Art-Full Life

Matthew Porterfield’s  installation, Days are Golden Afterparty, 2011, includes two interrelated parts: a monumental grid of cell phone photographs–72 of them, each 20 by 30 inches taken over the past year—and a flicker film that features these and other images flashing before your eyes.   It is well worth the time it takes to absorb these images and think about their meaning individually and collectively. 

Matthew took the cell phone photos over the past year or so, creating a chronicle of his daily life.  He has chosen a broad range of subject here—intimate scenes of home, snatches of nature, travelogue, and seemingly random views caught as he passed quickly through the world around him.  The images speak volumes about the ever more rapid pace of life and our expanding ability to record its details. This body of work is a daring departure from the artist’s now familiar films, like Putty Hill , which now, by comparison, seem to flow gracefully across the screen at a rather stately pace.

We all think we can take cell phone pictures, but no one I know takes them this well.  Each photograph is beautifully framed, a complete composition within its boundaries. Now and again, their recognizable subjects—a pile of crabs, and arrangement of electrical equipment, or the canopy of a tree—take on the formal qualities of near-to-abstract painting.  

Taken together, the images in Matthew’s grid challenge us to find larger patterns, as the wall text tells us, “intellectual, emotional, and graphic relationships.”   As I sit alone in this final gallery of the Sondheim exhibition, some narrative threads emerge and connect individual pieces in this patchwork grid thematically.

A number of the photographs allude to the evolution of visual culture, communications, and technology.  We start with printed matter, a framed vintage postcard, and old family photographs tacked on a wall, and evolve to computers, surveillance screens, and cell phones, one left on a tabletop between a drink and a handgun, the other glowing a cool blue, ready for a harmless shot.

Occasionally, we are in a position to recognize someone.  We do see people looking directly out at us, but I feel more drawn to those only partially revealed.   Here I am thinking less about the bodies cropped down to chests and abdomens (there are several of those) and more about people whose backs are turned to us.  Are they hiding, excluding us as voyeurs, or are they actually reminding us of the act of looking?  We see what these figures were seeing at the moment they were shot—a crowded beach, a forest, a bedroom, the water beyond a window.  We can stand in for both the subject and the photographer who captured their view.

Animals take on a close-to-human presence.  A stuffed rocking horse is left behind on a bed; a real brown bunny pauses on a green lawn; twice sleeping dogs lie on warm pavement; and finally two cats, linked in a circular embrace of black and white fur, form an ideal pairing.  Not far away, a human couple lies together in bed, one smiling, another in shadow.  They are less comfortable than Matthew’s feline friends, perhaps less confident in their enduring affection or just awkward being immortalized by his cell phone. There is something here about isolation and longing for relationships.

After awhile, it occurs to me how many of these images involve windows, as though we are looking through a lens at the world beyond or waiting for an aperture to open.  We watch figures as they peer ahead through windows or we see what they see as they look into mirrored reflections.  The presence of light is even more striking—there are bursts of light, natural and artificial, in so many of these images.  A man flees down a narrow alley into the sun; a woman raises her hand to block out the sunlight so that she can pose; a string of lights illuminates a brick façade at night; car lights glow in the darkness.

Light plays an even larger role in the flicker film, a minute-long montage of cell phone photographs that flash past with dizzying speed. Here, I can catch glimpses of images from the grid across the room, but I am more aware of the white light that punctuates the series of photographs, as if I am blinded by the flash as they are being shot.  If the grid is a record of daily life, this film seems closer to the memory of a life—memories are never complete or sequential, just connected loosely to one another, some fragments more tightly held than others.  I can’t help but think of the description so often given of the moment of death, our memories sucked into the next dimension as we are drawn toward brilliant white light.

There are five strong finalists for the Sondheim Prize.  The judges will be deliberating today.  Join us in the BMA Auditorium tonight at 7 p.m. to hear the results and celebrate their decision.  From my point of view, Baltimore is the real winner.  We are so fortunate to be surrounded by so much talent!

Multi-media artist Stephanie Barber is camped out in the BMA galleries, hard at work every day in a makeshift studio.   She sits at a work table, a piece of plywood mounted on two sawhorses.  There she is surrounded by a rolling supply cabinet, a keyboard and a child’s piano, a pile of books, and innumerable plugs and cords and wires that feed computers and photography lights.  Her workspace extends across an entire gallery—you have to pass through it to continue viewing the exhibition. 

Stephanie is actually creating parts of her Sondheim submission while we watch.  Here process intersects with exhibition. “I am thinking about the emphasis given to product over production, or display over creation,” she says. 

As I arrived one weekend, Stephanie was finishing an interview with a visitor. Visitors ambled past before a young woman paused at the work table.  Stephanie greeted her, “I am creating a video while I am here,” and asked this recent arrival to join in.  “The line is ‘I love you.’ The worst part is filling out the form.”  The BMA visitor-as-performance- artist walked over to the green screen across the room and stood among the lights.  She took a deep breath.

