Blight StarFor City Paper

In the stretch of alleyway behind the 2000%u20132300 blocks of North Calvert Street, a transformation has taken place. Almost entirely hidden from view between two busy streets, the backyards and exteriors of vacant properties in the Old Goucher neighborhood have been reborn through Sarah Doherty's Axis Alley project. Once a neighborhood eyesore, the small alley running parallel to Hargrove became a source of inspiration for Doherty, a MICA sculpture professor, and eventually a call to action, once she invited local artists and community members to reclaim these abandoned spaces.

Previously host to a lone plywood sign advertising new housing projects, the empty lot on Calvert between 21st and 22nd streets is the most publicly visible piece of the Axis Alley makeover. The adjacent walls of properties to either side of the lot have been decorated with murals that lead into the alley, which extends behind the rowhouses. Walking through the narrow space, frightening and dilapidated structures have been given a new charm. A house whose rear exterior wall has gaping holes, revealing the decrepit state of the inside, now has flashes of gold rimming the cavity and a large brick mandala in the yard. In neighboring yards, various sculptural and two-dimensional installations brighten boarded-up properties. Three pieces by Emily C-D (an erstwhile City Paper contributing illustrator) and Jessie Unterhalter of the TwoCan Collective brighten the gate and walls of a house in the 2100 block, and Gary Kachadourian has wheat pasted weeds and wild flowers in another lot. The entire installation is slated to run until next spring.

When Doherty moved into this neighborhood two years ago, she saw everybody living with/managing to ignore the dangerous, unsanitary conditions of their alleyways. While the larger alley, Hargrove, had its fair share of illegal dumping, the smaller alley, where the site-specific project took place, was disturbing. "[It was] truly a no-mans-land of trash, rats (dead and alive), needles, condoms, and decaying structures filled inside and out with illegal trash dumping," Doherty writes in an e-mail. Alarmed by the apparent apathy and lack of responsibility for these spaces, she began incorporating the alley into her class curricula, encouraging students to develop site-specific or site-inspired works. The more time she spent in the alley and worked with her students, the more the community took notice and interest.

As she made plans for a larger-scale clean-up and art-installation project, Doherty gave talks at the Windup Space and posted a call for site-specific proposals online. "[The talks] really helped expand the presence of the project" she says. It was "a way to address a larger number of residents."

In September, she received proposals from local artists, architects, and even dancers interested in working together to clean and find a better use for the vacant spaces. Choosing from among the proposals, Doherty contacted the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, which owns most of these vacant properties. Its officials were adamant that she have an insurance policy for the project, protecting the participants working in the hazardous environment. Due to the neighborhood and conditions of the project, many of the brokers Doherty talked to were unwilling to help her.

"It seemed at one point to be the deal breaker, in which the project could not go forward" she says, but through tireless searching, she eventually found a broker who was sympathetic to the project and helped find an underwriter.

In an approximately two-week period, Doherty and some volunteers cleared the alley of trash. Despite a number of 311 calls, Doherty found the most effective way to clear the alley was with her own two hands, and by hiring some of the neighborhood's transient members. The project came up against further obstacles when the police twice mistook the clean-up effort as an illegal dumping operation. Each participating artist also did his or her part to clear the properties for proposed pieces. By Oct. 18, all the pieces were finished and open to the neighborhood and greater public.

Since the project's early October initiation, Doherty says she has seen improvements to her community. "In the months I worked on Axis Alley, many residents expressed that they largely had no awareness or relationship to the backs of their properties other than to take out trash, and that [the project] has made them more connected and aware," she says. She has also noticed the alley has stayed consistently cleaner, with fewer needles and condoms on the ground. With the safer, cleaner conditions, the neighborhood's children are also using the alley to play in and ride their bikes--"something that was not possible a year ago," Doherty notes. Although the scale of the project may be considered small, in this neighborhood, it is a grand gesture.

Learning The TradeFor City Paper

The Seventh Annual Curators' Incubator at Maryland Art Place presents three exhibitions curated by Rachel Sitkin, Shelly Blake-Plock (an erstwhile City Papercontributor), and Margaret Winslow. The program mentors green curators as they develop show proposals into exhibitions, and this trio worked with MAP's program advisory committee to realize their shows and produce a catalog. Winslow and Sitkin present exhibitions with thematic overlaps (although different focuses), both looking at architecture and man-made environments, while Blake-Plock put together the first sound-art installation to be exhibited at the gallery.

In the first and smallest room, Winslow's Soft Spacesbrings together three artists who incorporate architecture in their work. Examining the inherent formal and psychological influences of the surroundings on their craft, the three artists express nostalgia, emotion, and unseen dialogues through architectural elements. Selecting one large-scale piece each from Ronald Longsdorf and Janell Olah and three smaller works by Stephen Ruszkowski, Winslow's Spaces is impressive for its limitations and concise in its investigations. Longsdorf's "I saw our future that day" is a massive polystyrene structure that fills the entire back quarter of the room and references architectural construction and craft through a life-sized representation of a front porch. Rigged with a grid of lights behind the facade that shine through the semi-opaque foam, the piece is systematically illuminated to simulate a sunrise. Looking past the obvious command of craftsmanship and imposing scale, the piece projects the intimacy of one's home and the shared experience of that space.

