The Sum of Parts, curated by Amy Boone-McCreesh @ MAP Feb 22

Curators' Incubator: The Sum of Parts

Curated by Amy Boone-McCreesh

February 22 - March 24, 2012

Reception and Curator’s Talk: February 22, 6-8pm 

After the LONGEST-EVER wait and patient endurance of whatever the hell has been going on at MAP for the past year, Amy Boone-McCreesh FINALLY gets to present her excellent exhibition for [what would have been last year's] Curators' Incubator.  We have been eagerly awaiting the return or relevant programming!

In The Sum of Parts, Boone-McCreesh has brought together four contemporary East Coast artists who utilize repetative processes as the engine to building larger works. Sculpture, installation and drawing are explored through techniques such as knitting, cutting paper and mold-making for this multi-media exhibition.

Artists: Emily Barletta, Lauren Clay, Jerry Kaba and Nikki Painter.

Curators' Incubator Opens @ Maryland Art Place

Frank Klein

Maryland Art Place's Curators' Incubator, an annual event that highlights and encourages emerging curators, opened this past weekend and featured two distinct and interesting exhibitions.
Rebecca Webber chose to focus on surveillance imagery in her show, Invisible Omniscience: Seeing and the Seen, while Zoma Wallace and T. Shareen Dash sought to define the term and showcase artwork from the art collective Afrikatalyst (also the title of their exhibition).

Webber's show featured a variety of perspectives and approaches to the idea of surveillance. Artists Leslie Furlong, and Christa Erickson dealt with actual footage from different kinds of surveillance cameras -Furlong using footage from cameras recording weather data in Hawaii to show the absence of event in surveillance, and Erickson creating a hopscotch grid from international imagery.
Also from Invisible Omniscience:

Brendan Howell

Eric Parnes, left and William Betts right and below

Afrikatylist included a number of powerful pieces, each of which contained its own message, whether encrypted, as in William Nathanial Thomas IV 's 14 pieces (containing codes in hieroglyphics, graffiti tags and other symbols to tell a story), or more obviously in the picture-poems of Akil E Kennedy.
Also from Afrokatalyst:

Jonathan Edwards

James Phillips

Johnnie Bess above and below

Curators' Incubator will run through October 25th
Maryland Art Place
8 Market Place, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21202

Playthings: Trendiest Show On The Block

Playthings, a show whose advertised theme is that of whimsy and the spirit and function of toys, seems to include all the most popular trends in art within the past 10 years---video game imagery, crafting, low quality digital print outs, large-scale paper cut outs, fashion emblems and, of course, vaginas. This is not necessarily a criticism, but definitely a distracting aspect of the overall exhibition. Somewhere in all this trendiness, the theme gets a little lost.

Ryan Cecil Smith's paper sculptures

Looking like its straight out of Bedrock, a Prehistoric Jukebox

The Metro Gallery may have been a hard space in which to form a full vision of this show, it is a little unfriendly in its harsh divide of space and long, high walls. Perhaps if the walls were hung salon-style, the place filled, overwhelmingly with color and toys, it would have felt less disjointed and more like a toy store--more whimsy than trend.

Pam and Meghan Clay in front of Meghan's paper wall installation

Alex Worthington's fashionable, fake food...previously featured but we love it.

Much of the work appears to be that of the curator's friends and acquaintances, a larger pool of artists would have undoubtedly brought a freshness to the exhibition, where it felt some pieces were shoe-horned into the theme. None of this is to say, however, that the work included in not interesting or cool, because all of it is very "cool" and many of the pieces are very engaging. It just goes to show that if there is this much talent at arms length, why not reach farther? This was Levin's first time curating--a tremendous undertaking--her exhibition was a solid start from which she can only improve.

Dina Kelberman's digital print outs

Curator/Artist Stefani Levin in front of her sewn piece

Playthings

PLAYTHINGS, a group show featuring work involving/inspired by/intended
for the act of play will be opening at the Metro Gallery next
Thursday, May 8th. The opening will be fun, this is a personal
promise. Please come. It is from 7 to 11pm, and the gallery is located
at 1700 N Charles Street. AND don't quote me on this, but I heard
there might be free booze. I will get back to you on this.

PLAYTHINGS features work by (in no particular order): Ben Fino-Radin,
Milana Braslavsky, Dina Kelberman, Alex Worthington, Ryan Cecil Smith,
Natalie Jenison, Noel Friebert, Nik Pence, Meghan Clay, Michael
Gerkovich, Giuliana Pinto, and Stefani Levin.