“I love you,” she said.

“Wait until I am aiming at you!” cautioned the artist. 

Quickly finished, Stephanie returned to her table, sat on a large blue exercise ball, and broke into song, her voice wafting through the galleries.  She is making a 31-part video, jhana and the rats of james olds, to be completed during the run of the show.  Jhana is a meditative state of mind, enlightenment, where one concentrates quietly on a chosen subject.  Stephanie describes how jhana resonates with her work:  “I am interested in the tedious and repetitive qualities of meditation and art work, the difference and similarities in these two practices.”   

As for American psychologist James Olds, founder of modern neuroscience, he co-discovered the reward center of the brain. Stephanie explained current thinking on the reward center: it is really about the satisfaction we experience from puzzling over a problem, from hard work to creation.   Bravo to fearless Stephanie for letting all of us become a part of her creative process, for teaching us that art is not just about a moment of inspiration, but about long, disciplined labor—and deep thinking.  

An installment of jhanais on view on a nearby screen.  Large text scrolls across the bottom of an interior view that is actually an image torn from decorating magazines of the 1950s to 1970s. A group of these clippings are tacked up on a nearby wall, representing a wide range of taste, from American antiques to austere modernism.  These would be the admired (but rarely achieved) home décor styles of my childhood, likely the height of Dr. Olds’ career.  In one segment of the video, an unseen woman addresses an unseen man named Randolph wistfully, her words scrolling past us.  As the words run out, she disappears, evaporates—or was she ever really there? Maybe she was just her possessions, or her desire for them.  This must be jhana unfulfilled.

Not far away, in the projection dwarfs the sea, 2007, a hand places photograph after photograph, one in front of another, each one a stark black-and-white image of a man.  As we listen to the narrator, a woman with a foreign accent, we learn that these are sailors who spent many weeks at sea and we sense their loneliness intensely, “so huge it dwarfs the sea.”   The narrator catalogues their unique quirks or interests—one spent a lot of time in the ship’s library, but was also “a gifted liar;” one “never spoke;” another did not satisfy his wife.  “Many of these men are dead,” she says ominously.  “However strong you are, the sea is stronger.”  

Stephanie is a catalytic presence here in Baltimore.  She has performed at the BMA before, reciting “Who Got the Tuna” in a literary death match held at the Andy Warhol Late Night last year. She recently co-curated the Transmodern Festival, the much-anticipated arts event held each spring. 

Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Stephanie—and become a part of her art!

Washington, D.C. based photographer Louie Palu offers us a close-up view of the five years he spent embedded with American and Canadian military units in Afghanistan. The opening of the exhibition comes at a timely moment, coinciding with the announcement of American troop withdrawals from this conflict.

Louie’s experiences were real and they were dangerous.  He walked through exploding mind fields and rode in ambushed helicopters, so his subjects were not distant or abstract. 

Last week, I walked through the gallery with Louie, reliving the stories behind the making and meaning of these works and speaking with him about the pacing and arrangement of his installation. He’s visited Civil War battlefields all around Washington and thought a lot about Goya’s images of violence and war, so his thinking about his challenging subject is deep. While he began by shooting video of the war, he soon turned to the still photograph, more conducive to reflection by the viewer. “You cannot turn off a photograph,” Louie explains.

The photographs are incredibly powerful, transcending specific people and places to create a universal and timeless view of war and its tragedies.  In Louie’s images, we are aware of suffering, but without distinctions of race or nationality, military or civilian status.

An Afghan soldier warming his henna stained hands on the front lines in Zhari District.

As we first enter the gallery, we are confronted by a portrait head an Afghan soldier, his hands raised to his mouth to capture the warmth of his breath as he stands guard at frigid post.  Louie lures us further with magnificent landscape views of distant battles, smoke and dust rising through light. These, he confesses, were inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s glowing seascapes, themselves sometimes chronicles of marine battles.  A soldier on patrol, slightly out of focus, stands like a ghost behind a thorny bush, its pointed bristles sharp and clear.

As we walk around, we are immersed more deeply in the horrors of war. Each image tells a sorrowful tale. Three young brothers, victims of an insurgent bomb, lie side-by-side; medics had to choose one to save, the others died. Two more victims, one black, one white, cling to life and clasp hands for comfort as they await medical evacuation.  Another wounded soldier, bathed in turquoise light inside a medivac, stares with glazed eyes; the photographer held his hand as they flew, fearful he would die.

Louie is wrapping up this compelling body of work. “Five years is plenty,” he says, but shooting was only half the work. He has now edited the results and created an organized set of prints that tell a narrative of his experiences. These are in an edition of 25, ten to be reserved for public institutions, where the artist hopes they will educate and engage Americans. Louie’s planning to take these images on the road and project them in small towns across the nation.

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.