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!

Photography by Edward Winter

If you take in Andy Holtin’s compelling exhibition Hypotheses at Gallery Four, come prepared to ponder big questions. The artist challenges our assumptions about art; the connections and control offered by mechanical tools and technology; and most of all, human relationships. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

In We all need a creation myth, a white fence supports a mountain range made of sifted chalk. Bright blue and glistening, no two peaks are the same. 

While we watch, Andy creates this landscape using a mechanized kitchen sifter suspended above a moving shelf.  A nearby video reduces the action to its essentials—just a delicate stream of chalk and rising mountains of minute crystals. The action soon reverses, with the crystals sucked back up into the unseen sifter, only to drop down later in yet another pattern. 

Photography by Edward Winter

The View, created with Galo Moncayo, places a miniature woman looking out over the edge of a cliff.  As I stand on tip toes to see her, she is watching me—a Goliath in her world, watching her. There’s landscape here, too.  The cliff below reveals its geological history. Layer after layer of cardboard is cut into bulges and swells, with its stone surfaces seemingly worn open by time and the elements. 

Photography by Edward Winter

The World as We Know It is not really the world as we know it.  Where would you find 15 construction cranes packed so densely, moving constantly and yet never colliding? These are beautiful objects, made more so by their movement and the patterns created by their cast shadows. 

Other pieces return forcefully to the gaze.  Glance, Andy’s collaboration with Ellen Chenoweth, presents companion video portraits.  The two monitors actually pivot, with a man and a woman occasionally sneaking a peak at each other, but never quite meeting eye-to-eye.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the opposite wall, in Checkin’ out you checkin’ out me, two surveillance cameras, housed in handcrafted wooden structures, flirt more successfully with each other.  They turn their “heads” as the accompanying audio blasts Foreigner’s 1984 hit, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” This may be as close as anyone—human or mechanical—gets to love.

Photography by Edward Winter

Two video pieces continue this exploration of relationships. In You made this happen, created with Enrico Wey, two video images slide together, then pull apart.  Two men (often shown transparent like ghostly figures) seated at opposite ends of a table cross over and merge with each other like the gestures of a drawing.  Yet the men seem unaware of their interactions as they sit, climb, lie down, and crouch. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Passage, a circle of nine independent video channels, closes the show.  A man and a woman seem to chase each other from screen to screen, heels clicking on a hard floor in an empty room.  They trip and fall, approach and flee, trail behind, disappear and return, sometimes even pass each other, but never quite connect.  We are in the center as they move around, but even in the midst of it, we are as clueless as they are as to whether they will meet up.

Photography by Edward Winter

Found Art, Photo by Alex Ebstein, Posted on http://thereweretentigers.blogspot.com

Earlier this summer, after MICA undergraduates emptied their rooms and studios, Michael Farley cleverly dove into the dumpsters. Surrounded by trash, he found treasures: plaster cast pistols painted with yellow day glow paint; a mysterious rope and boat anchor; and a photo of a grimacing woman.  

His discoveries were on view in the thoughtful (and witty) show at Annex Theater and Gallery, Authorship &  Appropriation: the Artist & the Found, where the “found” concept (pioneered by Marcel Duchamp) operated on multiple levels.  The exhibition closed earlier this month, but there’s plenty of creativity flowing throughout the City until the fall exhibition season starts. 

Art Work by Andrew Liang, Photo by Alex Ebstein, Posted on http://thereweretentigers.blogspot.com

Don’t miss Windup Space’s Double Dribble, a one-person show from Andrew Liang.  For it, he’s plastered colorful characters across the walls, bringing to life a cockroach choir, mice driving sports cars on a cat-tongue road, running (literally) noses, dolphins, winged horses, and much more. All-in-all, it’s a dizzying, but delightful combination.  Only a few items aren’t spoken for so hurry there if you’re looking to buy. (Andrew is one of the talented artists who recently reopened the multi-disciplinary Current Space. There, Baltimore vs the World is on view until September 5.) 

John Chiara, Echo Lake at Meyers Grade

In Gallery Four’s amazing exhibition, You and Me Living Today: Vol.2: The Land, John Chiara uses old school techniques to brilliantly defy assumptions about art in our digital age. In Echo Lake at Meyers Grade, he arranges a series of photographs across a full wall, taking advantage of Gallery Four’s commitment to giving artists ample space to display ambitious work. Read Jessica Dawson’s review of Chiara’s “abject panoramas” in The Washington Post or watch the clip below to learn more about how John creates these remarkable works. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Letha Wilson's Pink Cairn on view at Nudashank, www.lethaprojects.com

Baltimore-based photographer Andrew Laumann selected examples of photography for the exhibition Day Glow at Nudashank. For those of you (like me) who missed the opening, check out the closing party on September 3 and Peter Boyce’s review with a slideshow on Radar Redux. 

POMP, an all-women show exploring celebration and honor, opened at Fifth Dimension, on August 21—more about that next time! 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Artscape’s extention into the Station North Arts & Entertainment District has engaged a variety of talented artists and created incredible experiences for festival visitors in some unexpected places such as the Midway on the Charles Street bridge, above the train station.

On the bridge, everyone giggled when they realized a cheerful orange and white squid “inking” them wasn’t mechanized, but that the “inking” came from a person shooting a water gun. Kelly Schmall and Ryan Murray created this fun and beautiful creature.

