Art-Full Life

Photography made a strong showing at the Sondheim Semifinalist exhibition, reminding us that this medium challenges painting for supremacy in the 21^st century. Brian Kain’s digital c-prints, hung directly on the wall, demonstrated how much freedom photographers now have to take actual scenes and manipulate or transform them. In all three, images and their mirror images were joined seamlessly to create compositions that were simultaneously realistic, yet abstracted by their manner of presentation. In Robert Fludding Tom’s Creek, an empty room with a piano is shown right side up and then flipped upside down, the piano seemingly hanging from the ceiling; it is joined with a view into the deep blue water of a pool, the same scene folded out from the center to create a whole pool out of half. 

In another piece, a river view repeats itself four times side-by-side and up and down, the receding river creating glistening diamond shapes as it flows into the distance away from the center.

Andrew Laumann’ s three black-and-white photographs were grouped tightly on a freestanding wall, isolated in a way that enabled the viewer to consider how they explored the ephemeral qualities of water and light.  In Zaily, we see his model’s face, a single nipple, and both hands clearly, a cigarette dangling from her fingers, but much of the image is devoted to the steamy air that envelopes her. This is as much about air, water, and light as it is about portraiture. Two other works record the changing qualities of snow as it falls and melts. Single flakes are seen close up or at a distant on a well trodden path of disappearing precipitation.

Wendy Wu’s digital photographs, while sometimes of recognizable subjects, emphasize formal qualities. Sunny may capture bright highlights of the sun in a shadowed area, but it could equally represent the stars of another universe, massing in constellations or new galaxies, or just a random pattern of darkness and light. Three horizontal photographs, tacked above eye level and arranged side to side, capture the views we see when we look up in any rust-belt city– street lights, stop lights, chain link, and the electrical infrastructure that powers our homes. These familiar elements take on a beauty when Wendy shoots them in the fading light of day’s end.

Ben Marcin showed a photographic grid of sixteen isolated row houses, the buildings that once flanked them long gone. Their height all the more emphasized by the surrounding empty lots. These buildings stand like lone teeth in the mouth of an elderly man, longing for their missing companions. You can spend some interesting time learning the differences among building surfaces, sidewalks, and neighborhood landmarks in Baltimore, Wilmington, Delaware, and Camden, New Jersey; each rust belt city has its defining characteristics!

Adam Weir took architecture we recognize and depicted surprising or ambiguous scenarios. My favorite is Seclusion: there a block of Baltimore row houses is reconfigured in a circle.  Their backs create a  round courtyard in their center, with a massive two story cement wall arrayed around them, a sidewalk and parking spaces radiating outward! This is a rowhouse configuration beleaguered city dwellers dream of. 

For anyone still waiting for painting to return to primed canvas, paint brushes, and smooth surfaces, this show will be an awakening.  JK Keller  used wax and acrylic to create freestanding letters, O-N-L-Y.  They stand on blackened cinder blocks and lean against the gallery wall, their surfaces reading alternatively as striated marble or graffiti excised from an urban wall.  Is this painting or painted sculpture?

Jo Smail showed two large works side-by-side, each a collage of another cut and folded canvas.  Those are mounted on raw canvas, its surface further elaborated by the addition or splicing of pieces of mismatched canvas or broadly brushed strokes of paint. She mixes oil and enamel, acrylic and enamel, breaking yet more rules, all to beautiful effect.  One, a portrait of a dog walked by a master in a plaid coat, was accompanied by a tiny canvas depicting the pet, trailing along without a leash. 

In Richard Vosseller’s This Is Not A Love Song fresh wooden beams, two anchored on weighty stones, create an open structure through which we could view other work in the gallery. Its vertical elements attracted passersby like open portals.

Mindy Hirt‘s Pink Semblance is light and airy, a three-dimensional space so delicately defined by yards of quilting thread that it almost disappears from a distance, like the fragile web of a sleeping spider. All across the whiteness of her web, a single pink thread was woven in and out, like the highlighted trail of a single insect or an isolated person.

The Sondheim Semifinalists exhibition remains a wonderful tribute to the creativity and imagination in our region.  Each year, it gets better and better. If you missed this year’s excitement—mark your calendar for the 31st Artscape in 2012!

As you approach the Sondheim Semifinalist exhibition in the Fox Building at MICA, you will see a large picture window filled by colorful paintings, basketball hoops, and pillows. This is a playful installation by Andrew Liangand Michael Benevento. At Artscape, the secret door to this wonderland was thrown open and visitors—children and the young at heart—were invited to become a part of this engaging work of art.

 http://www.vimeo.com/17314292

Eric Dyer’s video Bellows March  is the first piece that greets you inside as you enter the.  It deconstructs flowers and animates a simple piece of equipment—a chamber that expands and contracts to release air—using them to create a magical world. There bellows march left-right- left in straight lines that emulate military parades, flowers grow instantly out of sand and seem to float across bright green grass, waving their swirling petals joyfully, and winding, caterpillar-like creatures leap in syncopated performance, gradually slipping into perfect lines and patterns. 

How does he do this? Thank goodness, he tells us!  An accompanying video documents the two-and-a-half years of work that went into this piece—animation, three-dimensional modeling and printing, hand-painted cinetropes or circular sculptures, and finally, video in a studio.  And you thought technology made work easier?

Some of the pieces in this show that are most advanced technically explore vintage subjects—old-fashioned or jerry-rigged mechanical systems or man-powered instruments.

Kelley Bell, who has a knack for creating previously unknown but much needed machines, takes us through the stages of facing death–denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  In this charming video, accompanied by a sound track, we see an elaborate machine take a Victorian images of figures, crunch them into small bits that are poured, heated, liquefied, and then transformed into vapor-like ghosts that float gleefully outside the frame, rising to a higher reward.  The machine is more personable than the figures it crushes—each mechanized part has eyes and a mouth; they seem to enjoy their macabre work.  