A similar nostalgia permeates Ruszkowski's three pieces from his "Roofline" series. In each, Ruszkowski's mixed-media works on panel he depicts a fuzzy-edged image of roofs from (according to the catalog) historic Delaware architecture. Reminiscent of faded photographs, the images grasp at details of past structures that appear to exist only in memory and limited documentation. Janell Olah's soft sculpture also focuses on minute building details and helps to illustrate the unseen, circulatory-like systems within the walls. Her sectioned, inflatable sculpture "me trying to help you try to help me" uses the gallery's air system for inflation, and the sculpture's form and anthropomorphic buoyancy illustrates the life-like systems within the walls.

Sitkin's In Our Nature explores the tensions created by man-made landscapes, and includes five artists who use their surroundings as a springboard for imaginative, reactive artwork. The exhibited works illustrate a spectrum of unease. At opposite ends of this range, Washington-based artist Igor Pasternak playfully documents a trash-collection spectacle while Philadelphia-based painter Alex Lukas depicts the apocalyptic collapse of modern society. Pasternak's large, inflatable, happy-faced ball covered in tape and trash is an artifact from the accompanying video in which he and his wife roll it through Washington's streets, hypnotically accumulating trash and debris as onlookers laugh with, encourage, or question the couple. In his striking, large-scale painting on paper, Lukas depicts man-made structures destroyed and abandoned by their former inhabitants. Concrete walls, highway dividers, and fences are marred with ominous graffiti and other indications of a recent battle.

In Nature's thematic middle-ground, Kim Beck traces parking-lot islands in her laser-etched panels and alludes to the real-estate crisis through a series of painted cardboard boxes arranged in a small cityscape. And Laura Cooperman and Michelle Hagewood each present more decorative pieces that collage elements of the man-made landscape through different media: Cooperman uses cut paper, Hagewood produces digital prints. Together, the works illustrate a crescendo of anxiety that comes through the psychological factors of the man-made environment and the resulting environmental and economic consequences.

Blake-Plock's Art of the Set-Up attempts to present the hand-made instruments of local experimental musicians as visual pieces of art. Each artist/musician presents his or her instrument, accompanying them with photographs, video, and other non-sound materials. Inconsistently installed--some pieces sit on the floor, others on a small table or hung from the wall--the pieces look abandoned by their players rather than presented for visual appreciation. In a city where this subculture is so celebrated, it feels reasonable to put these uniquely crafted objects on a pedestal, and it would have been nice if Blake-Plock had done so literally.

Curators' Incubator continually produces smart, interesting exhibitions by curators who have, in the cases of 2004 participant Jackie Milad (former Goucher College Rosenberg Gallery curator, currently program coordinator of University of Maryland's Stamp Gallery) and 2005 alumnus Liz Flyntz (who since has been involved with the late Current Gallery), and will go on to exciting future projects. While most venues help to encourage the careers and ventures of local artists, Maryland Art Place's program helps to celebrate and encourage those people behind the scenes.

Open Space OpensFor City Paper

Behind the alligator mural on 28th Street, the Baltimore Body Shop began to show signs of life and late-night activity back in June. Afghans hung from the windows and large groups of twentysomethings gathered on the sloped driveway, going in and out of the functioning repair shop. The year-long goal of 15 MICA students and recent alumni had finally found an unorthodox home in the renovated back room of the auto garage. Open Space, an art gallery and music venue, fills a hole left by the recent unavoidable hiatus of the Current Gallery.

The space itself "was pretty filthy and dusty when we first moved in," says Brendan Sullivan, one of the gallery's co-founders/organizers. He's joined by Matt Bettine, Eric Bos, Andrew Kennedy, Erin McAleavy, Molly O'Connell, Pete Razon, Neal Reinalda, Conor Stechschulte--members of the collective staff that run Open Space (not present: Scott Ache, Chris Day, Geoff Kixmiller, Eric Stiner, Adam Vorozilchak, and Harvey Melchor)--around a coffee table in the studio space above the gallery. The group fires off details of the space's transformation during the past three months.

"We had to saw out pieces of metal that were sticking out of the floor," Kennedy says.

"And there used to be giant boards over the windows, with like, 20 years of dust and grime that we scraped off," Bos adds.

"There was a raised-up Isuzu Trooper in the gallery when we first moved in," Kennedy says. "We joked about having that be our first show--just the truck." The others laugh.

The gallery downstairs is clean now, with white walls, track lights, a glossy floor, and the first exhibition--Lab Door/Ozone Shelf, featuring Eamon Espey, Andrew Liang, and Matthew Thurber--installed. But every day during the week before the opening, at least three members were still putting in long days to get the space ready.

The group has been hatching the idea for this space for awhile. "Neal [Reinalda] had been talking to us all in different groups as early as last September and we all got excited about it," Bettine says.

"I knew I wanted to do something after I graduated from MICA, and it depended on what sort of space I could get," Reinalda adds. He's the group's principal public-relations figure, and Open Space's provocateur. "If it was bigger, I could have a venue, and if it was smaller, [I could] have it be a gallery or smaller book store. We found this space, and the fact that there are so many people involved makes it more financially viable."

But working with so many people is equal parts benefit and hurdle; coordinating schedules with so many people is difficult, but sharing costs and responsibility made taking on the renovations less daunting. "Having so many people, if everyone chips in $10, you have a lot of money to work with," Bos says.

Reinalda agrees. "People will take on a project that they're interested in doing financially," he says. "So [costs] gets spread out."

