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Orbiting Artscape

Vastly underselling a score of the satellite exhibitions complimenting Baltimore's annual summer festival

By Bret McCabe | Posted 7/15/2009

Mayor Sheila Dixon slyly made an interesting announcement right before naming the Baltimore Development Co-operative as the recipient of the 2009 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize Saturday night at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Before a sizable crowd sitting in the BMA's auditorium, Mayor Dixon had a captive, receptive audience to announce that Baltimore is a recipient of a $250,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant, a grant that the City of Baltimore is matching to create a $500,000 investment to be distributed throughout the city's arts community by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts and something alluded to as the "Baltimore grant foundation." The NEA funding appears to be coming from the $50 million allotted it by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act no idea where the $250K from the city is coming from and a $500,000 investment in Baltimore arts is one of the newsiest bits of local arts information to come out of a weekend overstuffed with local arts happenings.

On Friday and Saturday, some 11 Artscape satellite exhibitions opened around the city. I didn't make it to all of them public transportation is not a gallery hopper's best friend but I did hit a handful. Consider the below less reviews of the shows than first impressions gleaned through the hustle and bustle of opening receptions, when people are less interested in looking at the art and more interested in hanging out, exchanging pleasantries, and being seen not looking at the art. Most of these shows run during Artscape, too, and are totally worth leaving the city festival's Mount Royal Avenue corridor to check out.

Maryland Art Place's Convergence 09: Works by Recent MFA Graduates offers a professionally slick presentation of a variety of media, and Ellen Durkan's metal dresses make an impressive first impression. Her two pieces, "Athena" and "Death dress," are exhibited as sculpture, but are made to be worn. Online you can find images of women modeling these fascinating garments, and where their futuristic elements come into play: They look like the evening wear choices the replicant Zhora may have worn in Blade Runner. As stand-alone items, their wry commentary becomes more pronounced. These dresses made of brass, cast iron, copper, forged steel, leather, and wood visually recall the ornate finery and frills of Victorian-era garments, only amplifying that era's more constricting and restraining elements, playing on the cage-like structures of corsets and hoops skirts with actual metal bars. Also of note is Leslie Shellow's "Subtle Disturbance," an installation in MAP's front gallery that extends out of the back corner of the gallery's floor and crawls up the wall. It was difficult to explore with a roomful of people, but it slyly creates an alternate reality using imagery that feels inspired by the natural world, slightly recalling the expansive work of Matthew Ritchie.

School 33's Studio Artists Exhibition offers an en masse look at its resident artists' current output. I'm most familiar with the high-gloss abstract paintings of Kate MacKinnon, and her six recent works here offer further evidence of her vocabulary becoming more and more engrossing the further and further it moves from rigidly geometric compositions. Her almost monochromatic paintings in School 33's upstairs gallery, "5 Chrysanthemums Ran Away 1" and "2" present as two canvases thick with still congealing pools of oil that have been layered and gravity pulled into ovoid pseudopods and bulbous shapes. Aaron Yamada-Hanff's striking oil-on-canvas paintings and Matthew Freel's muscular drawings, watercolors, and oil-on-canvas paintings also grabbed the eyes.

Gallery Imperato's Imperato Film Fest is a blithe idea playfully executed. Presenting the works of nine filmmakers/video artists and making the gallery space as dark as possible by turning the lights down and hanging thick curtains over the windows the exhibition feels like a mini media room, as most pieces are presented in continuous loops on individual screens with headphones attached for sound. The works here are short many in the one-minute range and none approaching even the half-hour mark, meaning you're spending only slightly more time looking at them as you might non-time-based visual art and very often clever and witty. Joe Parker's "The Boarding Ticket" has the brisk feel and fleeting point of view of a short story, while Carl Steven's two pieces are little more than extended visual gags that succeed because they don't overstay their welcome. Elsewhere, French artist Céline Trouillet taps into the public masks of karaoke in her pieces, especially "Song No. 7." Little more than a static shot of a young woman against a pink background singing Marc Lavoine's "Je ne veux qu'elle'," the exhibition's accompanying booklet actually over-thinks what's going on here by emphasizing the young woman's sexuality (lesbian) singing a heterosexual love song, aiming for discussions of gender ambiguity, cultural norms, and something about the proverbial "Other." But as proven by The World Won't Listen British video artist Phil Collins' (no, not the "Sussudio" guy) astonishing 2007 video installation at the Dallas Museum of Art featuring people karaoke singing the Smiths' songs in Bogata, Istanbul, and Jakarta the performance veil of karaoke is a constantly evolving prism opens up a wealth of ideas from which to read such works, and Trouillet's "Song No 7" is no exception.

Even better is Corrine Bot's "Spider," in which the young artist combines mundane situations with Anthony Goicolea-like permutations of self to create witty narratives and complex visual spaces. In this short film, a young woman sits at a kitchen table reading the paper before getting up to swat a "spider" a person (presumably the same young woman, the artist) dressed in all black and a ski mask that crawls across the wall in the upper left quadrant. In the upper right quadrant is a "photo," which also features Bot looking in the mirror holding a gun to her head, an indelible B&W image that feels as gritty as anything in Larry Clark's Tulsa set of photos. Consulting Bot's web site (corrinebot.com), this image comes from another short piece, "Driven by Boredom." Bot's body of work in general appears to be a constantly expanding universe of interrelated ideas.

The South Calvert Street building that has housed Current Gallery for the past four years is going to be demolished in a few months, and the young people who have powered this always insouciant space are going out with a bang. Abandon Ship is a grinning farewell to a multi-use home base that has witnessed a churning sea of emerging art activity. Rarely polished, sometimes overly ambitious, often a mess, but never boring, the Current Gallery's swan song is a anarchic celebration of many of the people and ideas that have fueled its boisterousness over the years. The show's title is carved into the drop ceiling's sheetrock. The exhibition's organizing plot is sketched right on the wall. A hole in the wall is exquisitely framed. And the escape lifeboat cheekily sits right in the center of the gallery, ready to go down with the ship. No idea what Current's Michael Benevento, Monique Crabb, and Hans Petrich are going to get up to next, but if you have to go out, Abandon Ship is the way to do it.

The H&HScape after-Sondheim party Saturday night was hot, humid, enthusiastically attended, and a little overwhelming. Three galleries on two floors of the H&H Building at Eutaw and West Franklin streets opened their doors to a steady throng of people after the BMA award-presentation reception ended. If crowd density is any way to gauge interest, people adored the shows at both Nudashank (co-owned by City Paper contributor Alex Ebstein) and Whole (whose Radix show is co-curated by CP contributor Emily C-D), where convivial crowds made interacting with the work difficult and a bit pointless.

Upstairs at Gallery Four a more spread-out gallery space meant some large-scale works in its Protocol: /Syntax/ Semantics/ were more easily navigated. Shaun Flynn's delicately obstinate "Bad Hammock" a hammock created out of cut sheetrock that looks like it is barely supporting its own weight was one of the most blunt statements of purpose in an exhibition that is all about turning something into something else. It's a captivating idea disarmingly explored by Dan Steinhilber, whose plastic bag pieces are trashy, convoluted, and oddly alluring. An untitled piece takes bits and snatches of multi colored plastic bags and creates Frank Auerbach textures on stretched plastic. Another of his untitled pieces features air-filled trash bags turning into a Koons-ish shiny sculpture that doesn't try to unpack cultural baggage. And in his most daft piece here, Steinhilber suspends a ripped green plastic bag above a metal trash can mounted atop an electric fan. It's almost a dumb visual joke part literal trash art, part inflatable gorilla in front of the used car dealership and somehow dreamy and captivating at the same time.