Shenanigans for City Paper

LOL is an exhibition best appreciated for what it has accomplished rather than for what it touts itself to be. An exhibition of 24 working artists, most not well known, it has been well attended and largely well received by the Baltimore art community, making it a huge success for the Contemporary Museum, which has battled a slight case of irrelevancy to some of the younger art community since the Beautiful Loserstraveling exhibition in 2005. As a curatorial mission,LOL attempts to bring together artists working in various formats that affect an unsuspecting audience, surprise their viewers, and bring about change through pranks, real-life intervention in nongallery settings, and satirical re-examinations of daily life. The show is then divided by subsets of the admittedly loose umbrella term of “antic art,” breaking it into “Everyday Objects,” “Activist Antics,” “Artworld Pranks,” and “Theatrical Antics.” Categories are assigned to each room, “Theatrical” being divided over the video room and smallest gallery. At a glance, this order seems logical and helpful, but on top of creating some visual lulls, it highlights those pieces that don’t quite fit.

In the gallery’s front room, Joey Versoza exhibits two pieces that play on sports absurdity. In “Fuck Face,” Versoza tucks a Billy Ripken “error” card—the infamous baseball card that captures Ripken holding his “practice bat” with the piece’s title written legibly on the base below the grip—into the corner of a mirror, so the viewer sees his or her own face when inspecting the collector’s item. In more wholesome baseball humor, “Greeting Card” is a piece that Versoza included in an invitational small-works show and arranged to have signed by the oldest living relative of a Cincinnati Red upon its purchase.

Accompanying Versoza’s work is Jonathan Horowitz’s cutesy one-liner sculpture of a caricatured-beyond-recognition Hillary Clinton with the words hillary clinton is a person too written on the block below her feet. The bronze statue is impressive in scale, standing 6 feet high, and draws from a Warholian public figure appropriation and media skepticism, but it seems to have no larger relationship to “antic art,” which is used interchangeably with the term “prank” in the press release. Likewise, on the opposite wall of the front room, Ryan Mulligan’s rather charming mural, titled “When the Shit Hits the Fan,” depicts a grid array of life- and oversized survival gear, an imaginary checklist of supplies for his son in the event of a future catastrophe. This piece, which quotes from personal narrative and takes the form of a large illustration, seems to be the most irrelevant inclusion within the larger theme. Again, this is where ignoring the curatorial statement and organizational breakdown is recommended.

“Activist Antics,” in the side gallery, is the smallest grouping, though other exhibited works overlap into the category. Here artists record and present public interventions and satirical misinformation. Pieces include guerilla crosswalks, mockumentaries, ominous hazmat-style suits for the general public, and prank protest songs, attempting to address human rights, political hypocrisies, and scarred nationalism through a variety of media and performances.

Classified as “Theatric,” Nina Katchadourian’s brilliant (and most thematically fitting within her category) pieces are easy to overlook, looping on the corner television in the dark video room, but they shouldn’t be missed. Her two video pieces, “Carpark” and “Natural Car Alarms,” record real-world art interventions orchestrated by the artist and (in “Carpark”) her team of collaborators. “Carpark” documents a project that sorted Southwestern College’s vehicles, with the cooperation of their owners, into 14 different parking lots organized by color. News footage is combined with the artist’s interviews of affected drivers, showing the aerial view of the campus’ vehicles and individual musings, complaints, and compliments. In “Natural Car Alarms,” Katchadourian documents her recreation of car-alarm patterns using only bird sounds. The cars are parked in public places and alarms tripped. Art star Rob Pruitt makes an underwhelming appearance in theatrical pranks with “Kitlers,” a long scroll of cat images first seen in his Pattern and Degradation show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. The images, undoubtedly culled from the popular blog Cats That Look Like Hitler, are far less volatile than many of the other works created for Pattern and Degradation.

Heavy hitter William Powhida is the most notable of the “Artworld Pranks” artists displayed in the main gallery space. His sharp, witty art-world commentary, which takes the form of photorealistic drawings of lists on lined paper and annotated portrait diagrams and maps, have found their way into the collections of the audience they critique. Powhida outlines the wealth, nepotism, and egos in the art world, and finds these same insiders to be the most appreciative audience of his work. These clean pencil drawings have been featured in New York magazine and other widely read publications, both in reviews of the artist’s work and as art-political cartoons. Other work grouped with Powhida into “Artworld Pranks,” again, should shirk their label and be taken for what they are. Larry Hammerness displays a wall of celebrity breasts titled “Who’s Boobs?”; Larry Krone exhibits a series of mirror pieces, embellished with foil and acrylic phrases such as it gets better and story of my life.

LOL set out to bring together artists under one curatorial assignment, but instead exemplifies an ideal function of the Contemporary Museum in the Baltimore art landscape. By exhibiting fresh, contemporary art from national and international voices and various career stages, along with regional artists (Baltimore’s Katie Kehoe is included in the exhibition, although Washington, D.C.’s Patrick McDonough or Philadelphia-based Hennessy Youngman would have been good fits too), the museum is quickly regaining the attention of a hungry art community.

Unnatural Nature for City Paper

In his fourth solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery, The Nature of Things, veteran sculptor John Ruppert continues his ongoing conversation with geological forms and natural forces, while adding his less-exhibited photography and video to the mix. Ruppert’s known for his elegant metalwork and exceptional reproductions of natural objects, particularly pumpkins and splintered wood, and his current exhibition is overtly Zen. Concealed from the street with two large shades over the front window, which serve to obscure the bustling, unpredictable outdoor distractions from the calm gallery contents, The Nature of Things is an enclave of calm on North Charles Street.

