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3rd Annual Critics' Residency Program

For Immediate Release: April 29, 2005

For more information contact:
Julie Ann Cavnor 410-962-8565 / jcavnor@mdartplace.org

Maryland Art Place introduces this year’s curators as part of its Third Annual
CURATOR’S INCUBATOR PROGRAM

Liz Flyntz, curator of Craft Pathos
featuring Mid-Atlantic artists: Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger, T. Charnan Lewis and Michael Paul Oman-Reagan

Timothy Nohe, curator of X/Y
featuring Mid-Atlantic artists: Christa Erickson, Christina Nguyen Hung and Paul Vanouse

Baltimore, MD – Between August 30 and October 15, 2005, Maryland Art Place (MAP) presents a dynamic pair of extremely diverse exhibitions by two Maryland area curators as part of its Curator’s Incubator Program. This juried annual program, now in its third year, was designed to encourage diversity while mentoring emerging curators and fresh new talent by offering a flash-point look at contemporary art in and beyond our community.

This year, both of the curators in the program are Baltimore-based, with minimal experience curating visual arts exhibitions. While their exhibitions provide stark contrasts and ironies that are easily identified by the nature of the artworks and the platitudes they represent, the curators’ elemental and primary concerns are by no means unrelated. This is evident when comparing both exhibitions. One exhibit focuses on works representing low-tech work reminiscent of artwork one may find in a state fair exhibition: Liz Flyntz’s homespun Craft Pathos, features Mid-Atlantic area artists Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger, T. Charnan Lewis and Michael Paul Oman-Reagan, and explores recent politics of crafting that have moved beyond traditional unsophisticated (or middle-school) leisure activities into spheres that are more dependent on collaboration, conceptual theory, and which are based in narrative and technological experimentation. 

Meanwhile, curator Timothy Nohe’s high tech exhibition X/Y, featuring Mid-Atlantic artists Christa Erickson, Christina Nguyen Hung and Paul Vanouse focuses on their highly engineered (and politically visible) works responding to culture and discourses that trace prevailing currents of human exchange and power. Several of the artists in X/Y are collaborators in the internationally acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) based in Buffalo, NY.

About the Curator’s Incubator Program:
The curators for the Third Annual Curator’s Incubator Program were selected through an open exhibition call, and throughout the season will have participated in a number of special programs assisted by prominent curators from the area’s art community. The program was designed to hone a curator’s intentions and clarify their plans for new exhibitions. It is anticipated that their skills and exhibitions will have been strengthened as a result of experiences gained during the program: audiences should benefit from both curator’s innovative collaborations with participating artists. This year’s program features two different—though related— strategies by exploring various stances that artists may choose to posit their work and ideas. MAP hopes that this opportunity will advance both curators’ careers while providing artists and audiences with a venue and forum to address critical issues of contemporary art.

This year’s program culminates with a talk on Friday, September 9 from 6-7pm, on Baltimore’s first major Thursday evening event of the season. The talk will be followed by a Reception from 7-9pm. In addition, MAP will continue featuring the weekday smART LUNCH series of artists’ and curators’ talks, which will take place on Wednesdays between 12-1pm. Guests are invited to bring a bag lunch or have one specially delivered from Mondo Bondo (see www.mdartplace.org for more information) on the following Wednesdays: September 28 (with curator Tim Nohe and artists); October 5 (with Liz Flyntz); and October 12 (with curator Tim Nohe & artist Christa Erickson.) Each of these events are free to the public and have been designed to encourage engaged and lively discussions.

ABOUT THE CURATORS:

Craft Pathos Curator: Liz Flyntz
Liz Flyntz is an artist, editor, and emerging curator related to a family of craftswomen. She was a co-curator of the recent Transmodern Age Festival of performance and video art that occurred simultaneously at Area 405 and the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD in 2005, and was part of the Women in the Director’s Chair curatorial collective at the DC Underground Film Festival in Washington, DC. Flyntz’ own artwork has been influenced by protest aesthetics, amateurism, and queer culture.

Of the exhibition, Craft Pathos, Flyntz has written that crafting has emerged as a new approach for individuals “as an alternative to consumer alienation [which] has developed a market that delivers the materials one step behind readymade. The materials themselves aim to seduce, promoting their ease of application, quick results, low prices, bright colors - similar to consumer goods….Contemporary art’s absorption of the new craft movement occurs less as an acceptance of the irony of the handmade/readymade/paint-by-numbers and more of an embrace of the new energy of accessible multi-media, low-tech electronic experimentation, ambitious amateurism, outsider art, and narrative psychedelia. This work belongs to a new dialogue occurring in art that refuses to be either rejected or be consumed by technology.” Thus, in Craft Pathos, Flyntz has featured artwork that may be identified as pop art, kitsch or agitprop documents, yet oddly, they simultaneously appear to be all and none of these things. Flyntz is proud to be a self-described “product of an unusual education,” having received a BA in Visual Arts in 2002 from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. Flyntz currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD.

Craft Pathos Artists:
Dan Breen is a Maryland native educated in engineering and graphic design. He received his BA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Currently residing in Baltimore, Breen is a self-taught musician and has worked with a wide variety of musical groups, including The Vernacular Quintet, The Financial Group, Pukebazooka, Megaweapon, Snacks, Les Trois Batterie, Trockeneis, Roctopus, Polymprovus, Baltimore Afrobeat Society, and Mugwump. In 2000, Breen began creating knitted works as accessories for an upright bass; more recent work consists of a line of hats called Headpants.

