Art-Full Life

One day away from the exciting announcement of the Sondheim Artscape Prize winner, I did a little audience watching at the BMA. Visitors really love this show and I really love watching them love it.  I was delighted to be an anonymous fly on the wall.

So, here I am in the first gallery, standing beside Christopher LaVoie’s Energy Temple, a beautifully crafted sculpture, sort of a wooden ziggurat with one side sporting three large speakers. 

A really cool looking young couple enters.  She is tattooed, her hair in dreadlocks, dressed all in black, her leggings topped off with a metal-studded belt. I imagine that they are musicians on tour, wiling away the daylight hours while they wait to perform in a warehouse in Baltimore that night.  They look longing at the speakers.

I place my hand on top of Energy Temple and it makes an incredibly startling vibration.  Everyone in the room, including the couple, turns to look.  They think I have just broken the cardinal museum rule—no touching—and that an arrest is imminent.

“Can you touch it?” she asks.

“Yes,” I respond smiling.  The guard is also smiling benevolently. He knows it’s okay. 

“There’s no sign,” she says.

I look around and point to the label on a distant wall. It tells us: This sculpture is interactive. Touch the copper plate to activate.  I reassure her it’s fine and touch it again, more emphatically.  Another sound ripples through me.

By now, Energy Temple is surrounded by eager visitors and there is a surge of vibrations.  Musician Lady and her boyfriend are using their hands gracefully to create electronic pulses.  A teenage girl rat-a-tap-taps with her fingertips. Others join in, given permission by their peers.

I walk ahead to find a young father with a delightfully bald infant in a stroller. The two are pausing quietly before every one of Nate Larson’s photographs, studying each tweet paired with each photograph. The images show the place where the tweets were sent.  The baby is totally tranquil (mine were never like that). The father spends the longest time at my favorite one—a dense rack of clothing in a thrift store accompanied by the tweet, “When u come from nothing, anything is something.” 

Soon, the musicians walk from Energy Temple and straight into the darkened room dedicated to filmmaker Matt Porterfield.  They are transfixed in front of a black-and-white film of a band. A drummer is pounding away energetically.

Nearby, I see beautiful color sequences of Matt’s Hamilton flow across the wall. A quiet audience is absorbed in a scene where a grandmother speaks a few words to a child in a verdant garden, an array of brilliantly colored flowers lies in the foreground. The gallery’s low bench in front of the film is filled and an elderly couple leans back against a barrier wall, determined to see more. Their complete absorption is a tribute to the power of the mostly silent film.

I emerge from the darkness to confront two of Matthew Janson’s sculptures, monumental crystals constructed out of shattered mirrors.  I see myself reflected dozens of times, as broken and fragmented as the surface of the work.

On the other side of the gallery, another young couple leans over what from a distance looks like an elaborately decorated bassinet—a confection of fabric and fringe fit for a prince or princess. The girl is speaking excitedly to her companion. All I hear is “Rosemary’s Baby!”  I rush over and follow their lead, looking down into Carrion.  It is like encountering an eviscerated animal, all red and bloody, yet somehow the shape and texture and color is beautiful.

Off of the gallery where Ryan Hackett’s  enormous canvases hang, I slip into a darkened gallery, where Ryan’s video plays. Here you can contemplate a continuous view of a sunny, cloud-filled sky.  Puffy clouds slowly roll accompanied by whale noises.  A couple is seated on the loveseat, silent, taking it all in.

I move on to the final galleries and catch a fragment of conversation among two women. “I hear the average man swallows nine spiders a day,” announces one.  I know right away that they have just seen Karen Yasinsky’s You have to be very careful.  In it, an insect flies into the frame and dives into the mouth of an illustrated Elliot Gould.  Help!

The man who was just in Ryan Hackett’s video room enters Leah Cooper’s installation.  He reads the wall text.  He leans over to consider the pile of materials on one corner. He bends close to a point on the wall with a taped line. He looks down at his reflection in the mirror. 

An older couple walks by quickly, the man pleading, “You’re going too fast! I can’t see anything!’

They remind me how close looking requires time and patience—sometimes even a suspension of assumptions—and how lucky the Museum and the Sondheim finalists are to find such an attentive audience for contemporary art here in Baltimore!

The Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition is free and open until August 1.