At the front of the gallery, a large, deceptively realistic iron rock sits illuminated in the corner. The small manufactured boulder sits to the side of a wedge-shaped metal grid that supports the weight of a large metal object resting diagonally across the incline. “Sunken Grid With Strike” is a combination of inorganic metal mesh with one of Ruppert’s signature wood-like forms. Falling somewhere between the organized structures of Sol LeWitt and the natural arrangements of Andy Goldsworthy, the sculpture on its own is elegant and pleasantly simple. Ruppert adds an experimental video element, which had its Baltimore debut at Grimaldis at Area 405 in June of 2008. The accompanying video piece, a full frame of koi fish swimming slowly in a pond, was filmed last year during the artist’s trip to Shanghai. The piece is projected onto the floor and wall around and onto the sculpture, creating a lava-lamp effect, with slow-moving blobs of orange trapped within the visible frame edge. While algae, barnacles, or deep-sea imagery would have more directly suggested submersion, the koi steer the mood away from potential water anxiety and into an Eastern sensibility, which spills out into the rest of the exhibition.

Like a Zen garden, the elements in the exhibition sit within the minimal landscape of the long narrow gallery. In the rear room, a single piece, “Core With Rocks (2011),” a circular metal sculpture with three outlying cast-iron rocks, has a suggested expanding energy that (along with its large proportions) fills the entire divided exhibition space. Radiating in rings of wire mesh, which become more optically dense toward the center of the “core,” Ruppert’s sculpture mimics the calming, repetitive concentricity of water ripples—a more contemporary substitution, perhaps, for raked sand. Simultaneously delicate and imposing, “Core” pauses an imagined elemental pulse. Dramatically spot-lit as nature could never replicate, the constructed material qualities are enhanced—oxidized iron rocks glow a Martian red, the steel sparkles—and add their own unique allure.

Between the two open exhibition spaces, the artist has included a series of landscape photographs. These serene images of clouds, water, and hazy horizons directly freeze the atmospheric conditions and natural phenomena that serve as mental backdrops to the sculptural works: expansive dark clouds over a still coast, sunlight bursting through a murky sky. Ruppert’s photos, like his cast-rock reproductions, offer another impression of nature as it is seen and captured by the artist.

In addition to the gallery exhibition, Ruppert will be unveiling a three-day satellite show during this year’s Artscape festival at his Druid Hill Avenue studio. While the works at Grimaldis are all made within the past year, the studio show will include works from throughout the artist’s 20-plus-year Baltimore career, including pieces from his Lightning Strike series, Celestial series (rapid prototypes), and a chain-link sculpture, along with the debut of a new sound installation. In contrast to the pristine white gallery and bonsai-like control of each element within the Grimaldis space, the studio show will allow viewers a glimpse at the artist’s mental and physical workplace, where each piece has at some point been a work in progress.

The Nature of Things presents a series of constructed objects that defy their artificiality and create moments of suggested harmony between artist, observer, and nature. Transforming space into serene, meditative esplanades through organic pacing and order, Ruppert’s use of space, light, form, and texture affect the equilibrium of each piece in equal measure. By opening his studio to the public, Ruppert reveals his awareness and control of each of these elements throughout the entirety of his process.

Dynamic Duox - for City Paper

Photo by Michael Northrup

In the third installment of the Contemporary Museum’s recent Liste exhibitions, a rotating series of small solo shows, a number of gallerygoers entered a dark, curtained-off back room and emerged soon after, looking confused and slightly harassed. “I think it’s a gay thing,” said one shrugging woman to her disinterested male companion as they walked away.

Behind the curtain, a distorted song played at low volume and suspended hunks of melting ice encasing obscured objects dripped slowly into a fish tank, accompanied by the sound of the occasional plunk of a keychain or brooch breaking free and splashing down. A tiny video of two young men in a shower played on a cellphone attached to a semi-medical-looking bench, with a towel hand-customized with zippers, hand sanitizer, zebra-print keys, and a flashlight cryptically incorporated into the installation. Refraining from overt signifiers, the work dissected idiosyncratic aspects of contemporary gay culture, voyeurism, and the internet age. The installation was the work of DUOX.

In a short year and a half, DUOX, the name under which artists Malcolm Lomax and Daniel Wickerham (both ’09 Maryland Institute College of Art graduates) work collaboratively, has presented three major projects locally and a fourth at New York’s Bard College in March and April with what can only be described as exponential leaps in sophistication. Treating the sexual and abject in their work with triviality and a cool nonchalance, DUOX examines the way we represent ourselves in reality, through the filter of our sexual orientation, and as virtual avatars.

In past exhibitions King Me at Open Space and Museum of Modern Twink at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center on West Chase Street, DUOX’s approach to installing collaborative solo shows in large spaces has been maximal and a little overwhelming. Lomax and Wickerham’s modus operandi seemed to be filling the gaps between larger, more impressive works with a slew of small moments and humorous details, be it crushed snack cakes, articles of clothing, or magazines, the latter ranging in subject from fashion to pornography. DUOX’s rejection of the idea of an art exhibit as a typical assortment of pristine objects echoes their unconventional way of communicating about their work. When asked via e-mail to sum up these stray details into a description of their work, Wickerham rattles off a list: “Manifesto; Dynamic loading of content without refreshing a page; Hijacks preexisting forms; Approach and presentation as subject and not merely process; The City Self. The Virtual Self; The Private Self; The Hustler Self; Social Media and anti-social behavior. . . .”

According to Wickerham, their minds and works are a consistent buzz of absorption and output. “The amount of details and dense reading we consider reflect our time, which has access to so many things, BUT our work is never about that,” Wickerham writes. “Our work will take that kind of access for granted, as a readymade, and provide a show that is a simultaneous reality to the one we live in.” With each exhibition, DUOX has struck a more apt balance between individual works, overall aesthetics, and a repetitive set of references, due to the building momentum and ambition of their mounted exhibits.