A skateboard ramp by Jordan Bernier, Elie Sollins, Steve Santillan, and many, many other talented hands and minds rises into an elegant blue and white wave.

Bloberation, the brain child of Sarah Matson, who designs fabulous costumes for Annex Theatre, invited us to pluck a blob (an imaginary aquatic creature) from its habitat with long metal tweezers.  If you succeed, you won a bean to plant; if you failed, a door chime rang.  I heard chimes, but was kindly awarded a bean anyway.

Sarah with Bloberation

Not far away, the parking garage across the street from the Charles Theater was transformed into a gallery for the second year in a row by artist Marian Glebes.  I stopped by and found shade, good conversation, and lots of art, including early 80s rec room furniture sprouting greenery!

Born to be Wild, an installation by Eric Leshinsky and Jenny Janis, drew passing crowds inside with grass sod surrounding what I recognized immediately as authentic seating from the early 80s. (I soon learned the artists found the furniture free on Craig’s List.) A matching plaid wool sofa, love seat, and rocker were arranged around a bland area rug, and accompanied by a wooden coffee table and a pair of end tables, one bearing the requisite television.  A brass and glass chandelier hung above.

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.

Artscape visitors entered and sat comfortably beside tufts of crab grass, as if everyone’s sofa has weeds popping out of its upholstery.  This was so much fun, I am daydreaming about a Decorators’ Show House run by artists. Imagine the startling possibilities! 

Eric passed on the news that a Harvard scientist’s recently released book makes a compelling case for rethinking the place weeds hold in city life. The author sees weeds as opportunistic responses to disturbances in the urban environment and argues that they sometimes provide welcome results.  Now my weeds in Charles Village are blessed.

Next, there were three mobile galleries pulled by bicycles from Dustin Carlson, well known to Gallery Four fans. These amazing displays can show a surprising range of work effectively, on the move in Baltimore, or somewhat subversively, at big art fairs like Miami Basel.

Dustin titled his iteration Public Invasion of the Fine Art Kind, which showcased Gary Kachadourian’s digital prints, Nick Karvounis’ Danish-style chair constructed with two by fours, Alex Ebstein’s drawings, and Seth Adelsberger’s painting. It’s an irony that the Artscape crowds kept these mobile galleries confined to the garage—but look for them soon out and about.

Benjamin Kelley's ambitious installation features bone fragments sucked through a plastic tube between two vacuums.

Just as Baltimore’s streets became passable in the aftermath of Snowmageddon, gallerists at the H&H Building threw open their doors with a suite of provocative works.

The most cohesive and sophisticated presentation was Gallery Four’s  Terms of Use, a four-person show that combines photographs by Norwegian Mats Sivertsen with sculpture by Chicago’s David Moré and MICA graduate students Colin Benjamin and Benjamin Kelley. The show was curated collectively by the artists who live and work in the space, including my BMA colleague Eddie Winter, a photographer. 

I’m told Moré flew to Baltimore between blizzards with two suitcases full of materials and then worked around the clock to make something unique for Terms of Use.  His And I kissed Her on the mmm-mm occupies half of one entire room with: a busted banjo, a tower of foam bricks, a figure of Slash (the former guitarist for Guns N’ Roses) inside a bottle, a sinking model boat, a minuscule model boat, a miniature figure clinging to an electrical cord for its life, and vibrating speakers that tossed debris and violently shook a miniature lifeboat. For me, the journey through the model boats and the music (and even the piece’s title) evokes many a guy’s passage from boy to man. And, in every way, it rocks!

Colin Benjamin’s sculptures employ found objects with elegance and whimsy. In Enough Already, (that story’s over), a hammer is frozen in mid-action as it pulls a huge nail from the floor. The piece is just waiting for one of us to trip over it. Scattered throughout the gallery are pairs of janitor’s brooms with bright orange bristles. Their positions defy the possibility of their actual use. All of the brooms stand inexplicably upright, as if they were really intended for this artful purpose and not for cleaning—or maybe that cleaning is done by brooms on their own. For an amusing and coincidental connection, check out a recent YouTube frenzy over magic brooms.

Benjamin Kelley’s sculptures are sleek mechanistic forms covered in hard white plastic and grey leatherette.  In But It Is Not Everything, vacuums inside two enormous cylinders shoot human bone fragments back and forth between them through a clear plastic tube.

These and other pieces in the exhibition complement Sivertsen’s photos, where mysterious mechanical objects are inserted into people-less interiors and urban landscapes. A jet engine rests comfortably on a double bed. An unidentified object hangs above a kitchen counter, its dials and lights forming a mechanized face. In Unity, several microphone-like objects fall from the sky into a canyon of modernist buildings; one of the microphones is growing roots.

Terms of Use seems to me a statement on the powerful presence of the object—whether created, found, or digitized.

A few reminders:

• There will be a closing reception for Terms of Use on Saturday, March 27, from 5 to 10 p.m.
• Look soon forArt-Full Life posts on other worthy exhibitions inside the H&H Gallery at Nudashank and the Whole Gallery.
• This surge of creativity has been supported by the Baltimore Community Foundation’s inspired “confetti grants,” awarded last December. Thank you, BCF!