BmoreArt

Idle Hands
XoXo Gallery

Through August 28
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12-4 PM

The historic building located at 218 W. Saratoga was once a clothing factory and later a television retail store, so it is fitting that textile work and media installations fill the contemporary galleries in XoXo Gallery and Maryland Art Place. Curated by Carlotta Cerrato & Jodi Hoover of the local GoxxipGirl collective, Idle Hands is a group show of six artists: Julianna Dail, Sarah Magida, Katie O’Keefe, Karin Birch, Eileen Travis, and Phylis Mayes who utilize various forms of the textile medium from croquet, embroidery, sewing, quilting, and more. Textile work has historically been labeled “craft” and traditionally created by women, therefore not considered “real art” by institutions until relatively recently.

Cerratto and Hoover share in their statement: “The exhibit explores how repetition and tradition, once seen as mundane, can be harnessed as a profound artistic practice that both honors skill and challenges conventional notions of labor and creativity rather than simply a means of avoiding ‘the devil’s work’.”

Katie O’Keefe’s “Loose Ties” evokes intricate intimacy with hands of silk organza, tulle fabric, seed beads, and sewn threads, holding twisted strands of powder-coated steel and gold-plated, rare-earth magnet findings. The piece references the Moirai, the Ancient Greek women known as the “three fates,” responsible for spinning, measuring, and then cutting the threads of each human life. In addition, O’Keefe’s three “Isolation Portraits” are small and stunning. Each depicts the figure of a woman, using free-hand machine embroidery on tulle fabric with hand embroidered silk organza and is titled for the day it was made in isolation, asking the viewer to consider, what did your body and soul look like during isolation on day 694?

Julianna Dail’s three works from her “All the ways you tried” series build on O’Keefe’s intimate constructions but emphasize text. Using embroidery thread, acrylic circles cut from security envelopes, and small black paper dots, Dail’s pieces read like a redacted letter, with elements that have been banned or forbidden, questioning power structures around communication and censorship.

Sarah Magida’s quilted “Beginning of Knowledge” echoes the themes of mythology that quietly abound in this show. The artist uses indigo, cochineal, marigold, and madder to dye cotton fabric, and then embroidery and applique to produce a nest of multi-colored snakes in the center of the quilt. Framed by fabric blocks of flower patterns of solid blue and yellow, the squirreling snakes create a feeling of kinetic energy. Magida has brought the viewer into the Garden of Eden, and with so many beautiful gossiping snakes, we’re going to bite the apple.

Young Blood
Maryland Art Place

Through August 24
Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 AM- 4PM

Young Blood is an annual show of recent MFA graduates at Maryland Art Place from University of Marylad Baltimore County (UMBC), Towson University (TU), Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). This year, its 16th iteration, features a tightly curated selection of the region’s best graduate work in the large main gallery, as well as the building’s fifth floor. Diverse in media, the exhibit includes thesis works by McCoy Chance (UMBC), Lolo Gem (TU), Huxley Green (MICA), Trevon Jakaar Coleman (UMD), Mariia Usova (UMBC), Dooree Kang (MICA), Ahlam Khamis (UMBC), Cody Prysesk (TU), and Rida Yawar (MICA).

In addition, this year’s Young Blood is hauntingly beautiful, as many of the artists’ works reference trauma in thoughtful and well crafted ways. Rida Yawar’s stunning “you left the window open” features pink salt bricks stacked in the pattern of a corner in a deliberately incomplete structure. Some of the bricks appear whole, while have fractured and jagged edges. The viewer must be careful while walking towards it, around it, and refrain from the urge to lightly touch it. Yawar shares that she prefers to focus on transmutation of human emotions into physical forms. This idea does manifest in the sculptural work, as the viewer feels that there is something left unfinished, something left open.

Huxley Green’s work, “Locked in this Eerie Matrix of Wanting” feels like wandering into a private ritual. Consisting of varied pieces of cyanotype images from their family archive on canvas, fabric stained with dirt from Missipippi and wine, thread, acrylic paint, and sewing pin, the images are eerie with ghostly figures and body parts. It is clear that Green’s work is influenced by religious history.

The beautiful macabre feeling continues with Mariia Usova’s untitled sculptures of gorgeous glass spines, Ahlam Khamis’ “Clove Balaclova” and “Clove Pillow” both reference medicinal herbs used in Palestinian tradition, and Cody Pryseski’s paintings of tricycles and distorted figures. The works of McCoy Chance and Trevon Jakaar Coleman become reflections of each other as McCoy’s TVs appear in Colmen’s acrylic landscapes and vice versa.