Members of the group also have varied tastes, but they feel Open Space's creative/curatorial direction benefits from such differences. Lab Door/Ozone Shelf is primarily the effort of member Molly O'Connell, who is also a member of Closed Caption Comics. "Molly really jump-started the first show and put it together," Sullivan says. "But it will be different with each show, and part of the idea in naming it 'Open Space' was to invite other voices and outside curators, different people we know to curate shows and use the space."

Everyone gets more excited when the discussion turns to upcoming shows, and they all want to keep the exhibition's aesthetic constantly changing. "We don't want to become predictable," Reinalda says.

"And we don't want people to be discouraged from sending in a proposal because they think we have a certain style," McAleavy adds.

Open Space ambitiously plans to produce between 10-12 shows per year, meaning the collective members work on many project simultaneously. Reinalda has invited two recent MICA graduates, Malcolm Lomax and Dan Wickerham, to have the run of the space in a two-man exhibition titled King Me that opens Oct. 16. For another upcoming exhibition, the group compiled a list of 40 painters, which they eventually whittled down to five. Long-term, the group is keeping in contact with similar start-up spaces in Richmond, Philadelphia, Chicago, and on the West Coast. O'Connell plans to revive her "Cream Dream Lecture Series" that she held at MICA, bringing in guest speakers such as Ian Svenonius and Brendan Fowler.

The collective would also like to get more involved with its neighborhood. "Ideally, we'd like to have a community presence," Stechschulte says. "Remington has so many programs, like the tool swap and the community garden, it would be nice to become more involved."

So far, this gallery's start-up timing has been fortuitous. The building is affordable, commercially zoned, conveniently located, and catching on quickly. "Other people have laid the groundwork for our space to be possible," Reinalda says. "And then to see all these people that I look up to come by the space is really amazing."

Grad Company For City Paper

Convergence, Maryland ArtPlace's annual regional MFA show, is a heavily video-based exhibition of recent graduates from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Towson University, the University of Maryland, College Park, and UMBC. It's fair and accurate to say that it feels a little inconsistent: Some work here stands out as gallery-ready, a mastery of style and presentation, while other pieces aren't. And this showcase is a chance to learn what succeeds and doesn't on the job after two, and sometimes three, years of graduate work.

Leslie Shellow takes advantage of this showcase. In the gallery's first room, the Towson graduate presents the multi-media, nature-inspired installation "Subtle Disturbance." Honeycomb shapes and organic elements surpass their decorative suggestions to become an experiential piece. Starting from one dense corner of the room, carefully arranged drawings in dirt trickle into flat paper pieces, which become more sculptural and cylindrical as they approach the wall. Paint and paper cutouts referencing coral, flowers, cells, snowflakes, and amoebas crawl vine-like from the floor mass, blooming and growing as they approach the ceiling. Natural and synthetic materials blend to illustrate microscopic, structural similarities of form, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral.

The gallery's middle room contains three video pieces, all installed in different ways. College Park graduate Juan Rojo's "Farewell," presented on a small television monitor, is an almost 7-minute, slow-motion video of figures embracing. Super-saturated, and with no natural, fluid motion, Rojo's video becomes more a series of images than a narrative short. Unfortunately, the painterly qualities of the piece are subdued by its somewhat misguided presentation; the television monitor cripples the images by trapping them within the device. Had the piece been projected, the line between video and painting would have more effectively disappeared.

MICA grad Alan Callander takes up the back wall with his video, "Grey to White." Alternating between emotive figures and abstract imagery, there is no real comparison or continuity between the story arc created with the figures and the spliced-in abstract elements. The collage of the two video styles is unsettled; the two aesthetics are noticeably separate, rather than smoothly transitioning between the styles.

The third video, which is the least conspicuous, is UMBC's Susan Main's "One Inch of Anywhere." In her piece, a looping video plays on a laptop screen set up behind a wall, viewable only through a narrow, plumbing tailpipe. With such great measures taken to contain the content of the video, you expect to find something exciting, controversial, or even voyeuristic at the other end, but there is very little payoff for looking through the pipe. At other end of the hole is a sped-up, top-view video of grass.

MICA graduate Robby Rackleff visually dominates the gallery's back room and offers a second comparison of video to painting with a completely different set of inspirations. Unlike Rojo's video portraiture, Rackleff creates animated landscapes based on video games. His large-scale installation, "There Is No Such Army," made up of fantastical 16-bit hues, is a blinking, slowly morphing canvas. Flat, brightly colored shapes and planes create a conceptual kingdom under siege. The video is missing a game's classic side-scrolling protagonist; instead, this game is seemingly paused on an unexplored level with a mind of its own.

MICA's Michael Dax Iacovone illustrates his interest in movement and the way in which people document the banalities of time and space though video and photography. In his four-frame video "Following Billy," he uses continual motion to create an almost still, uniform image. Primarily a photographer, Iacovone uses moving video to create single, photographic frames. The title is also its summary: each of the four frames show the back of the same person from an equal distance, walking in different locations. While the setting is changing in the periphery, and the subject physically advancing, the composition remains the same throughout. (Iacovone also uses still photography to document movement in this exhibition with a multi-frame, multi-exposure panoramic photograph/diagram.)

