Art-Full Life

Neal Reinalda, sculptor, musician, and now curator, recently opened The Suspended Moment at Open Space.  When I stopped by one recent Friday, two gallery visitors stood transfixed in front of Alex Delany’s 2009 video, Crowd Sitting. I looked over their shoulders to see what at first I thought was a projection of a photograph that captured people seated on risers. But suddenly, a man moved his arms. Then froze again.  Nothing. Waiting, waiting, waiting.  Did I imagine that gesture?

Someone relocated their hands below their chin.  Now this video had me hooked. Each of us watching didn’t want to miss a movement – if it happened. With its silent syncopation of stasis and movement, this piece reversed our expectation of video; we needed to watch in the contemplative mode, looking carefully for subtle changes.

I only took my eyes away from the video when Neal came by and introduced me to Ilia Ovechkin, exhibiting four untitled digital prints. Ilia told me these works are so recently completed that they might still be wet! Each print juxtaposed a soda can with another object or in one case, an animal (reportedly the smallest dog in the world).  Large in scale and printed on muslin, these fresh works are an up-to-the-moment convergence of photography, printmaking, and painting. 

They become a series through the alignment of their images and the addition of huge rubber bands wrapped across their lower quadrants, with a computer printout inserted below.  These found objects were added as Ilia reflected on the finished prints. His girlfriend lives in another city, so they are in frequent communication by email, and her communiques often have attachments.  The layering of these prints reflects some of their suspended internet moments.

Conor Backman contributes to The Suspended Moment with small but powerful paintings that command the space around them. They are painted cubes, extending five inches from the wall. As Smooth as Its Name shows a frozen mountain range in stark blue and white. Red bars across the mountain range remind us that this is created landscape, not actual space. 

In Conor’s sculpture, Aum, oooh, mmmm….., an ice cream cone is caught in its own suspended moment, forever melting on the book below.  A student at Virginia Commonwealth University, Conor helps run Richmond’s  Reference Gallery, very much a part of the vibrant artist-driven gallery scene that links the creative class from city to city.

Lauren Brick’s truly haunting Subtitle Poem presents a series of seemingly unrelated pieces of text superimposed over black and white cropped images appropriated from film: a man and a woman, an ocean, and it seems to me, the broken up soil of a grave.  The texts, apparently subtitles, alternate between what you might think are exchanges between lovers and dark thoughts that culminate in the unsettling statement, “Waiting to die isn’t living.”  The more I look, the more poetry I see in these images and the words affixed to them.

The Suspended Moment is accompanied by a free poster by Neal and Ingrid Burrington.  In a conversation and a collection of quotations, these two artists explore the theme of the exhibition—those meaningful moments of insight or understanding that come to us suddenly, frozen fragments of clarity so unexpected in the frantic pace of everyday contemporary life.   

Neal explains that the quotations, like art work, are “removed from their original contexts and suspended in their own right, as moments of muddled clarity.”  My own personal favorite is from writer John Updike: “Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.” Four images on the poster represent heads, hands, feet, or bodies of two people, each separated by a thin sheet of paper pressed between them; any slight movement apart and the paper will fall to the ground, a memory of intimacy. 

One suspended moment immortalized on the poster caught my attention. “TAKE CARE AND KEEP IN TOUCH // INGRID.”  Oh, no! It turns out that Ingrid Burrington, creator of the ruler that measures everything we don’t want to talk about, has graduated and moved to New York. Ingrid, I am hoping that YOU will keep in touch with US here in Baltimore!!!

And, thank goodness, you can still catch some of Ingrid’s work at Sign Language, a fabulous exhibition of art, documents, and performance that opened last night at the Whole Gallery at the H & H Building.  More about that soon!