Handsome, skinny, and fresh out of undergrad, Lomax and Wickerham jumped at the opportunity extended to them by Open Space in October 2009 to put together King Me, their first collaborative post-grad exhibition. While creating the work involved a lot of effort in and of itself, DUOX decided to coordinate additional events, produce an obtuse press release, hand-make its promotional postcards, and plan a cool exit from the opening in a car, which they parked halfway inside the gallery. While all this led to cheers and congratulations from peers and attendees, the overall installation—a sea of telephone books, sawhorses, string, and various surfaces layered with magazine clippings of genitalia and male celebrities—felt a little empty. Video works and beer cans were given equal visual weight, with both ideas and inside jokes unresolved and uncommunicated. The result was something like walking through the remnants of an awesome party that you had not attended.

Disconnected motifs and an obsession with minute details are acknowledged parts of DUOX’s art-making practice. Things that appear again and again in their installations are dry cleaners, zebra stripes, key chains, and the human body. “We are interested in the individual, the possibilities of one’s life, and finding new paths. So the work is never going to be just an example of us figuring that out, it will be more inclusive,” Wickerham writes.

DUOX’s Museum of Modern Twink, which was a part of Baltimore Pride last year, was an entirely self-motivated exhibition, from securing the space to promotion and manning the gallery for the duration of the show. In this show, Wickerham and Lomax chose to highlight pop-culture icons, brands, patterns, and the body (although in many cases dismembered pieces of the body) as subjects, with a tongue-in cheek preciousness. Reclaiming the idea of the museum and the viewing experience, DUOX hung a dense, loud show in the space. A large green wall work assembled from many smaller canvases featured the word ear spray-painted in the upper right corner, small clay masks in black and hot pink, the Fruit of the Loom logo painted on layered monochrome canvases, all hanging from the wall by a chain. On the opposite wall, a small painting of Justin Bieber and large photocopy prints of Casper the Friendly Ghost hung with the words missing and reward above and below the cartoon character. The center of the room was an eclectic array of floral-print cushions, magazines, blue and green heads on poles, bumblebee jackets, and a video of a young man being covered in baby powder and other materials by the artists. Microphones stood awaiting audience participation, and synchronized reading performances took place during the opening reception. Rather than include other artists, a survey of ideas, or be subject to a curator or theme, the show favored a fleeting sensibility through events (one-time performances), decay (crushed Zebra Cakes under Plexiglass), and crude installation with tape, chains, and clunky fixtures—the opposite of what we associate with an art museum. With their “museum,” DUOX questioned institutional methodology and the idea of art versus artifact, plus the increased pace at which that relationship is changing.

DUOX seems to work best under both time and space constraints. Selected by Sue Spaid from local gallery Open Space as one of its three nominees for Liste, Lomax and Wickerham were given a project room of approximately 11-feet-by-22-feet and only a few weeks from notification to exhibition to make the work for the show. “We weren’t even sure at the beginning of May what we were going to do for the Liste,” Wickerham writes. In the limitations of the small project space, the skill and adroitness of these two young artists was focused into three pieces: a video projection and two sculptures. Taking into consideration Liste’s quick turnaround, the late May opening, and the museum’s lack of air conditioning, DUOX created “Ice Purses,” which melted with a satisfying quickness during the opening and first day of the show. The purses themselves were two giant cubes of ice, with various objects (mouthwash, key chains, cell phones, CDs, etc.) frozen within, suspended from an engine hoist. As they melted, items would fall from them into a (fishless) fish tank below. Beneath the table, elements from past installations, zebra print and keychains, reappeared in a minimal arrangement.

In “Fur Bench,” the artists recreated a bench from a porn video, using soft white upholstery. Parts of the bench are faux finished with rock-spray paint, and a flat-screen TV is ratcheted to the bench as a shelf for the attached BlackBerry phone. The TV speakers play slow audio of Beyoncé’s “Disappear,” and the phone plays a video of the two artists wearing camouflage masks washing each other in the shower. The ice drips and altered audio in the dark room make for an uncomfortable, voyeuristic effect, like catching someone dancing in the mirror, stuck halfway between humor and intrusion.

When asked about humor in DUOX’s work, Lomax answers: “The humor in our work is to provide an alternative to mundane things . . . If we had to suggest a specific form of comedy, the work we do is more like stand up, sometimes self-deprecating, self-indulgent, but with hopes of arriving at something with substance. And we’re constantly ready to be heckled.” For the Liste installation, a video piece projected on the back wall of a figure in a hard hat lightened the mood with flashes of hand-made fashion, customized accessories (a flower-printed box cutter necklace), and a variety of carefully selected items on or around his person.

Reigning in their propensity for clutter and dense installation, DUOX rose to the occasion and presented a museum-quality show. Mixing a frank openness and humor with an ongoing interest in spectacle and style, their work was simultaneously concise and mysterious. “I hope people leave thinking more about themselves than us. And as they come into contact with more things, they see them with more potential, more flexibility,” Wickerham writes. And without further explanation, that’s what we’ll have to do.

I Was Perfect for City Paper (alternative oscars)

Read Full Article HERE

Best Of 2010 - Evan Moritz profile

Best Director

Evan Moritz

Annex Theater, annextheater.x10hosting.com

Evan Moritz is always up for a theatrical challenge. He co-wrote, -directed, and -toured a four-person dramatization of the Beowulf epic and created a large-scale, stage version of the 1973 animated Fantastic Planet, Moritz bolstering local DIY theater’s ambition. This year alone, Moritz—who previously preferred acting—has directed, collaboratively and solo, five major productions at multiple venues around the city.

