For the fourth year running, the Maryland Art Place has created an exhibit of the finest work found by its staff from students of the numerous MFA programs in Maryland. This year they have selected nine young artists to fill their space at Power Plant Live with an array of different media and flavors. Those selected this year to show in the unfortunately named exhibition, “Young Blood” – a name that conjures images of gang members more than it does revitalization – are Amy Boone-McCreesh, Jesse Burrowes, Jill Fannon, Robert Guevara, Adam Junior, Linling Lu, Sarah McNeil, Wun Ting Wendy Tai, and Katie Taylor. These artists represent all four Maryland schools with an advanced degree in the visual arts: MICA, Towson University, UMBC and UM College Park.
The initial room of the gallery sets the theme for the work to come in the exhibition. Jill Fannon, from UMBC, has a series of photos irregularly arranged on the wall depicting female models bombarded, smothered and carrying the burden of simple household items. The weight and cost of domesticity appears central to the arrangements of these photos, depicting women deprived of an identity by couch cushions, paper doilies and bubble wrap. A few of the photos appear performance based, capturing the model in a bizarre action or reaction to the presence of alien goods imposed upon her form. While other photos in the collection share similarities with traditional portraiture – simple poses, solid backdrops – with a touch of the surreal.
Sara McNeil’s work shares the room, diverging only slightly from the themes of domestic strife. Her instillation “Manchine” combines a small sculpture of a pink, suburban ranch house, lit to show a cluttered desk in the living room, with a life sized version of that very desk directly behind the sculpture. On the desk the viewer is enticed to look over what someone living in such a quaint house may concern his or her self with, only to find that this curiosity or impetus to voyeurism may not have a pleasurable result. The desk is scattered with notes and photos cut from magazines of strange, steel devices used to mechanically distort the body. This distortion of the human form is then replicated on a small screen seen in the back cellar of the pink plastic house. A naked man opens wide his legs, smiles and again closes them in a mechanical, jerking fashion.
With the exception of Robert Guevara’s “Precipice and Void,” no other piece in the exhibit rivals the three pieces in the front room for sensationalism. This of course is not to say that the pieces in the back rooms are of any less importance. Two artists in particular caught this reviews attention, Wun Ting Wendy Tai and Adam Junior. The latter artist’s balsa wood sculpture “Nowhere to Go” depicts a colony of tiny white houses held high off the floor by a lattice structure that slims to a single support column. A great fragility, a feeling that the intricacy of such a simple community could come crashing down at any moment with a light touch by a greater force, makes one reflect on the precarious nature implicit in even the strongest communities. Writing this it is difficult to push the images of recent tragic events, such as the earthquakes and tsunamis of Japan, from the mind. One light touch by a greater force can take a whole society to its knees. Adam Junior captures beautifully humanities tenuous connection to the world and to one another in this lithe and simple sculpture.
Similarly, Wun Ting Wendy Tai uses very simple means in her two sculptures, “The Measure of Mourning” and “Salt Water – No. 2,” for large affect. In “Salt Water - No. 2,” three separatory funnels hang from the gallery ceiling, slowly dripping water onto piles of rock salt directly underneath. The piece, both reminiscent of a clepesydre and IV bags, appears to be marking time before the inevitable disintegration of the piles of salt. Yet in the process of marking time, the device is accelerating the action it appears to be counting down to and therefore counting in double time. Each drop of water is a measure that both marks and destroys, an action eerily representational of the ancient Greek epithet “Time the Thief.”
Though varied in conception and affect, the works found in MAP’s new exhibit will surely give the viewer a very clear idea the avenues down which art in Baltimore will go in the future. There are many more reasons to see this exhibition than can be stated here, so please do.
“Young Blood” is on view through August 27th at the Maryland Art Place, Power Plant Live! 8 Market Place, Suite 100, Baltimore, Maryland 21202.
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