Towson graduate Ellen Durkan renders metal dress/cages, both in her drawing and in her two sculptures, "Athena" and "Death Dress." Mostly grotesque and slightly melodramatic, the pieces are created based on the artist's own measurements, and meant to be worn. Her seven-and-a-half-foot-tall graphite drawing, "Blindheaded," is pinned to the wall, a presentation that suits the work--but not the drawings of MICA graduate Katherine Mann. Mann's MICA thesis piece was an impressive, wall-sized collaged painting, and here she includes two more demure pieces. Melting from fine, botanical detail into watery, abstract brushstroke, Mann beautifully demonstrates her knack for design and composition--if not presentation. Pinned to the wall, the two pieces buckle and bow from the corners, distracting from the delicateness of their imagery.

But you exhibit and learn. Convergence, an honor and rite of passage for the included artists, is just the first opportunity among many for young artists to continue to mature and find a voice for their work outside the studio.

2009 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize (Karen Yasinsky) For City Paper

Karen Yasinsky

Informed by classic French cinema, Karen Yasinsky has a somewhat formulaic, though typically successful, method of presentation. Often Yasinsky uses drawings and hand-drawn and stop-motion animations to re-interpret a single movie; in this year's Sondheim finalists' exhibition, she explores Robert Bresson's 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar. Including three animations--two hand-drawn and a 9-minute stop-motion animation with dolls--and a series of drawings all based on the movie, Yasinsky reinvents the characters and plot multiple times within her installation.

The first room of Yasinsky's exhibition space contains her drawings and two animations, each hand drawn at 12 frames per second. The drawings are broken into two groupings, the mood and style changing drastically from one set to the next. In the larger, more prominently displayed drawings, brightly colored inks burst from behind the centrally placed graphite and colored pencil figures, ultimately washing the figures out. In these images, Marie and Balthazar are displayed, absurdly and alternately, with a cowboy character and a cartoon reproduction of Mr. Magoo. Somewhat unimpressive in their raw, almost unfinished rendering and without reference to a greater narrative or climax (due to their similar compositions and backgrounds), the images seem to be more studies for an animation than finished works in their own right. Making up for this shortcoming, however, are three smaller drawings on the rear wall, which are more carefully stylized and maintain an allegorical attention to color: Balthazar is depicted with silver details, while Marie is illustrated in reds.

The two hand-drawn animations, "Marie" and "Enough to Drive You Mad," are sound tracked by local musicians Dan Breen and Tom Boram of Snacks. In the three and a half minute "Marie," the girl appears as a simple, though strikingly accurate, line drawing, looking off into the distance as her lips move. Yasinsky examines the ambiguous psyche of the quiet protagonist: The image and accompanying music begin cleanly and classically, the track opening with strings and piano over a quiet, French monologue. Together, they dissipate into visual and audio noise; the portrait becomes pixilated into a grid of dots, colors flash and invert while the music becomes discordant and shrill. "Enough To Drive You Mad" is a four-minute loop that begins with Marie innocently petting her donkey and melts into a trippy, psychedelic narrative that reintroduces the cowboy and Magoo.

Probably most reliant on knowledge of Bresson's original movie, Yasinsky's stop-motion animation "I Choose Darkness" focuses on the Magdalenian parallels of Marie's character through her relationship with the saintly donkey Balthazar and the male characters in the movie. Bresson is known for his reference to actors as models, and has very little dialog in his film, which relies heavily on the subtleties communicated through facial expressions and body language. Rising to the challenge of translating ambiguous emotions through dolls, Yasinsky manages to create a similarly mysterious scenario in which Marie's affection for Balthazar is obvious while her impetus for exposing herself to abusive interactions is unclear.

While film is an inspiration for Yasinsky, the resultant art is all her own. Forcing the lengthy classic concisely into the contemporary gallery setting, Yasinsky creates pieces that have a voice of their own, while stroking the ego of gallery-going film aficionados. Her insights into the characters, creative explorations, and exaggerations of plot demonstrate a love for the source material, coupled with a practiced removal that allows her to dissect it with a compelling and focused panache. (Alex Ebstein)

Little Giants For City Paper

A Sculpture Show, C. Grimaldis Gallery's 2009 manifestation of its annual summer sculpture group show, features the small works of big names. For an exhibition whose bill includes Richard Serra, a gargantuan sculptor both in product and celebrity, the work is diminutive, and at times delicate. Some of the pieces in this exhibition look like maquettes for larger pieces, while others are explorations of form and material. Show's eight sculptors, having achieved some recognition for their larger pieces--some of which were seen in last June's Grimaldis @ Area 405--present a domestic-friendly set of works, as well as two dimensional drawings and sketches, which compromise little with the exception of scale.

Placed front and center in the gallery's window pedestal, John Van Alstine's "Sisyphean Circle (Beijing XVII)" is probably most pleasing piece to imagine as a larger work. A graceful, flat metal ring stands upright from a curved red base. From the inside edge of the ring, a red pigmented steel joint suspends a sharp stone into the circle's center. The composition suggests a constant, impending motion--a guillotine movement of the stone or spinning of the wheel-like ring--while remaining frozen in its potential energy. Begging to be surrounded by action figures at this size, a two-story version of the structure would be awesome and terrifying. Unfortunately, Van Alstine's two other, smaller works--also metal circle/stone pieces--are comparatively static. Crafted from chunkier pieces of metal and welded haphazardly, the illusion of balance is lost.