Moritz was one of the founding members of Annex Theatre, which started in January 2008. Since its inception he has passionately helped organize the loosely structured production company into an accomplished nonprofit venture, actively expanding both its audience and its collaborative talent pool. Working with the Transmodern Festival, Exotic Hypnotic, and Whartscape, as well as touring productions in other cities, Moritz has helped bring Annex’s DIY craft to the forefront of the local arts community. With an earnestness and enthusiasm that brings out the best in both his colleagues and his audiences, Annex took on not only a wide-reaching program, but also a community focus.

While working as an after-school theater instructor at South Baltimore’s Baybrook Elementary and Middle School, Moritz met 14-year-old student and playwright Derek Carr. Carr passed Moritz The Dark World’s Destruction, a script he had written at 12, and started attending Annex’s local productions. Moritz, along with Annex member Rick Gerriets, received a Kresge Foundation grant this year, which the company used to help Carr bring his script to the stage. Annex members held workshops in their neighboring community offering local children the opportunity to get involved in costuming, set building, and other aspects of production. Through this outreach and encouragement, Annex’s immediate neighbors have embraced the group’s presence and are regular attendees at its performances and events.

Moritz, who sits on the nonprofit theater company’s board, recently completed a Western play and is organizing a DIY performance festival in Baltimore, which will bring similarly minded groups from Philadelphia, Providence, and Minneapolis to the city. Moritz also plans to pursue more serious theater pieces, such as Matsukaze, a contemporary take on Japanese Noh theater that he co-directed with Walker Teret and Justin Durel at the LOF/t in December 2009. The story of two Japanese sisters who pine for a deceased lover was a notable break from the typically comic productions mounted by local DIY groups. It’s a dramatic ambition that Moritz would like to see more of in the future—an abandonment of sarcasm, irony, and tongue-in-cheek humor in search of something more fulfilling.

Crafting A Future for Urbanite Magazine

Designers all over the world scrambled to do last-minute fittings, accessory pairings, and music selections as they prepared to unveil their new collections this fall. From her home in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Rachel Faller, who received her BFA in Fiber from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008, did the same.

Faller arrived in the United States last week for a one-and-a-half month stint to participate in independent fashion events on both coasts. She presents her line of organic, fair-trade clothing at L.A.’s Green Initiative Humanitarian Fashion Show on Oct. 16—as well as at other shows in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

click to enlarge

• KeoK’jay Design

For Faller, however, the glitz and excitement of the fashion world is just a side note to the accomplishments of her sixteen-person staff: nine HIV-positive women, one sewing instructor, two shopkeepers, one project director, two eager interns, and herself.

Two years ago, Faller, 23, founded a forward-thinking boutique in Cambodia called KeoK'jay—“fresh” in Khmer, the official language. Faller first conceived of KeoK'jay when she and a friend visited Cambodia in 2007. Fascinated by the country’s culture and traditional fabrics, she hatched a post-college plan to return to the country to study traditional textiles and fair-trade business models.

click to enlarge

• KeoK’jay Design

During her senior year, she continued her research and interest from afar, making work about the 1975-1979 Cambodian genocide, in which 1.7 million people lost their lives. She presented this work to the public in her commencement exhibition. Three months after graduating, Faller was on an airplane, heading back to Phnom Penh on a Fulbright scholarship to begin ten months of research and start her business on the side.

Most of the women Faller employs are widows who must choose between daytime jobs or caring for their children. Faller developed designs and techniques that the women would be able to produce at home with very little equipment. Through her growing familiarity with the culture and the community, Faller was inspired to craft contemporary accessories, clothing, and gifts out of traditional, organic, and recycled materials. Many of the fun, contemporary, bohemian designs feature prints that are hand-silkscreened with dyes made from Cambodian plants and minerals. Others are embellished with embroidery and patchwork appliqué.

click to enlarge

• KeoK’jay Design

“Quality is very important,” Faller explains. “Many of the crafts here are not well-made. We wanted to make quality, contemporary products. This way they are more exportable.”

With ten months of fair-trade and textile research under her belt, Faller’s business has taken off. KeoK'jay products can be found in shops in Australia, Norway, and Massachusetts, as well as in her two Cambodian boutiques, KeoK'jay main in Phnom Penh, and Circle boutique in Siem Reap, which Faller owns with another designer.

click to enlarge

• KeoK’jay Design

Eventually, Faller says she’d like to transition out of the day-to-day aspects of the business and encourage the staff to sustain the business on their own. She has taken on additional side projects, most recently in India, hoping to give the KeoK'jay sewers more independence, but she admits there is no clear end in sight for her involvement.

“I am coming to terms with the fact that it is necessary for a Western-based designer to be involved to make internationally marketable products,” she says. “The design training is just not available in Cambodia.” For now, she continues to be inspired by the strength of her co-workers and plans to stay in Cambodia as long as it takes to see the business thrive.

Size Matters for City Paper

A couple stands over a shiny wooden counter preparing parts of a meal in the photograph titled “Ben and Dawn.” Ben is looking down at the lump of hamburger meat in his hands, which hovers above a plate that sits at an impossible angle on the countertop. The inconsistent perspective makes the meat look foreign, nauseating. Dawn stands close to Ben chopping vegetables. In her right hand she holds the knife to the side of the diced pieces; her left arm extends an inordinate length, making her appear lopsided, and her left hand lays awkwardly on the cutting board. With a vacant expression on her face, Dawn doesn’t appear present in the activity. Her hair is unfixed, and falls over her left eye. Her dress is brightly patterned, and she isn’t wearing makeup. Ben and Dawn look like they might be getting ready to entertain, but they express no pleasure or excitement. And at its large scale—45 inches by 40 inches—this otherwise ordinary scene becomes uncomfortable, the figures trapped in the close-cropped composition.

