Cowboys and Engines, Dustin Carlson’s solo show at Gallery Four , 405 West Franklin Street, is ambitious—and it reaches its high goals with remarkable success. These five installations, all completed in 2011, are thoughtfully conceived, beautifully executed, and provocative.
On the surface it might look like a road trip through the American West—maybe one you took with your family as a child—but as you experience the show, it will cause you to ponder some serious questions about the American Dream and about our nation’s unchecked consumption, made all the more poignant by recent economic events. Whether we burn a gallon of crude oil thoughtlessly or “burn the midnight oil” using our own energy, Dustin would like us to ask ourselves whether we are using our resources wisely.
For Vista, three billboards of iconic Western views, each one like an enormous post card, stand around the perimeter of the first gallery. They are meant to be viewed from the front seat of a Ford pickup truck. Dustin reclaimed three of these from a local junkyard, Crazy Ray’s, and arranges them in the center of the room. They face a parched view of the salt-crusted mud of the Badwater Basin at the bottom of California’s Death Valley, the lowest point of elevation in the United States. Each truck seat is tenderly worn where a driver sat ride-after-ride, perhaps even passing these very views.
The next two pieces are handcrafted versions of machines familiar from our daily lives. Island contains two gasoline pumps. Their blue and red plinths taper gracefully to their bases, somehow making them look taller and almost looming. The screens where we usually watch the price of our purchase escalate with alarm takes on a human persona—we can see facial features, eyes looking back at us expectantly.
Nearby, Polar Ice emulates the ice cube dispensers we encounter in convenience stores. At the opening, a chilled bag of ice was placed at its feet, but now the ice has melted and evaporated, leaving us with a crumpled, empty plastic bag. Both of these pieces are constructed from recycled and recyclable materials—aluminum, plastic, and wood fragments reconstituted into sheeting—but both are reminders of the energy we casually use to travel as we want or to cool a soft drink or water.
Not far away, Idle grabs your attention with its clattering sounds; caps on the top of two side-by-side tractor trailer exhaust pipes rattle in syncopation. In reality, the exhaust that streams from cars and trucks oozes out silently, making it easy to forget that we pay a price for this pollution. If exhaust was this noisy, we would have solved the problem decades ago.
The show culminates with Perpetual Motion Machine. Six miniature steel rigs nod up and down, seemingly pumping invisible crude oil from the gallery’s wooden floor. These are human-scale versions of the massive oil rigs at work on land and sea, and while machines, they resemble a pack of running animals, horses or dogs clambering along some trail or course. Arranged in two rows, three pairs of pumps chug away, up and down, every now and then eliciting the squeak of metal against metal. Their electrical components and cords are very visible—there’s no attempt to varnish the truth about how they are powered—but their batteries are recharged by mono crystalline solar panels. As you hear the noise they generate, you imagine how nature is disturbed by the frenetic motion of oil drilling equipment.
This show, on view until August 27, calls out how fortunate we are in Baltimore to have talented artists who not only create, but also curate and display. Dustin has worked as an artist and co-curator of Gallery Four since 1996 and he does all this while running Carlson Art Works, a design and fabrication business that creates furniture and sculptural forms for museums in our community, the Maryland Historical Society and the Baltimore Museum of Industry among them. Another reminder of how entrepreneurial the creative class can be!
Plants were everywhere—growing out of sofa arms, backs, and pillows, scattered across a coffee table in old take-out containers. But wait, these were not house plants from a florist, but weeds. They could have come from the alley behind my house or (sorry) my overgrown yard.
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. 