Annette Sauermann provides a visual bridge between the two- and three-dimensional works with her two wall-bound sculptures and a series of three collages. In the past, Sauermann's worked with light, creating large, elaborate architectural installations to emphasize luminescence or to trap the glow of a light source. In a shift toward the two-dimensional, Sauermann's newer work consists of thick, flat concrete slabs fitted with translucent pieces of plexiglass and light filters. While drastically reserved, she continues to address light and architecture, minimally and materially. As if working backward from the room to the wall, it's a short reach from her concrete sculptures to her collage series. Compressing and flattening space and light, her collages on board are also crafted from cement, light filters, and sandpaper.

While most artists include colorfully and materially consistent pieces--and in the case of Van Alstine, repetitive forms--John Ruppert includes both the most hulking, masculine structure, and alternately the most delicate, petite piece. The vertical, cast-iron shaft "Split Column" is unfeasibly balanced on its narrow point in a circle of black sand. Resembling a splintered tree trunk, Ruppert's organic form is simultaneously precarious and imposing. Ruppert's smaller, white plaster "Phobos #2 (Celestial Bodies Series)" is contrastingly fragile but more comfortably grounded. At just 10 inches high, "Phobos" consists of two slightly imploded blobs; the bottom solid, and the top form a lacey lattice.

Chul-Hyun Ahn, whose infinite light/mirror tunnels took a dramatic turn toward diorama at the end of last year, includes two minimal pieces: "Horizon," which is wall mounted, and the free-standing "Well 4." While most works in the exhibition are of souvenir status and would look comfortable in a home, Ahn's pieces veer toward the functional. "Horizon," a glass pane in front of a neon-bordered mirror, casts off enough light to serve as a cool, contemporary lamp, while it wouldn't be much of a stretch to see the round, glass-topped "Well 4" as a coffee table--neither of which is meant to be a slight. Ahn's smaller works remain distinctly recognizable and adaptable to every potential setting, blurring the line between art and design.

The pieces in A Sculpture Show offer a similar impression to viewing the blueprints and architectural models of a building you've already visited. In many cases, the work and planning that goes into the model is more intimate and exciting than the resultant building, which is often taken for granted. These works allow a view into the development, process, and range that each artist has accomplished; a chance to reconsider familiar pieces and the planning involved.

The Illusionists For City Paper

Decoy, the exhibition currently on view at the Creative Alliance, makes you look twice and question what you see. Each of the art works in this show, curated by Erin Cluley, causes you to waver between its surface attraction and a deeper message, which you reconsider upon each viewing. Visually airy with an array of edgy undertones, Decoy lures you in and dares you to be shallow.

Jenny Mullins' drawings of majestic birds, with their detail and clean stylization, resemble both postage stamps and propaganda posters. In each image, the birds are bound and constricted by rope, or disfigured by belts and sequined, yellow hoods. Dotted with a barrage of arrows and aggressive flag poles, it is uncertain whether the images are supposed to read as victorious or sympathetic. In "Sacrifice to the Economy," a single bird of prey's feathers bulge against bindings, and strings trail out of the composition from the tiny arrows along its back. With its head obscured by a traditional falcon hood--albeit one bespangled with sequins--the bird is either blinded against the violence being acted upon it or made vulnerable by its hooded condition. Verging on satirical illustration, Mullins plays on contemporary American tensions and the constriction of national pride.

Paul Jeanes' oil paintings of lush cloud formations offer the initial impression of photographs taken from an elevated or hovering perspective, and they're hung along the back wall of the exhibition to create such an illusion. The hand and the medium become obvious at a closer range, but the images then reveal hidden details--a flock of birds, a helicopter--invading otherwise pristine cloudscapes. Jeanes' artist's statement claims that the paintings--from his series, "Not to Touch the Earth (1000 Skies for Mies van de Rohe)"--are based on the view from the van de Rohe-designed Highfield House in the Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood. In a similar celestial study, Jeanes includes a grid of small paintings of the moon. Next to the imposing cloud triptych, the small images, while charming, are relatively unambitious, and the moments captured are less interesting.

Michael Mansfield's two charcoal drawings examine views from space. At their massive scale--100 by 100 inches and 104 by 132 inches, respectively--the drawings appear to be elegant, topographical data charts of remote or imagined islands. Indicating a satellite's perspective and mapping unidentified landmarks by using nodes of varied sizes, the information relayed becomes a pattern of indeterminable possibilities: clusters of people, military units, cell phone towers, McDonald's locations, etc. Mansfield simultaneously celebrates the awe of technology and examines the unease of its potential by letting his viewers fill in the blank as to why such data is being gathered.

Robert Horvath's tantalizingly slick, shiny paintings look like exotic floral still-lifes from afar, but up close they reveal a germ-like, organic structure more akin to a science project. The gaseous bubbling, cell-like structures billow and glow against their stark, black backgrounds. The radiant, bulbous forms have an uneasy hostility, like an unstoppable, alien disease--think The Blob, only prettier--swelling across the paintings' surface. Hanging on either side of Kendra Lee Hebel's "Sugarpus"--a set of three costumes made from resin and hair--Horvath echoes Hebel's more obvious play on the value of beauty.

Hebel's three dresses, worn by white mannequins, directly contrast the clean form of the body with physical anomalies and asks--not so subtly--which is more interesting. The tactile, overpowering dresses, made of synthetic hair and rubber silicon, mimic body hair and growths, while cut and presented like delicate ballet costumes. Worn by live models during the opening, and undoubtedly made more startlingly organic through movement, "Sugarpus" finds exoticism in moles, hair, and cancerous growths.