The images in Commissure, Chicago-trained photographer Ben Gest’s solo exhibition of digital portraits, are pieced together and manipulated from multiple images of the same subject. In some cases, hundreds of photos are combined to make the final image. As in mannerist paintings, scale, perspective, and focus change slightly across the portraits’ compositions. Body parts are subtly elongated, an extended arm is disproportionately long, a floor appears vertical. The distortions are meant to call attention to the psychological unease and physical discomfort of familial relationships and day-to-day interactions, but they are not particularly jarring and in some cases barely noticeable. The process for creating these works is careful, meticulous, and precise, but the imagery remains cold and often bland.

Gest’s photographs here are easy to dislike, not for their lack of skill, but because Gest has a knack for making life look worse. Large-scale, formulaic portraits of the artist’s family and acquaintances overwhelm the gallery, allowing no visual pauses. Despite the high ceilings, the photographs are hung low, echoing their pedestrian imagery. The figures dice onions, unnervingly adjust earrings, contemplate laundry, and climb stairs. The extremely ordinary moments that Gest captures feel forced, emphasized in his subjects’ forlorn looks in every direction but at the lens. Poses appear awkward and false, and the resultant images rest somewhere between familiarity and spectacle.

Despite photographing his near and dear, Gest is unapologetic in his portrayals of them. Gray hairs, wrinkles, and unflattering facial expressions are exploited for thematic purposes: Subjects are frozen in their discomfort. The children he photographs appear similarly bored and anxious. Posed in normal settings, resting on couches and playing with pets or toys, child subjects come off as slovenly, lazy, even cranky. Fashions and household objects are commonplace and current, untested by potential nostalgia—which benefits photographers who work in a similar vein, such as William Eggleston. Unlike Eggleston, though, who also makes work investigating the mundane, Gest appears to find no poignancy in his subjects or their universal struggles: loneliness, aging, etc. Eggleston’s most iconic images, shot on film, have a warm, super-saturated quality that brings style and a small sense of glamour to even the most banal of images. Gest’s digital portraits favor cold light, cloudy skies, and florescent interiors. This overwhelming visual sigh means Gest’s more stunning images—“Tara Searching,” “Jennifer in Her Rooftop Garden,” and “William”—get lost in the abundance of similar photos. Mostly vertical compositions and tightly cropped portraits, the lack of diversity is purposely monotonous: Everywhere you look you’re confronted with the awkward routines of contemporary living.

Although slightly heavy-handed, Commissure is an exhibition that is worth seeing in person. The technical confidence and proficiency demonstrated in the production of each image becomes even more apparent at the prints’ significant scale. Peering into the often larger-than-life faces of figures caught in moments of self-awareness in life’s most average situations, you may remember the weight of your own obligations and inevitable behaviors. The photos become psychological mirrors, large, bold, and crisp. Gest illustrates, with unsettling frankness, the despondency of the human condition.

WAMU Segment on Natural Remedies

WAMU covers Natural Remedies on "Art Beat" with Stephanie Kaye
Listen HERE

Natural Remedies at John Fonda Gallery

Natural RemediesCaitlin Cunningham & Alex Ebstein

Natural Remedies is a two person exhibition of new works by Caitlin Cunningham and Alex Ebstein. Both artists reflect on their consciousness of health, medicine, and alternative remedies through meticulous, psychedelic imagery.

April 22 - May 30, 2010
Opening Reception: April 29th from 5:30-8:00pm

John Fonda Gallery
45 West Preston Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
located at Theatre Project
410-752-8558

Hours: M-F, Noon-4pm and by appointment

Extra Ordinary for City Paper

The reflection of a florescent light on a paint can; a web printout, crumpled and discarded. We absorb, process, and ultimately ignore most of the visual details in our day-to-day lives, images that exist as a piece of a longer narrative, such as the subtleties of package design overshadowed by familiar logos. The artists in Open Space's The Suspended Moment present these fleeting moments, frozen, considered, framed.

Ilia Ovetchkin's four untitled pieces thrust messages from the artist's Gmail account into a physical and enlarged format. The photos, roughly 48-by-36 inch ink jet prints on muslin, float in a pink or fleshy field of color. Each image is an arranged still-life containing a soda can and an additional object: a camera, a dildo, etc. The imagery comes from e-mail attachments sent to Ovetchkin from artist Petra Cortwright, and Ovetchkin rubber bands a printout of the e-mails to the lower left hand corner. In these physical attachments, which contain only additional images and URLs, the communication becomes abstract and mute, links un-clickable, and the files only viewable as thumbnails. Authorship here is unclear, sentimentality inaccessible, but the language is familiar and ordinary.

Will Pesta's two lambda prints, "Hallelujah" and "Welcome," are created through an experimental combination of unrelated electronics. Using a flatbed scanner, Pesta captures a television screen's moving images as a single jpeg, each named for the coinciding dialogue from the recorded segments. Sweeping, linear timelapse distortions occur as a result of the scanner's slow capture rate. The images share a cold, green/gray palette, an average of the colors and emitted light throughout the scan. Upon close inspection, the prints have an intricate Moire pattern made from the vertical scanner lines mixing with the TV screen's grid. When captured photographically, moving images have a horizontal distortion, while Pesta's prints have vertical sound wave undulations.

Conor Backman--a Richmond-based artist and founding member of the youthful, collectively run Reference gallery--exhibits a wide range of works, each taking Suspended's theme in a new direction. Most literally, "Aum, oooh, mmmm . . ." is an assemblage of objects on a modified Ikea table. The legs, normal on one side, slope elegantly into a white, yellow, red, pink, and baby-blue rainbow on the other. Atop the table rest a stack of photographs and a plaster melting ice-cream cone, frozen mid-drip over a book on the floor. More subtly, what appears to be two lightly crumpled sheets of paper lean against one another in the far corner. The pages are painted sheets of steel with hand-rendered, photorealistic reproductions of web pages: a YouTube URL for "biggie skys the limit" and a jpeg titled "if a tree falls in the forest." Backman also includes two landscape paintings copied from beer boxes. Each is presented at the actual package sizes, with all text and product information removed. Without the branding, the images are elegant and clever, their original context all the more ridiculous.

