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Brian Kain / Ledelle Moe / Tammra Sigler

Think what would have happened if John Cage collaborated with Chris Burden, Marc Chagall morphed with Jean Tinguely, and Henry Moore moved to Burma. Art can’t help but refer to other art, whether in reality and intent, or simply within the viewer’s imagination.

Baltimore, MD – Maryland Art Place (MAP) is currently showing three innovative exhibitions by artists whose work stands in strong counterpoint to one another. One artist has forged a dynamic career as a painter and printmaker, exhibiting work widely across the nation and beyond. Another is a conceptual artist inspired by the nature of simultaneity that melds and renders our perceptions of sound, memory and the effects of time on seemingly mundane sites, while the third is a white South African challenged by a paradoxical search for legitimacy and accountability regarding the historic injustices her race hoisted upon many people of her native land. This is a diverse trio of exhibitions that should challenge and inspire audiences.

MAP’s visitors may find it curious that the exuberant (and serious) meditations of Tammra Sigler’s paintings—inspired by games, toys, puzzles, the DC area sniper and recent military conflicts— meld with Brian Kain’s stripped-down conceptual, musical and architectonic works, while balancing against a stark and monumental sculpture by South African artist Ledelle Moe, reminiscent of scattered fragments of a Buddhist ruin that could be discovered while exploring remote depths of an East Asian jungle. Seldom do gallery guests travel such great distances than when considering these three solo exhibitions of painting, sculpture and media installation.

MAP invites the public to the season’s first group artists’ talk, with each artist discussing their art and ideas. This event will take place on Thursday, September 23 from 6-7pm, followed by a reception from 7-9pm. The opening is free and encourages the public to join the discussion about the artists’ work and issues relevant to contemporary art.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Brain Kain:

Brian Kain received his BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1984, and was a MFA candidate in painting from 1984-85 at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, where he received a MFA in Sculpture in 1990. Kain is currently an Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts and Art History at Maryland Institute College of Art, where he teaches studio and academic seminars in design and art history.  He is a former faculty member of Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA and The Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and has been a visiting lecturer for the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Sculpture Department of The Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI.

Over the past decade, Kain has pursued a patient, deliberative practice of art and philosophy, from the relative seclusion of his home and studio in the village of Emmitsburg, Maryland. His reflexive use of media and method arises from a poetic pragmatic pluralism, which compliments the democratic institutions that inform his thinking: home, workshop, village, community, metropolis, market, academy. He has recently begun an effort to bring his work to a larger, national audience.

Kain is married to the artist and educator Lori Rubeling, with whom he is a principal partner in Rubeling & Kain Studios. Together they collaborate on projects of architecture, theater design, fine arts and academic teaching. They are the parents of two teenage sons.

In artist’s statements, Kain has written that, “It is false to perceive things as separate discrete objects, easily codified and catalogued. Instead things should be attended dialectically: allowing for shift, disruption, confluence, overlap, concurrence, inter-dependence. When a thing is allowed to be as it is (without the abstraction of temporal language) it rapidly becomes everything and nothing….The artist simply pays attention to the changing from one situation to the next and falls in as an element among situations. I would not deny the wonder in that but I prefer to accept it as a natural exchange.”

Ledelle Moe:

Ledelle Moe was born in Durban, South Africa in 1971. She studied sculpture there at Technikon Natal and graduated in 1993. A travel grant award allowed her to leave the country for the first time to travel to Europe in 1992. When she returned home, Moe became active one of the founding members of the FLAT Gallery, an alternative space in Durban. A second travel grant in 1994 brought her to America, where she studied and received a MFA the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture Department, and subsequently to Baltimore where she began teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Since then, she has taught at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC, Virginia Commonwealth University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Moe has exhibited in many venues, including: the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden; the NSA Gallery in Durban, South Africa; the International Sculpture Center in Washington, DC; The Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC; and FLAT International in both Richmond, VA and Baltimore, MD.

While reflecting about her work, Moe recently wrote “My sense of identity as a South African is understood only through the continued reinterpretation of past experiences via memory and imagination. Within the particular cultural and historical circumstances in South Africa, the tensions between power and powerlessness make this process fraught with contrasts and contradictions… For me, the means by which I explore the emotional complexity of my experiences and my identity as a South African artist is through the symbolic language of the human and animal form…The animal image combined with the human, for me, represents not only the irrational non-verbal: a symbol of the unconscious, but also a vehicle for the expression of contradictory human emotions.  My materials are rough and speak to a sense of decay behind the brutal show of strength.  The violent treatment of the surfaces over exposed steel, refer both to power and powerlessness.  It is my intention that my monumental “figures’ – animal or human – reveal this vulnerability behind a brutal display of raw strength, redefining what it is to be ‘heroic’ through a critique of the monumental.”

Tammra Sigler: Toys, Games and Puzzles

Sigler recently moved to Naples, Florida from Baltimore, Maryland. She received her education at Syracuse University, School of Fine Arts, and graduated with honors in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland in 1965. Since then she has been painting professionally and teaching, exhibiting and has been awarded many prizes around the nation.  The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC and the Baltimore Museum of Art have Sigler’s work in their collections, which also has been acquired by numerous corporate, university and private collectors.

Commenting about her MAP exhibition, Toys, Games and Puzzles, Sigler wrote: “In the “Gameboard” series, aside from the fact that I am engaging in play and wit, I am also dealing with the basic metaphor of life as a game. I establish my surface as the playing field, or game board, upon which all activity occurs. There are rules, boundaries, goals, and errors. There is a START and FINISH. Similarly, our lives take place on our own “game board,” and we are the “tokens” holding a position and interacting on our surface. We move about, “doing our thing.” Beginning at “start,” we move toward “home,” all the while, skipping and jumping forwards and backwards, making notations, following (or not following) detours, signs and directions.”

Ms. Sigler’s work in this exhibition was made available courtesy of Davis/Keil Fine Art, Naples, Florida. Her prints were produced at Goya Contemporary/Goya-Girl Press, Baltimore, Maryland.

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Maryland Art Place (MAP) is a non-profit center for contemporary art established in 1981 to: develop and maintain a dynamic environment for regional artists to exhibit their work, nurture and promote new ideas and new forms, and facilitate rewarding exchanges between artists and the public through educational leadership. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm. There is no admission charge to enter the gallery.  For more details, please contact MAP’s Director of Programs, Lisa Lewenz at 410.962.8565 or llewenz@mdartplace.org