Decoy is a smart show, successfully drawing parallels and pairing works one might never have considered complementary. Bringing together artists working in a variety of media, size and subject matter, Cluley presents a realized exhibition with an overall message and curatorial statement: Things aren't always what they appear to be. While the exhibition is positively polished, attractive and professional, if you get stuck on the surface, you're missing the point.

Transmodern Day 4 - City Paper Blog

Altered States, a satellite Transmodern exhibition and the latest curatorial endeavor by Jamillah James, delivers an impressive--dare-we-say all-star, both local and national--roster of video, installation, and new media artists, with a killer live performance at the opening to boot. Bringing the work of major, contemporary artists--including a video piece by the Providence-based collective Forcefield, which consists of Matt Brinkman, Jim Drain, Ara Peterson, and Leif Goldberg--into the Baltimore and Transmodern spectrum, while simultaneously highlighting local artists working in the same vein, Altered States helps to uphold the level of professionalism that the Transmodern festival has achieved with each year's manifestation.

Though unfortunately limited to the smaller, second-floor gallery at Load of Fun, James more than made due with the space's awkward, hallway layout. Projecting two larger videos and screening additional pieces on television monitors--along with three major installations by Erin Womak, a collaboration between Caitlin Williams and Sarah Milinski, and the New Jedi Order--the space is full without being overcrowded. Cohesive in its overall aesthetic and celebrating the action of making work over the idea of art as product, the exhibition is an intentional throwback to 1960s fringe, communal subcultures. A majority of the included works are collaborative projects, with the pieces by individual artists echoing the idea of a collective ceremony. Womack displays a beautifully eerie series of masks, many of which were seen in her ritual, performance/installation during last year's Transmodern festival, while Jimmy Joe Roche plays the part of a spiritualist in his video.

As a whole, the video work is comprised of experimental forms and ambiguous imagery. Familiar images and symbols lose their recognition and meaning within each strange context. In watching the looping footage melt from one visual reference into the next, a greater narrative is never obvious. EMR's (Matt Bass and Dylan Mira's Extreme Mature Respect) and Forcefield's respective pieces reflect a vague communal or teamwork effort to an indeterminate end, although EMR's repetitious imagery of linking arms arguably climaxes with an unrelated explosion.

Marking the closing of Transmodern and the opening of Altered States, Sunday night's music performances were similarly themed and well-considered. Featuring the indisputably awesome line-up of the Lexie Mountain Boys,Soft Circle, and Ra Khuit Noor (a performance by Erin Womak and Ravi Binning, which exceeded the average attention span by three minutes or so). Perhaps the only blip was the inclusion of New York's Blues Control. Purposefully ambient, the band has the stage presence of an iPod, an uncomfortably sharp contrast to the upbeat energy of its fellow performers.

Despite its satellite location, Altered States pushes the Transmodern envelope and manages to capture its generally uncontainable energy in a gallery exhibition. Perhaps a glimpse into the future of the festival, and certainly a concise and digestible cross-section of the overall, four-day program, Altered States helps to establish this Baltimore institution's art-world relevance and reinforces its infinite potential. Altered States was a one-night-only event, and compelling enough to make us look forward to James' future projects.

Just The Wax For CIty Paper

Wax Actual, the group show of representational, encaustic painters in the Creative Alliance's upstairs Amalie Rothschild Gallery, has trouble finding a voice for the medium it seeks to champion. The encaustic medium--basically pigmented hot wax, which is generally turned to for its seductive ability to capture light or produce flat or uniquely textured surfaces, as in the paintings of Canadian artist Tony Scherman--loses its excitement between the conservative imagery and erratic application. Curated by Creative Alliance's resident encaustic painter, Christine Sajecki--whose work far outstrips any artists she includes--and writer Joseph Young, the exhibition looks self-defeating, presenting the medium, in most cases, as extraneous.

Of the 10 paintings in the small exhibition, only three demonstrate an admirable grasp of the medium. Many of the included artists appear to have picked up the medium (perhaps for its novelty) and run with it, without stopping to explore it for its unique characteristics. Without the title tip-off, it would be hard to guess that encaustic is a common thread throughout the show. In the hexagonal "El Jardinero," Margarita Friedman portrays a vibrant portrait of a gardener. While the painting is technically excellent, and the portrait undeniably charming, Friedman's medium is questionable. The bold palette and the painterly application of the medium are so similar to oil that the choice of encaustic appears superfluous. The luminescence that encaustic can capture in a surface is lost in the dimples of the brush strokes and the boldness of the color, rendering the medium unrecognizable. Similarly, the flat, thin paint application in Randall Steeves' "Ordinary Americans" might as well be acrylic, with the encaustic effectively disguised. Seemingly out of place among the colorful canvases and panels, Micah Cash's abstracted, black-and-white landscapes in Sumi ink and beeswax again bend the medium in an unsuccessful direction. The hazy gradient of white sky to black tree line in both pieces would be better served in watercolor, as the wax is an undetectable element in the images.

Susanne Arnold includes two paintings in the show, "By the Waters of Babylon: Fire" and "By the Waters of Babylon: Fallout," featuring scenes of people working along the shore. Arnold distorts the encaustic pigment by adding sand to the piece where sand is depicted. While the technique explores wax's ability to adhere additional materials to a painting's surface, the effect is similar to using glue, and the gritty texture is both dull and overworked. Jeff Schaller's "London" shows a woman in an unnatural, hunched posture with the word "London" painted horizontally across the canvas. While the overall image is slick, the paint is applied thinly with no attention given to the medium's ability to be built up and modeled.