Kelley’s Future of Transportation, projected unobtrusively onto duct work elsewhere in the show, displays a number of delightful conveyances that roll by, suspended from a rope.  A bird rides in a mobile bird house; one creature passes by in a bucket; others are conveyed through the air in a windup container or a miniature boat that rows through unseen water.   As each of these unlikely conveyances slides past, I wonder which one I’ll choose when gas runs out.  See if you can find this hidden treasure!

MICA professor David East  presents us with real and virtual to consider in Rosette Generation.  Geometric slip cast shapes form florettes on the gallery floor; between them, in an animation on a small computer screen, similar shapes float through our field of vision. In Damask he mounts a black-on-black patterned wallpaper panel that flows onto the floor, one ceramic cone pierces the panel, as though it was projected into the plaster wall; another lies across the black backdrop onto the floor. His ceramic sculptures wind up in unexpected relationships to actual and imagined objects.

Linda Hesh  fills a side of one gallery with a series of related pieces in different media, mixing two-dimensional images and sculpture to achieve a powerful installation. Three lawn signs, jauntily supported on squares of artificial turf, proclaim sentiments in support of same-sex relationships and marriage. Linda’s color photos on the wall beyond show signs with similar sentiments installed on lawn signs, on a building, and on the side of a truck.  Below, a shelf of plastic miniatures features a tiny truck, building, and billboard, each bearing a sign that continues the theme.

Christian Parks  shows a group of works that connect with each other and blur lines of meaning and media in interesting ways.  A wooden construction titled Candy is painted in sprayed bands of brown, white, and pink. In form and palette it relates to Sickness (Triptych) behind it. A digitally manipulated photograph of Edgar Degas’ popular Little Dancer Age Fourteen, shot in the BMA’s Cone Wing, shows the dancer in a white skirt with huge pink polka dots. She is flanked by two tempera paintings that are both two dimensional versions of the sculptural piece, one covered in pink dots, the other decorated with a single dot. While Candy reads pretty clearly to me as an easel, the tempera images are so flat for a moment they seem to morph into the facades of Baltimore row houses.

All of these submissions, engaging and sometimes provocative, remind us how fortunate we are to have such a deep and varied art community centered in Baltimore. Go by and see this show while you still can. It closes tomorrow, Saturday, July 30th.

If you want to see the full scope of the artistic talent we enjoy in this region, don’t miss the final week of the Sondheim Semi-Finalists in MICA’s Fox Building—the show closes Saturday, July 30th. There’s some really exciting work in every medium you can imagine—and in some you probably haven’t thought of yet!

As is often the case in Baltimore, performance has a strong presence in this show, whether in the video presentation of the Annex Theater’s Fantastic Planet, in the staged photographs of Milana Braslavsky, or in Robby Rackleff’s  terrifying video Dark Fortress Occult Master of Space: Jaguar. 

In Robby’s recent work, we see him as a somewhat discomforted Blue Leader.  This hero encounters a pulsing aura from outer space, maybe the sun rushing toward earth; an ominous masked man who trembles violently, creating a cacophony of clicking wires and electrical equipment; and then what seems like a childhood surge of memories— the characters and landscapes of video games interspersed with a prim teacher who emphatically circles the correct answer, 64, to a math problem.

The combination of images of Blue Leader grimacing or extending his arms defensively as if to ward off images, light, or memories causes me some worry for the hero’s future.  Will he survive? A second video, Remnants II, might be the world after the demise of Blue Leader and indeed all humankind, a mysterious empty landscape visited by balls of glowing light from another universe.

Melissa Webb’sperformance, more welcoming than terrifying, was in full swing on Artscape weekend.  The costumed artist and her companion were hard at work rolling cookie dough in a kitchen beside a garden, complete with picket fencing and three large trees.  You could press the cookie cutter of your choice or allow the artist to enter your current height as an inscription on the gallery wall.  If you come, know Melissa’s beautiful costumes remain behind on mannequins and you can imagine eating a piece of the lacy, three-layer wedding cake nearby.

Abby Donovan’s video, Attempting Necromancy with William Blake , documents a reiterative but mysteriously satisfying performance.  It opens with a woman blinded by solid golden glasses.  She stands beside a circle of debris and melting snow and in front of a shelf of ceramic letters forming the words “For Lo Futurity is in this moment.”  She searches for the letters, seizes them, steps into a circle, and then tosses the letters upward, occasionally catching them, but soon, they crash to the floor, their shattered parts accumulating around her.  The video loop concludes with Abby’s hands blackened by the letters and a nearly empty shelf. 

Even in installations, we sense a performance of a kind.  To create Desperate Times, Joseph Letourneau must have stood in the gallery and flung handfuls of copper coins across the floor.  His half-filled silver bucket of pennies is left behind and coins, some heads, some tails, some shiny and new, others worn and discolored, surround a cart and a television.  A video offers a seemingly unchanging garden fountain, with water flowing into a pool of water below a statue.  Did Joseph aim for the fountain and miss? Is the resulting installation about his/our bad luck?  The state of the garden seems to support this view! If it was once manicured, those days are gone and nature encroaches on all sides—it is overgrown by vines, grasses, and bushes.  In these hard times, have the pennies been tossed in frustration?  Even thousands of them will likely not solve the financial problems faced by every family.  Were these on their way to a change machine to be converted into large denominations to be applied to someone’s bills? I wonder if anyone picks them up when no one’s looking.

Stop by at MICA and make a few wishes on these pennies!