Lauren Brick's lithograph "Subtitle Poem" is a collection of movie subtitles and the section of the frame that they are inserted over. The poem is created by stacking the individual dialogue lines vertically, but with the text comes a series of amputated gestures and scenery snippets. Together, these film pieces create a nostalgic melodrama, a romanticism of ephemeral media.

If you don't spend enough time with it, Alex Delaney's projected video appears to be a single image of a seated crowd, like a class photo: The group is seated in four rows of staggering height, all visible from the waist up, and the front row from the feet up. As the eight-minute loop progresses, one or two figures at a time shift slowly or fidget slightly while others stay frozen. The awkwardness of the uncategorized and unlabeled group is amplified by this squirming, making the search for a commonality among the group--age, race, manner of dress--equally vacillating.

It's a succinct articulation of this exhibition's exploration of the fugitive digital age. Disposable technology, instant communication, and unlimited virtual storage have conditioned us to consider few things precious, as they are only a Google search away. Suspended attempts to capture those banal moments that ordinarily pass us by. Daily practices that might soon be outmoded are a timestamp for these artists, and the works themselves only a brief pause before whatever comes next.

Being Here for City Paper

Half the fun in visiting Sculpture at Evergreen 6: Simultaneous Presence, the biennial outdoor exhibition on the museum's grounds, is the exploration. Some pieces lie conspicuously on the lawns; others are concealed within overlooked architectural elements of the vast property, the search for green metal plaques bolstering your sense of adventure. Regional artists Ronit Eisenbach and Jennie Fleming--Eisenbach is also an architect who teaches at the University of Maryland and Fleming is working toward her Ph.D. in Media, Art, and Text at Virginia Commonwealth University--curate this sixth installment, which features 10 site-specific installations designed by individual artists and collaborative artist teams. For Simultaneous Presence, though, Eisenbach and Fleming picked work that foregoes the carefree whimsy of past shows in favor of contextual message and eco-consciousness.

Artists were invited and encouraged to find inspiration in the museum's history and location, creating pieces that speak to the distinctive qualities of their five-month home. Those pieces designed by the two participating individual Baltimore artists and one artist team display the greatest insight into the local historic landmark, its current and historical roles, and proximity to the city.

"Skip," an installation by Baltimore-based artist David Page, consists of a short length of steel and wooden train track, with a stationary cart paused in the middle. A ghostly, metal contour of a crouching passenger peers out of the fixed car. The functionless structure and its eerie passenger memorialize a former Baltimore industry and alludes to the John Work Garrett, Evergreen House's original owner, who was the president of B&O railroad during the late-19th century. Page places the pedestrian aspects of the railroad with the material accumulations of its executive leader.

Baltimore-based Shannon Young chose to comment on the potential for agricultural sustainability, and the lack of edible vegetation on the Evergreen grounds. Young's work typically investigates the consumers' relationship with food, specifically whether or not people are aware of its origin and the physical distance it travels to get to your plate. In her installation, "How Does Your Garden Grow?," Young has carted in a vegetable garden, filling an expansive, sloping lawn with shopping cart-beds of lettuce, carrots, and other consumable plants. Alongside the garden sits a small greenhouse with additional planters and a stove; the physical distance from farm to fork could not be closer.

A small, square patio sits next to a picturesque, mallard-inhabited stream among the Evergreen's Italian-style gardens, which are bordered with hedges and brick walls. This is where the Baltimore-based team of Eric Leshinsky, C. Ryan Patterson, and Fred Scharmen--who enlisted additional collaborators: Michael Benevento, Gary Kachadourian, Sarah Doherty, Billy Mode, Jonathan Taube, and Services United--re-imagine a contemporary, urban counterpart, "Evergreen Commons." The elegant brick walls are mimicked with harsh, chain-link fencing, and Kachadourian's photocopied brick wall, complete with graffiti. Instead of white marble benches, arranged for conversation, the commons contains a single, modified Baltimore City bench and a trash can. Urban foliage, a streetlight, and basketball hoop cast narrow shadows across the ground.

Participating artists from other cities primarily focused on a mix of Gilded Age excess and environmentally friendly decoration. Queens-based Yukiko Nakashima, however, installed a series of hooded, child-size figures in shadowy areas of the grounds. The somewhat frightening sculptures are arranged in small tableaux: one set attempts to haul pine trees, another figure holds a dead bird, and two more wear a birdhouse and bird head. The only figurative sculptures in the exhibition, Nakashima's characters are alarming daydreams and the lone inhabitants lurking in the corners of the formerly domestic property.

Artists Taeg Nishimoto, Matter Practice (the duo of Chris Malloy and Ken Kinoshita), and Yolande Daniels, all of whom have a background in architecture, contributed sculptures that have both a universality and anonymity to them. They are decorative and somewhat functional, though Matter Practice's "Fallen Fruit" lawn chairs come with a warning against head injury. Both Nishimoto and Matter Practice incorporate solar-powered LEDs into their sculptures, the effects of which are unavailable to the public, as the facility closes at 4 p.m.

2010 Sondheim Prize Finalists Karen Yasinsky Review for City Paper

Karen Yasinsky

Installing her work for a third year as a Sondheim finalist, Karen Yasinsky has drastically scaled back her presentation. Having put tremendous gusto into the elaborate, multimedia installation last year, this year she chose to be more succinct and almost cautious. Yasinsky, who makes hand-drawn animations and stop-motion films based on classic movies, takes up one modest room in the gallery for her nearly three-minute animation loop, "You Have To Be Very Careful." While the title suggests a dual trepidation, both for her characters and about the installation itself, in this case, less is more.

