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Obsessive Aesthetics

Four good shows - in advance of Artscape

Glenn McNatt
July 4, 2007

In the month long run-up to Artscape, the city's annual outdoor festival of the arts that runs July 20-22, there are any number of shows to whet your appetite for the celebration to come. Here's a short list of intriguing exhibitions to check out:

At Maryland Art Place, the show Obsessive Aesthetics presents four artists whose works involve such incredibly labor-intensive fabrication techniques and attention to minute detail that they suggest a pathological compulsion. Yet they also exert a powerful allure.

All the exhibitors - Leslie Hirst, Renee van der Stelt, Larry Bamburg and Dawn Gavin - might be described as "process" artists, in the sense that the various activities involved in making their artworks are as important as the objects that ultimately result from them.

Hirst, for example, bases her glossy, enameled mixed-media paintings on the patterns fashioned from four-leaf clovers that she finds on walks.

Because four-leaf clovers are relatively rare compared to their three-leaf cousins, the "process" of searching out, gathering, sorting and collating the plants becomes as integral to Hirst's art-making as the painting, gluing and enameling that go into the final products - which, incidentally, are stunning.

I also was mesmerized by van der Stelt's drawings and sculptures based on azimuthal and stereographic map projections and Gavin's unbelievably precise pin-and-paper constructions, which are likewise inspired by the processes of surveying and mapping.

I can almost guarantee, however, that practically everybody's favorite in this show will be Bamburg's fantastic, whirling kinetic sculpture, which, depending on how you look at it, resembles nothing so much as a basketful of leaves blown by the wind or a giant, sticky spider's web.

Titled The Nature of Things: Handmade, Custom, 100 per cent, this site-specific installation, which the New York-based artist created over a span of several days just before the show opened, is surely one of the most unusual and original artworks to be seen in Baltimore in recent months.

Obsessive Aesthetics runs through July 21 at Maryland Art Place, 8 Market Place. Call 310-962-8565 or go to mdartplace .org.

Larry Scott's spontaneous mixed-media drawings at Touchet Gallery in Fells Point seem to take inspiration from Willem de Kooning's figurative Abstract-Expressionism.

Scott works on a smaller and less-assured scale. His drawing is certainly expressive - mostly portraits and figure studies - and his acrylic and ink works on paper possess a lively sense of the ephemeral moods that faces and bodies are subject to.

When it comes to using color, however, the artist is not nearly so facile. What color does appear in Scott's drawings - a splash of crimson or some other primary hue - is usually more in the nature of a decorative flourish than an integral element of the composition. Hardly any of the drawings essay more ambitious color harmonies.

Still, there's an undeniable energy and charm in these quicksilver sketches that hold one's attention and keep inviting one back for a closer look.

Larry Scott: People I See runs through July 28 at Touchet Gallery, 536 S. Ann St. Call 410-522-2280 or go to touchetgal lery.com.

John Ruppert's evocative and spare sculptures and drawings, on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery, mimic the natural materials of wood and stone without ever quite losing their character as wholly manmade artifacts.

When Ruppert's ingeniously formed cast-metal rocks, for example, sit directly alongside their natural counterparts on the gallery floor, it's easy to tell the difference between them. Without the real stone to compare, however, the artificial rock looks uncannily familiar but also utterly alien.

For many years, Ruppert has also created sculptural forms out of prison-grade chain-link fencing, a material so ubiquitous in the urban landscape that it almost qualifies as part of the natural environment.

Ruppert's chain-link forms never refer to the city, however. Instead, they resemble vegetable and marine life forms, succulent plants and shells.

The example on display at Grimaldis, lit from above so that its links cast a delicate filigree of shadow on the floor underneath, is a disarmingly simple form that projects a spectacular pattern of seemingly infinite complexity.

John Ruppert: Evidence runs through July 14 at C. Grimaldis Gallery, 523 N. Charles St. Call 410-539-1080 or go to cgrimaldis gallery.com.