Sandra Sedmak Engel, Pat Dennis, and Rebecca Cason, all Baltimore-based painters, demonstrate a contrastingly sophisticated craftsmanship, if slightly more passé imagery. Engel's stylized portrait of a young woman, entitled "Going to Brighton Beach," is composed and crafted like pieces of a puzzle. Relatively smooth and pleasingly waxy on the surface, closer inspection reveals what looks like a careful, reduction process of grooving the hardened background before adding additional color to the surface. Her meticulous manipulation of the wax prevents the colors from mixing, and produces crisp, controlled line work. Dennis' painting, "Four Horses," is a front view of four horses in motion. The bodies and faces are slightly relieved from the surface, the wax applied thickly, allowing it to drip naturally and spontaneously throughout the image. Cason's small portrait of a girl, "Katherine," looks like a resin-dipped Renoir postcard. Using a photo transfer, all the detail work is smoothly encased within a glossy, top layer of wax looking both polished and synthetic.

The exhibition overall is an insignificant sample of the encaustic medium. Aesthetically inconsistent and undoubtedly limited by its given space, the show fails to present a compelling case for the narrow subject matter on which it focuses. In presenting a show of encaustic work, a fairly unpopular medium, broadening the subject matter and choosing the best examples of encaustic painting would have better served the general curatorial mission.

DC Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/events-in-baltimore/nudashank-gallery-worth-looking-for

Picture Plane / Nudashank Written up in Baltimore Jewish Times

http://www.nudashank.com/jewishtimes.html

Nudashank Written up in Baltimore Sun / Herald Tribune

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090524/ARTICLE/905241014?Title=Baltimore-art-gallery-thrives-in-tough-economic-times

Whimsy Pickings For City Paper

Fantastical Imaginings, the exhibition currently on view at Maryland Art Place and Loyola College, falls a little short of delivering anything more than bland drollery. Originally exhibited at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Fantastical Imaginings is a strange grouping of 14 artists working within the vague category of the "imagination." Suffering mostly from curatorial decisions--in both venues, the show is grouped stagnantly by artist, with no attempt made to create cohesion within the exhibition--the result resembles an issue of Juxtapozgeared toward an elementary-school audience. The innocuous imagery of bunnies, robots, children, and unalarming gore is punctuated only by the seemingly inappropriate inclusions of Laylah Ali and John Karpinski, both of whom express a refreshing lack of seriousness within the group of simpering illustrations.

Oddly imbalanced (Amy Cutler and Anne Siems each exhibit one piece, while A.D. Loveday has nine drawings included between the two locations), and ranging in subject matter from Marie Antoinette to cutesy, anamorphic bone piles, it is hard to move comfortably from one body of work to the next. The included images depict various degrees of departure from reality: some landscapes are as common as your own neighborhoods, while others disintegrate the familiar into sci-fi scribbles. While variety can be a plus in group shows, the anachronistic divide between puffy, 18th-century figures portrayed by Marilyn Holsing, Siems, and to an extent, Claire Owen and Serena Perrone, and a more contemporary esthetic favored by Mark Hosford, A. D. Loveday, and John Karpinski feels like a ramshackle assemblage of two separate ideas into one exhibition, with some negligible filler--namely John Shipman and Lee Wilkinson--to span the visual gap.

While the show features primarily two-dimensional work, the odd woman out is Roberley Bell, who includes two, lumpy, awkward "flower blobs." Her sculptures, which are split up, sit in the corner of the front and rear rooms of Maryland Art Place's gallery and, in their separation, appear to be swallowed by the vastness of the exhibition space. Strangely marginalized by their placement, the neon, flower-encrusted structures have as much impact as a potted plant, with zero relationship to the rest of the work. To be fair, both sculptures effectively mimic potted plants.

In what is an apparent subdivision of the greater theme, Paul Chidester, A.D. Loveday and John Shipman's work falls, albeit with mild success, into the category of social and environmental consciousness. Loveday's scribbled robots on minimal, colored backgrounds suggest a dystopian, futuristic examination of technology. The intricacy of Loveday's foreground work loses its interest against their inappropriately bold backgrounds; her work is most interesting when she sticks with black and white contrasts. Shipman shows a series of (perhaps, self-) portraiture that conveys his love of trees and animals; in one, his heart offers a carrot to a rabbit. Chidester, in particular, attempts to deliver wisdom about preservation and civilization's effect on the landscape, portraying polluted or transitional spaces seemingly guarded by single, ape figures. His puffy, undulating style separates his message from a recognizable world, and the works' small scale and stylization likens them to children's book illustrations. The vehicle is ill-suited for the message.

John Karpinski and Laylah Ali's works both stand out as being the most interesting and most visually different. Karpinski's comic-book storyboards fit under the umbrella of the theme, but have an energizing and youthful feel while much of the other work is comparatively stodgy. Karpinski's work feels the most complete, delivering a light-hearted and humorous supernatural curiosity with the narrative included in the comic format. Ali includes her newer, stark portraits of ambiguously costumed figures in this exhibition. While her earlier work may have fit more appropriately, and brought a bit more edge, her clean, un-flowery hand is a welcome, visual break. The indeterminate interactions of Ali's characters require no additional explanation; their strength is in both their ambiguity and their craft.

