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3rd Annual Curators' Incubator Program

 

Abstract, Street, and Invasive

A look at three sharp gallery shows ending soon
By Bret McCabe

THIRD ANNUAL CURATOR’S INCUBATOR PROGRAM
At Maryland Art Place through Oct.15

Christina Hung’s works at Maryland Art place are pretty effing creepy. In fact, you half expect her 15 digital prints to sprout legs and walk away—or at least form a pseudopod and slime away. Hung grows bright red bacteria in petri dishes and then photographs the resulting colonies in sharp, crisp glossy images as if they were for an automobile advertisement. But that’s not what makes the images so weird. Hung scratches into the bacteria culture or forms it to grow in certain shapes, or around cer-
tain shapes, such that red-lettered word fragments as stay the course, or the paragraphs spread over petrie dishes in six-images of the “Experiments in Resistance” become streaked and barely readable as the bacteria grows weedlike. It’s controlled and not controlled, contained and yet un- domesticated, and any brain with even a smidgen of science-fiction mumbo jumbo roiling around in its folds can anxiously fret that but one wrong reagent or mutated cell or hair follicle or sneeze or spilled soda stands in the way of arresting visual-art imagery morphing into some slimy new organism bubbling onto the floor ready to feast on human hypothalamus.

That suggested reach from the gallery to the outside world unites the three mini-exhibits in MAP’s third annual curator’s incubator program. It’s most implicit in the Timothy Nohe-curated X/Y, which includes Hung, Christa Erickson, and Paul Vanouse, but it’s also percolating just beneath the surface of the Liz Flyntz-curated Craft Pathos, a group show of low-tech works from Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger, and Michael Paul Oman-Reagan. These pieces are co-ralled as a pseudo-commentary/response to the so-called “new craft movement”and its relationship with Contemporary Art—capitalized only because in this instance it’s being regarded as the rarefied marketplace world of the art school and market. And while the 42 brightly colored pieces sincerely made with available materials gathered here from the four artists certainly share a DIY spirit, far too much of the new craft movement assumes ambitious amateurism is by its very nature visionary, whereas even “unschooled” artists working with whatever they have typically do so because they have something to say.

You get the impression Vanouse and Erickson have something to say, although it might not have required such a science-mediated, high-tech language to achieve. Erickson’s “Eternal Climb” is the work that stands out here. A wooden ladder extends up a gallery wall; a monitor is mounted at eye level between two rungs. Feeding
off a live stock-market feed, as trading rises and falls, a pair of hands climb up and down a ladder on the monitor. It’s a neat realization of a Sisyphean rise and fall, but the most interesting aspect to it is its inner workings, not what those working achieve—all science, no fiction.

And while Hung’s photos do have a smidgen of that white-coat laboratory stuffiness about them, the saving grace is their inherent unpredictability. In “McCarshcroft: A Morphology of Extremism V (Second Edition)” Hung has created a single petrie-dish portrait of Joseph McCarthy and John Ashcroft in her bacterial red and photographed the growing colony just before the image became too indecipherable to recognize. It’s admittedly a loaded-gun image, but what makes it interested is how it goes off: The smearing heads could imply the bacterial spread of ideology, thinking as communicable disease. And while in this case it’s playing to a specific demographic, that the piece aspires to connect with an outside world in some way other than purely intellectual gives Hung’s work a refreshing prescience.