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19th Annual Critics' Residency Program: Just Looking

Thursday, May 5, 2005

MAP show is a striking snapshot of regional art

By Glenn McNatt, SUN Art Critic

Michele Kong fashions intricate, gossamer sculptures out of transparent fishing line and glue that look like enormous, floor-to-ceiling spider webs. She also makes amazing, freehand ink drawings of incredible complexity, in which every stroke of pen or brush is a virtuoso performance.

Kong is one of the indubitable stars of Critic's Picks: Just Looking, the lovely exhibition at Maryland Art Place inspired by  the gallery's 19th annual critic's residency program. The program brings prominent critics to town each year to work with local writers and artists in organizing a show.

This year, MAP chose New York-based curator and critic Franklin Sirmans, one of four curators of the highly acclaimed Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York (that show runs through June 5).

Sirmans selected two area writers, Jenny O'Grady and Jiyun Park, and 10 regional artists to put this year's MAP program together.

"What we [found] in the work of these 10 artists was a wide range of ideas and materials marking their own diverse trajectories to Baltimore," Sirmans writes in his catalog essay.

"From highly personal explorations to global social and poitical issues, the artists demonstrate their concerns in a way that is hypertextual and evident of the speed with which ideas are dispersed in the world," he adds.

Sirmans suggests there is no unique "Baltimore style" but rather a highly diverse and evolving global language of practices and visual strategies that artists everywhere are
learning to use.

The exhibition presents striking examples of some contemporary approaches in the auto-biographical photographs of Sonya A. Lawyer and Lauren Simonutti, in the surreal digital imagery of Marc Fanberg, in Kong's exquisite sculptures and ink drawings and in Jo Smail's stunning abstract black enamel drip paintings. The show also presents works by Rebecca Blakley, Dianne Bugash, Eric Garner, Christopher Gladora and Juliette Goodwin.

This is a beautifully curated and mounted exhibition that offers a snapshot of what is surely some of the most interesting work being done today in the Baltimore-Washington region. It is well worth a look.

The show runs through May 21. The gallery is at 8 Market Place, Suite 100. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Call 410-962-8565 or visit www.mdartplace.org.