clear packing tape. Not unlike the bomb shelters of the 1950s, they are filled with tools, rolls of paper, water jugs, and blankets. Hardly inviting, but perhaps welcome after a disaster.
On the ninth anniversary of 9/11, Open Space opened the exhibition Liberty B, including Philippe’s digital prints. Essentially, the exhibition takes a look at survivalism—stockpiling supplies, seeking emergency medical treatment, and building secure retreats that will allow people to survive, whatever happens. As the show’s catalogue explains, Liberty B, the independence and self-reliance of survivalism, allows us to exercise Liberty A, the freedom embraced historically by Americans.
The international flavor of this exhibition was undoubtedly determined by its Curator Hayley Silverman (a 2008 MICA grad who until recently was living in Berlin) and by the liberating possibility of sharing art across the internet. Everything in the show was created and moved halfway around the planet on the worldwide web. The irony here, of course, is that a large enough disaster would render that enduring connectivity unlikely.
Multi-media work by Guthrie Lonergan
For the exhibition, Los Angeles-based artist Guthrie Lonergan assembled commercial images shot in front of a blue screen. Hand gestures made by multiple figures are interspersed with a wrench, basketball, apple, popcorn that rises from below, leaves that blow across the screen, and an hour glass filled with sand. All of this is accompanied by a snippet from the song Message in a Bottle by the Police. “SOS. . . SOS. . . SOS” is repeated so often, you feel sure that time indeed is running out and the ship is sinking.
Climb at your own risk by Claude Closky, www.closky.info
Adding to the auditory mayhem, at the show’s opening, musicians mounted the stepladders in Climb at your own risk by French artist Claude Closky and played a guitar and a flute.
Detail, Motion 01 by Philippe Van Wolputte, www.vanwolputteprogress.eu
In Untitled, American Damon Zuccone offers us a digital clock (set to the actual time) that morphs constantly in shape. In Damon’s 6312414236, using computer software, a cell phone number rewrites itself every nano-second.
In the video Desert Slide, Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard and J.G. Thirwell climb a hill of pure white sand in the desert of Oman, then sit and slowly slip down the slope. Across the room, Jacob’s Sabulation emits weird, churning sounds that are actually created by the movement of sand.
As always at Open Space, there is art in the arrangement of the pieces to enhance the whole (the Closky ladders define the gallery really effectively as a three-dimensional space). And there are wonderful moments when one piece speaks to another.
Liberty B is on-view at Open Space until October 18. And while you’re there, congratulate these enterprising artist/curators on winning the Citypaper’s 2010 Best Gallery in Baltimore!
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. 