The projection fills the entire wall of the small viewing room, the frame stretching from the floor nearly to the top of the wall, immersing you in a striking, larger-than-life animation of two psychologically opposite characters. One is Shelley Duvall from Robert Altman's 1974 Thieves Like Us; the other is Elliot Gould from Altman's California Splitfrom the same year. Through a stylized rotoscoping, Yasinsky introduces these unrelated characters into the same cinematic space. Using no dialogue, the scene's awkwardness and humor are achieved through its soundtrack, placement of the figures, and pulsing colors that make up the imagined interaction. Duvall, whose character is dealt the short end of the stick in Thieves, appears similarly gentle and delicate in Yasinsky's flickering, graphite line work. Pensive and preoccupied, Duvall's likeness busies herself with ambiguous tasks around the frame, stopping for a close-up.

The animation of Gould--amended with grotesque, almost clownish color splotches--appears bold and wild eyed in the frame. His character has none of the grace or daintiness of Duvall's; where she flows fluidly, moving between the frame's fore and middle grounds, the Gould figure stays spatially frozen, amputated by the edge of the screen. In the awkwardness of this pose, he is transformed into something not quite human; he makes no gestures, only horrid facial expressions. Yasinsky likens him to a frog when a fly drifts into view and Gould swallows it.

Soon rainbows appear, Gould's shirt stripes alternate psychedelically, Duvall checks her watch and smiles. Duvall stands alone, changed by the complimentary comparison to Gould, now surrounded by an outline of color. In the last few moments of the animation, images of products from the 1970s slide right to left through the frame before it starts over again. Yasinsky's ability to animate, manipulate, and interfere in the predestined lives of film characters is somewhat playful and curious. She removes the limits placed on each character, gives them additional scenarios in which to hold their own, and reveals the depths of their psyches.

In her statement, Yasinsky describes this animation as creating a sketch of an era rather than a conscious narrative. Its brevity allows it to act as a collection of thoughts, drawings, and references in a clean, accessible format. Having already clinched the Baker Prize and the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize this year, it may be this kind of self-limitation that helps her to secure the elusive Sondheim prize. (AE)

2010 Sondheim Prize Finalists Matthew Janson Review for City Paper

Matthew Janson

Matthew Janson's Sondheim installation is a scattershot presentation of the artist's diverse studio techniques and material fetishes. It includes two-dimensional pieces and sculptural works that reference home furnishings and domestic function, even though they remain unusable objects. In many cases, pieces feel overly decorated and certain details unnervingly push the work away from refined and toward the garish. The 2009 MICA Mount Royal School graduate offers a body of work that hesitantly wavers between glitz and grotesque. Having followed his work for more than a year, this inconsistency came as a surprise.

Janson is most successful when he separates the ornamental and furniture elements from the conspicuous Great Stuff (industrial canned expanding foam). Selective material combinations, as demonstrated in "Parlor Rat"--a low, squat ottoman/wheelbarrow bursting with crystalline mirror shards--yield the most sophisticated and impressive results. "Parlor Rat" confronts the tropes of masculine sculpture with frill, lace, and a somewhat antique aesthetic. The central mirrored form is propped elegantly on parts of a caramel-colored chair. The top surface is flattened and round, edged in a lace doily. The typically four-legged furniture object has a unique posture, sloping down on one side to rest on a single caster. The piece looks ready to collapse under the girth of its own fanciness, or tip onto its single wheel to act as a vehicle for collecting and removing excess glitter.

The other two sculptural pieces don't share in this fantastic tension. "Total Exploding Millionminded Version II," a massive two-piece, mirrored geode on casters, is impressive and beautiful. The front of the piece has the similar chunky, organic structures of pyrite on a very magnified scale, but the mirror is untreated, a sparkly fool's silver. The backs--sides? bottoms?--of the magnificent minerals are flat and decorated in a silvery fabric like the underside of a couch. Casters hang off these vertical sides, immobile and functionless. They subtly suggest commodity, furnishing, and mobility, while remaining less critical than "Parlor Rat."

Hung to the left of "Millionminded" is a black and pink wall-fixed sculpture that conjures memories of the Franz West survey that occupied the same space. The lumpy, imperfect finish of this mixed-media piece--which incorporates vinyl, paint, and spray foam--has a poised restraint that the other wall works, which resemble horrific birthday cakes, do not.

"Carrion," a brown crib with clumsy red viscera, is where Janson loses me. The works here go from David Altmejd meets a hint of Franz West to a Tim Burton claymation--a dated, cheesy goth aesthetic. The muddy, textured exterior and white frosting-like edging feel hurried and unconsidered. The circular mirrors on each side and decorative fringe lining the bottom feel like afterthoughts. Inside the goopy, messy piece is more goop and mess: String and piles of foam are painted a glistening red to evoke intestines and blood. The work is the obvious black sheep of the installation, its craftsmanship poor, and Freudian undertones somewhat clichéd and repelling.

Overall, Janson's installation is awkward and a little inarticulate. Personal narratives are lost in translation. Rather than a farm-raised and -influenced artist as his statement says, the pieces have an unfortunate chintz that is uncharacteristic of his previous works. (Alex Ebstein)

Ramping Up for City Paper

It's seven o'clock on a Sunday evening. Roosevelt Park's sunset hum of insects and birds is broken by the whir of skateboard wheels. The sound pauses as the skater is airborne, and begins again with the thud of landing a trick.