With few exceptions, the works in Fantastical Imaginings look like illustrations in search of their accompanying narratives, and feel oddly incomplete without them. No visual or thematic thread ties the overall exhibition together, and while factions exist within the whole, the work was not hung to consider them. Traveling exhibitions don't always find as much success in their latter manifestations, but with a little re-organization,Fantastical Imaginings may have been a little more fantastical.

Her Stories: Group Show Presents and Examines Women's Voices and Identity For City Paper

IN WHAT IS THE LARGEST project to date undertaken by the Park School's current curator, Rick Delaney, If I Didn't Care: Multigenerational Artists Discuss Cultural Histories is an exhibition that adds up to more than the sum of its numerous and diverse parts. The show explores multicultural and multigenerational themes among female artists, and mindful of the Park School gallery's primarily young, academic audience, Delaney has assembled a challenging and extensive show that simultaneously celebrates art, women, heritage, and history. "I was looking for work with a narrative," Delaney explained at the opening, "even if that narrative is abstract."

If I Didn't Care showcases 29 U.S.-based female artists of different ages and backgrounds seeking to communicate their individual narratives through art. Ranging in age from 30 to more than 90, the artists' works illustrates a chronological struggle to give voice to artistic and cultural individuality, calling attention to stereotypes, ritual, and particular cultural phenomena of the past century. The included artists are at varying points in their careers--relative unknowns hang alongside established artists such as Laylah Ali, Siona Benjamin, and Joyce Scott--and within the broad theme, each artist is able to explore her own story, while becoming a part of the larger dialog.

Familiar esthetics meet fresh, new takes on alternate issues of stigma and empowerment. Laylah Ali, typically ambiguous and brutal in her imagery, includes an unobjectionable series of three small portraits here. Without specific race or identification, they help to set the tone of the exhibition, while remaining comparatively impersonal to the rest of the work. Saya Woolfalk, on the verge of art-world celebrity, investigates the exoticized impression of other cultures in her two gouache paintings. Frightening, Crayola-color figures offer "girls for sale" out of a street-vendor's cart in "The Cleaners," while a woman, dressed in tropical fruits, is pursued by a ravenous crowd of spiral-eyed white men in "Looking In." Inviting a twisted tourist's view into the foreign, Woolfalk's exaggerated use of color and tropical imagery is both appealing and repulsive, rousing unavoidable guilt and curiosity.

Negar Ahkami materially embraces femininity in her work, creating large, psychological landscapes using acrylic, glitter, and nail polish. Her work reflects Persian patterns and Western architecture; elaborate waterfalls cascade from the left side of the composition, meeting the edge of a modern cityscape to the right. A small female figure stands on a bridge that joins the two worlds, suggesting that Ahkami places herself, proudly and literally, between the two.

Migiwa Orimo's "Obi-Palimpsest," a ritually unraveled kimono, is arguably the most intimate and cathartic piece in the exhibition, dealing with death and private ceremony. The cloth, displayed scroll-like vertically, has been dissected, one thread at a time, leaving a ghost of the former material. The gathered, removed threads sit precariously on the ends of wires and flow outward, perpendicular to the side of the fabric. Even without knowing the work's personal significance, paying homage to her Japanese heritage and the death of her mother, the piece has an almost metaphysical presence.

Hanging next to the kimono, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's similarly introspective landscape, "If I Could I Would Go Down," shares a deeply personal elusiveness. Collaged magazine images, drawings, and beading are combined to create a fantastical setting for Sunstrum's recurrent geese-women. Addressing migration and the maintenance of self through geographic change, Sunstrum's piece is a unique view into the artist's mind.

In her black and white video piece, "Beef," Elizabeth Axtman speaks for the kids and draws somewhat petulant comparisons between rap and jazz. Cropped closely around her glossed lips, Axtman flashes a gold tooth as she mouths the words to Three 6 Mafia's "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" over a John Coltrane version of Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood." Three 6 Mafia's 2006 Oscar victory was met with backlash, but Axtman lightheartedly points out that older, generational contributions to music were at one point considered risqué and invalid forms of art, asking that due consideration be given to current musical trends. The piece is oddly inane while remaining sincere, and meeting the generational and cultural protocol.

Hitting harder on stereotypes and misconceptions, Tamasha Williamson and Deborah Roberts present some of the more serious work within the group. Williamson's iconic drawings of a comb and a pick, each labeled "Nappy," and unbalanced scale reading "-ism" confront racial inequalities and marginalization. Matter-of-fact and aggressive in their starkness, Williamson illustrates personal, blunt questions about beauty and social inequalities.

Roberts' reclamation of various pickaninny depictions satirically recounts racial misassumptions, and at times, reference specific, historical events. In "Easy Pickings," Roberts depicts young, black girls--with aforementioned exaggeration of lips and hair--growing from plants that are being plucked and beheaded by white policemen. Somewhat less friendly than Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," Roberts' imagery is still rooted in and reminiscent of 1960s social unrest.

Throughout the exhibition, pieces that would ordinarily stand alone begin to address other pieces, finding commonality in the artists' desire to communicate through their work. Impressive in its breadth, If I Didn't Careoffers a unique collection of voices that reveals a consistent search for the individual, female voice. Through a variety of media and technology, each artist contributes their piece of the story from their generational and cultural standpoint. Organized without reference to this chronology or geography, the exhibition reveals connections on a more personal level, exploring new dialogues in the work and examining the way we communicate personal narratives.