The gallery attendant will escort visitors to the fifth floor for the final installations of the show, where Dooree Kang and Lolo Gem have manifested novel universes. Dooree Kang presents the viewer with what appears to be the realms of good and evil. A large white cloud-like installation, bathed in purple light lords above a clustered group of hundreds of tiny human figures. While on the other side of the installation, wall paper with a pattern of angel and devil figures appear to be in an intense discussion. A war for the soul seems to be at stake.

Lolo Gem includes selections from the series Hidden in Plain Sight. A cartoonish collection of paintings and sculptures rooted in a collage-based practice and all appear to reference the complicated emotions of the fragmented inner child. For example, “Perceived Threat”, is a rusted bear trap connected to a hot pink acrylic chain and attached to the white and pink ceramic floor. Needing to go within and spend more time with our inner child seems to be all the rage lately but Lolo Gem appears to ask, what if that isn’t a safe space to occupy?

Jennifer McBrien
Hotel Indigo

Through August 29
Closing Reception: Thursday, August 21, 5 PM to 7 PM

Just around the corner, on Franklin Street, Maryland Art Place continues its curatorial partnership with Hotel Indigo, presenting a solo exhibition from Jennifer McBrien in the lobby. McBrien, a painter turned fiber artist, continues the mythological theme that seems to connect many of the shows this summer. She has created her own realm of figures that she calls “Bird Women,” with the figurative forms of humans with bird heads and claw-like feet, some with wings. Often embedded in the foreground of toile de jouy patterns, the Bird Women exist both within the world of humans and in another realm that appears spiritual and inaccessible to mortals.

Yet the Bird Women seem to experience emotions that us mortals may be familiar with: desire, mourning, joy, grief. The bird women display themselves, hold each other, bind each other, and squat at other Bird Women. In the piece, “The Three Fighting Graces” McBrien produces her own interpretation of The Three Graces, but apparently the Bird Women have their own ideas about who is worth fighting for. There is clearly a language that they share within each individual piece and as a body of work.

It must be said that McBrien’s work is stunning. While each two-dimensional piece varies in shape and size, all are created by drawing with her sewing machine. I hope to catch McBrien at her closing reception/mixer on August 21, where hopefully she will be answering some of our questions, such as, Why Bird Women? and are those actual plants in their bellies?

Jeffrey Kent: Bio-graphic Ruminations and Monique Crabb: I Close My Eyes to See
Current Space

Both through September 14
Gallery Hours are Saturdays 1-5 PM or by appointment
Closing Reception: Sunday, September 14th from 3-6 PM

Loop around to the back of Current Space and enter through the backyard garden oasis to two two solo shows of prominent local artists: Jeffrey Kent and Monique Crab.

Kent’s Bio-graphic Ruminations presents interdisciplinary work including a video installation, an audio piece, sculptures, and paintings—all connecting to a shared narrative and history.

Walking around the gallery space, I quietly listened to the audio piece while feeling magnetically pulled between Kent’s war on drugs series of paintings and his hanging sculpture of plastic water jugs stuffed with ripped pieces of American currency. The jugs are wrapped in a frayed yellow net. The object as a whole ever so faintly shifts in space. Kent’s work activated an energetic loop: gaze at “the war on drugs,” stand under the hanging sculpture, gaze at “the war on drugs,” stand under the hanging sculpture money.

Of course, with his video piece and an additional sculpture that references the history of enslaved folks picking cotton in spatial relationship to the war on drugs and heaving, hanging, shredded money, Kent is sending a message. From history to the current opioid crisis in our dear city the viewer walks away with thoughts that have entered the mind before on another type of loop: How many lost lives? How much wasted money? All in the name of horrendous evil in a pathetic attempt for power.

And with that the viewer moves into the space of dreams.

Monique Crabb’s I Close My Eyes To See asks the viewer to reflect on dreams, dreaming, and flying away on a carpet with the dreamy phrase of your choice. Nine 44 x 58 rug are hung on the gallery walls, wrapping all around the space. Each rug, handmade by Crabb with a tufting gun, presents a twist of phrases we’re often used to hearing, from DREAM A LITTLE DREAM to I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT and A DREAM OF ONES OWN. The color of the rugs also range from the entire greyscale gradient, white on white to black on black, referencing the murky in between.

The work deeply connects with those of us artists who are often called dreamers and those of us who gave up our dreams to pursue the more stable and foreseeable path. These rugs aren’t the kind that one wipes their feet all over, we will not be trampling on dream rugs or dreams in this space.