Obsessive Aesthetics
June 12 - July 21, 2007
Friday, June 22: Gallery Talk 6pm / Reception 7pm
‹ Leslie Hirst, detail of Four:Maze
More images ›Maryland Art Place’s current exhibition, Obsessive Aesthetics, features four artists who employ labor-intensive and meticulous art making methods in the creation of their work. The artist’s perception of the natural world is demonstrated in their subject matter and the near obsessive state reached in creating this highly process-based work. Participating artists include: Larry Bamburg, Dawn Gavin, Leslie Hirst, and Renee van der Stelt.
Larry Bamburg’s kinetic installations incorporate tiny shards of the natural world via string, photographs, lights, and fans. His work examines, and replicates the phenomena of growth and decay, and man’s perception of and place within those cycles. The evocative motion of the swirling installation provokes viewers to interpret what they see, revealing both the object as pure form, as an image, or as neither all at once.
Dawn Gavin works extensively with maps to examine place, geography, and one’s perceptions thereof, through intricate constructions and reassemblages of atlas and map fragments. “My interest in maps belies a long-term preoccupation with boundaries. These zones of demarcation, both real and imagined, constitute the perceived edges of the self and the formation of identity.”
Leslie Hirst searches out the elusive four-leaf clover as the subject matter for her mixed media paintings. Harvested during outside excursions, Hirst considers the act of collecting clovers “a type of documentation of my existence and passage in the environment.” After carefully pressing and categorizing the clovers, she creates drawings and paintings that depict her navigation through the landscape as represented by the placement of these botanical phenomena. Embedded within layers of paint and epoxy resin, the clovers in Hirst’s paintings “reference the dialog between natural and artificial elements inherent in the environment.”
Renee van der Stelt’s work examines the earth, natural systems, galaxies and perceptions of space. Her sculptures and drawings are produced through cutting or repeatedly puncturing the surface of paper with a pin or shaped punch. The punctures represent a topographic perspective of space whose appearance varies according to the direction and points in which light enters. Van der Stelt’s work also explores strategies for mapping three-dimensional space and movements around the globe such as wind, water current and bird migration patterns.
Read the Review in the Baltimore Examiner ›