Fawn Krieger was born in Long Island, New York in 1975. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York, NY and a MFA in Sculpture from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Currently collaborating with the art-punk band, Tracy + the Plastics, Krieger and musician Wynne Greenwood function as a collaborative “band” called ROOM, building environmental installations and performances. Krieger and Greenwood recently completed their first commission at The Kitchen in New York, NY. Krieger is presently working on a series of floating sculptures inspired by the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exploring notions of deliverance and transformation through collective encounters. Her work will be traveling this fall to Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; PS122 Gallery in New York, NY; and will appear in an exhibition entitled, No Location: Relocation at the Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea in Castel San Pietro, Italy.

Julia Dzwonkoski is a visual artist and curator currently completing an MFA at the University of California, San Diego. Her work involves collecting, arranging and modifying familiar objects and images (such as coffee cups, amateur landscape paintings, popsicle stick people, magnetic and other signs) in order to extract and build new meanings around these popular, vernacular forms. Her curatorial projects include Reverse Engineers (2005, 2004) and Made in Prison: Art by Incarcerated Americans (2003). Examples of Dzwonkoski's work may be found at www.weirdshadow.com.

Michael Paul Oman-Reagan creates work on socio-cultural and anthropological themes. He studied Biology and Philosophy at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Later, as the founder, director and curator of a gallery for emerging contemporary art, Oman-Reagan was a pivotal force in Portland’s millennial art renaissance. Since moving to the East coast, Oman-Regan has continued his acclaimed Communication Project, in which he uses object installation to produce new methods of interfacing with art institutions and dedicated cultural spaces. His object installations and projects examine the datum plane of the viewer and the syntax of communication. He currently lives and works in New York City.

T. Charnan Lewis was born in Texas in 1971, and grew up outside Washington, DC. Lewis currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD, New York, NY and Berlin, Germany. In 1994, she completed undergraduate degrees in Studio Art, Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland; receiving a MFA in 2004 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and winning the Graduate Painting Award and a Walter’s Traveling Grant honorable mention. This year, Lewis was a recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and Governor’s Citation, and will exhibit her work this fall at the BAC Arts Festival in Barcelona, Spain. Notable exhibition venues include the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan, the Takt Gallery in Berlin, Germany and Gallery 32 in London, England. Lewis’ current work consists of paintings, sculptures, installations and videos using candy, stickers and air.

X/Y Curator: Timothy Nohe
Born 1960, Baltimore, Maryland, Timothy Nohe is a Baltimore area artist and educator who has engaged traditional and electronic media, appearing in public life and public places. His work has included site-specific sound and video installations, sculpture, scores for dance, and virtual-reality works in a range of national and international venues, notably: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles, CA; the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts, Paris, France; and the Baltic Sea; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the Danish Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, Århus, Denmark; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland. His text “In the Near Future Minutes From Now,” was published in the Anthologie der Kunst / Anthology of Art and subsequently was presented in Germany by ZKM, Zentrum fur Medienkunst, Karlsruhe; the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; andthe Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn.

Nohe serves the public performance art group Fluid Movement as a board member and composer, and produced the sound scores for Nessie on Wheels: The Legend of the Loch Ness Monster and Frankenstein on Wheels. A frequent composer and performer of sound scores for modern dance, he has collaborated with Mariah Maloney, the Phoenix Dance Company, Doug Hamby Dance, Carol Hess, and Movement/Addiction. Nohe is a member of the International Corporation of Lost Structures, the Australian-based creative collective in Sydney, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles, CA.

Three Maryland State Arts Council awards have supported Nohe’s work in the area of New Genre and Installation/Sculpture. His professional affiliations include the Electronic Music Foundation, the College Art Association and the Society of Photographic Education. Nohe is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and resides in the Dickeyville community in Baltimore City.

X/Y Artists:

Christa Erickson was born in 1965, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the politics, pleasures, and pains of spaces mediated by electronic technologies. Erickson has degrees in sculpture and computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the University of California at San Diego. She is now an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Studios Director at SUNY, Stony Brook, NY. Erickson writes, curates, and exhibits internationally, and is currently developing an interactive installation of absurd personalized devices, which reference cultural obsessions with youth, wealth, health, sexuality, and beauty.

Christina Nguyen Hung received a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA in 1997. Her work as both an individual artist and as a member of subRosa has received support from The University of Virginia, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon and the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. In her most recent work, Hung explores issues surrounding “free” trade, intellectual property, and national security by researching and mapping out industrial zones and geopolitical borders, using live bacteria as a medium. Hung divides her time between Baltimore, MD and Pensacola, FL, where she teaches new media as an Assistant Professor of Art at University of West Florida.

Paul Vanouse has been working in emerging technological forms since 1990. His electronic cinema, performances and interactive installations have been exhibited in 19 countries and widely across the US. He received a BFA from the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, NY and a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Vanouse is an Associate Professor of Art at the University at Buffalo and a Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University. Vanouse’s most recent solo work, The Relative Velocity Inscription Device, is a live scientific experiment in the form of an automated electronic installation, in which he literally races skin color genes from his Jamaican-American family against one another.

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 The Alex. Brown & Sons Charitable Foundation, Inc. is proud to partner with Maryland Art Place in support of the Third Annual Curator's Incubator Program.

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Maryland Art Place (MAP) is a non-profit center for contemporary art established in 1981 to: develop and maintain a dynamic environment for regional artists to exhibit their work, nurture and promote new ideas and new forms, and facilitate rewarding exchanges between artists and the public through educational leadership.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm. There is never an admission charge. For more details, please contact MAP’s Executive Director,Julie Ann Cavnor at 410.962.8565 or jcavnor@mdartplace.org.