There’s a rollicking good time to be had at Washington College’s Kohl Gallery with artNOW Baltimore. On view through March 30, this show, featuring five young Baltimore artists, is the first in a series that takes advantage of Chestertown’s enviable proximity to Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia by spotlighting current art trends in each of these three major cities.
There’s a lot to chew on in this show, and it’s all a lot of fun. Curators Alex Castro and Cara Ober chose artists with impressive credentials (prestigious art schools, exhibitions, grants and fellowships) who merrily rummage through the complexities of life in the 21century, each in a very individual way.
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Just inside the gallery’s front door is an explosion of colorful cartoon cutouts by Andrew Liang. They vie for attention and impishly probe you to make sense of it all. Cartoons, comic books, video games, movies, and literature are his inspirations, and from them he summons icons and archetypes, oddments and hybrids. A grinning rabbit with vampire teeth and a shaman’s exposed skeleton is the Trickster, riding his horse backwards, ala Don Quixote. The Destroyer takes the form of Godzilla, his glowing radioactive dorsal spines replaced by cupcakes (whose implied sugar rush parallels the original monster’s atomic origins as a source of energy).
Pick your storyline and follow it through, then try another story. The imagination runs wild, and perhaps that’s the point. We’re living in an over-stimulated culture—images, references, ideas abound. The possibilities are so multitudinous and seductive that who can settle down to serious thought? And why should one, when there’s so much fun to be had?
Abundance and playfulness are also René Treviño tools. His three-panel “Bestiary” fills a wall with a rainbow of cheerful birds and beasts whose genitalia are interchangeable with flowers and leaves. It’s a vision of joy and innocence that makes you wonder why people are so uptight about sex.
As a gay Mexican-American, Treviño takes cultural biases seriously, even as he has fun exposing them. His “Propaganda Series” presents a copious collection of images from Greek gods to Aztec sun wheels. Drawn from many cultures and time periods, they are reproduced as high-contrast icons in black or pure, vibrant colors floating sensuously on frosty, translucent mylar. The initial impression is that they were printed using a photographic process, but each is meticulously painted by hand. Treviño gathered this lexicon of multi-cultural images as a challenge to the accepted, textbook version of history. It’s a familiar enough approach, but there’s such an unavoidable sense of commitment in Treviño’s method of working that you can’t just glance and walk away.
Karen Yasinsky’s offering is trickier to fathom. Her drawings and two-minute video appear to be derived either from blow-ups of cheaply printed pictures or low-resolution digital images. You know you’re looking at something that could only be seen in recent times, but you have to be observant enough to read the labels on the wall and find out they are hand-painted in ink on paper. So…why?
Treviño and Liang are obsessive in the sheer quantity of painting they do, and so, it turns out, is Yasinsky. A little background helps. Long fascinated by the power of film “to involve the viewer with the characters’ state of mind,” she has done a lot of work with stop-motion animation. It’s a painstaking process, and here she presents the evidence. Borrowed from film stills, the people in her drawings and video are painted, dot by dot. Such tedium has to be either maddening or meditative. Yasinsky is considering the psychology of her images as if on the cellular level. When her hand-painted images are combined as frames in animation, the picture leaps and shivers, as if jittery with emotion. Given that film is an art form made possible only by technology, there’s a curious irony in her emphasis on craft that speaks of a time when filmmaking was truly an art that came from the heart and soul, rather than from displays of special effects.
There’s a distinct lack of heart and soul in Leslie Furlong’s video of a train ride from Tokyo to Osaka. In a gray rush of cityscapes occasionally accented with flashes of bright color, its rhythmic stream of wires and power poles, high rises and green rice paddies holds a fascinating forlorn beauty. But you can’t help looking for the humanity in this man-made landscape and wishing for longer glimpses of the distant hills laced with mist that flit by in the distance. Two questions arise. How true is our perception of landscape (and life, for that matter) when we pass through it in a blur of speed? And how viable is this artificial landscape we’re so busily fabricating?
Furlong continues to work on these questions in five simulated landscape photographs. Through the magic of digital manipulation, she conjures bare expanses of parking lots leading back to miniature smoke stacks, big-box stores, construction cranes, and housing developments spread across a ribbon of horizon. Huge, dirty white skies loom above. Combining 10 or 20 photos in each image, she creates crisp, perfect worlds of asphalt and suburban sprawl, but there’s a longing for “real” landscape—the kind Breughel, Constable or Bierstadt would paint. These landscapes present the elements that now dominate our world, yet there’s something wrong. Their focus is hyper-real and the perspective is mismatched and joltingly foreshortened. But wait, just as your stomach sinks with the thought of countryside lost to suburbia, weeds and scrubby trees come creeping in, and you realize that nature will, one way or another, prevail.
Christian Benefiel, the only sculptor in the group, is also the only one who delights in the pure physicality of art, and it’s in his work that Baltimore’s gritty past as a center of shipping and industry can be glimpsed. His playful, interactive sculpture, “The efficacy of wishing,” is a crowd-pleaser. A slightly sinister construction of wires, clamps and tubes of recycled sailcloth mounted in a wooden rack, it’s based on the palletized missile racks used by the military (a design that must be credited to bees for that highly efficient storage structure—honeycomb). Visitors may make a wish by blowing into a miniature windsock nearby. Mimicking their breath, the sailcloth tubes inflate (presumably launching the wish) then fall limp again. Benefiel admits to creating “intentional nonsense,” and this sculpture raises a teasing question as to whether wishful thinking could ever generate weapons that do no more than gently sigh with our own breath.
Such questions are the common thread running through this show. It’s an exuberantly diverse exhibit of technically masterful work, but its real theme has to do with the probing questions these artists ask. They offer no real answers, but as I read the other day in a Buddhist magazine, life’s not really about finding answers, just better questions. So, enjoy the search.
Mary Wood says
Can’t wait to get there with print of these comments in hand to guide me through.