Nine skaters are using the park, a modest asphalt plot behind the recreation center in this Hampden green space. In one corner, a large, treacherous-looking wooden half pipe stands unused. Smaller wooden ramps, worn from use and exposure, hold backpacks, water bottles, and resting onlookers. Five modest concrete ramps, painted light blue ("pool blue," I am later told) ripple the lot like small waves. Jordan Bernier, the tall, skinny 26-year-old behind the DIY concrete project, walks into the park with his board under one arm, dragging a 12-foot metal pipe with the other.

"Coping!" Bernier says. "For a new ramp."

From across the park, another skater glides over and up the fence-side concrete ramp. He stalls on the coping, catches hold of the fence, and jumps off to join us.

Elie Sollins, 27, and Bernier share no social overlaps aside from skating, but through their mutual interest in the sport and a willingness to sweat and spend for the sake of the skate community, the two have formed a friendship and collaboration in their efforts to bring skating into the public eye as a positive recreation and subculture.

The Hampden lot is set to be the eventual location of a full, custom, concrete park--a long-term goal of the local non-profit group Skatepark of Baltimore. The group, which is devoted to fundraising and advocacy, has yet to solidify any plans to break ground. But as one of only two public skate-approved parks within city limits (the other is Carroll Park in Pigtown), the local skaters won't stand to see it underutilized.

"There is a history to this pad," Bernier says. "In 2005, I remember skating it. It was paved then but didn't have a fence around it. Kids would bring their jump ramps and stuff down to the park and skate it, but there was nothing [permanent] to skate. Some kids started building stuff on-site, but it all got knocked down by the city or by people lurking in the park at night." The park has been in the throes of public misunderstanding for years, its slow development due largely to misinterpretation that the defacing and damage of ramps (one was once lit on fire) came from within the skateboarding community.

Bernier and Sollins, along with their friend Steve Santillan, are responsible for the small concrete effort in the park so far. "Elie was the first to put money in," says Bernier, "but we don't have a lot of money to put into the project. It's something like 20 bucks every two weeks. But it goes a long way when you're making ramps out of rubble from around the park--recycled or re-purposed junk and bricks from under 83. All we're really paying for is the concrete."

Building concrete ramps in the park is a community-oriented project. As much as they are building ramps that they want to skate themselves, they hope that their efforts will encourage others to build their own ramps, and eventually replace the disintegrating wooden ramps with safer, concrete counterparts. Fostering a sense of responsibility for the space will help keep vandals out and use up.

"That ramp was built by Stephan," Sollins says, pointing to the fifth concrete ramp and referring to another local skater whom Bernier and Sollins only know from the park. "We helped him smooth it and paint it. Other than us, he's the only one who's put money in. But kids will line up to help us when we pull up with the van [full of materials]." Bernier laughs: "They literally line up!"

Bernier, who received a BFA and MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is beginning Towson University's MFA program in the fall, believes that the solo expressive sport and its accompanying architecture should be viewed as an art. As an undergrad, Bernier made a hollow ramp that was skated in a MICA gallery as an investigation of sound. Later, he built a wall-to-wall ramp in his studio, looking at form and space.

"Skateboarding has always been a huge part of my life, as much and sometimes more than art has been," he says. "There has always, for me, been the issue of connecting them. As an artist, who's to say something is not art? I have had teachers and other artists not recognize these [skateable sculptures and forms] as art, but that's their block." 

In 2008, Bernier was given the opportunity to bridge art and skating for Artscape, through the encouragement and curatorial efforts of fellow MICA graduate, Michael Benevento. Bernier designed and executed a pants-shaped skate ramp as part of the public sculptures in the median of Mount Royal Avenue.

"[Benevento's] curatorial angle was 'Outdoor Lounge,'" Bernier explains, "basically, somewhat functional sculptures that encouraged socialization." The pants ramp, designed by Jordan and assembled by a team of skateboarders and artists (including the author), brought together the arts and skateboarding communities with the general public. "People were really receptive to seeing a public intersection between art and skating," Bernier says. "It was a great platform for connecting skating with performance and sculpture." Over five months of consistent use, the ramp became worn and hard to maintain. The section of park that the ramp sat on was eventually purchased by the University of Baltimore, which requested it be removed for insurance reasons.

This year, Bernier plans to make another wooden ramp for the annual arts festival, keeping the Hampden lot in mind as a permanent home for the temporary installation. The ramp, which will be part of the Charles Street bridge performance and interactive sculpture section known as the Midway, will be a sculptural replica of Hokusai's "The Great Wave." Skateboarding has always had roots in surfing, and since the Z Boys and other West Coast skaters in the '70s, a tie to swimming pools. The image pays homage to the skating history, while appropriating an iconic art image to help those who have written off skating as a sport see the ramp for its craftsmanship and artistic validity. Structurally, Bernier and Sollins have designed the ramp so that, once transferred to Hampden, it can be buttressed with concrete for permanent installation.

While the art side of building ramps is fun and personally rewarding, the overall goal is raising awareness. "By seeing skating in a palatable way, the city becomes aware of the need for, and virtual absence of, skateparks in Baltimore," Bernier says. Tickets are still issued daily to those skating the Civil War monument on Mount Royal, and the recently circulated YouTube video of a police officer flipping out on kids skating in the Inner Harbor is a good indication that skating the streets isn't a viable alternative.

"You've got to respect the real world," Sollins says. "You can't be crushin' a church's steps, but there aren't a lot of places to go."

In a city with so much unused space, Bernier hopes that setting aside areas for skating can be viewed as a practical component of urban development. "In other cities like New York, where real estate is so valuable, there are still tons of sites designated for public skating" Bernier says. Through both projects, he hopes to show that there is a responsible, aesthetically conscious community willing to build and maintain attractive and functional structures.

"When it comes to skating, my art is about the community, "Bernier says. "I am not looking to link it to a gallery, I'm not trying to take it to that level, but a public acceptability and appreciation would be nice."