Craft Pathos
Curated by Liz Flyntz
Maryland Art Place (M.A.P.)
8 market place, suite 100
baltimore, maryland 21202
telephone 410-962-8565 facsimile 410-244-8017
www.mdartplace.org
Exhibition
dates: August 30 – October 15, 2005
Gallery Talk: Friday, September 9, 6-7pm
Reception: Friday, September 9, 7-9pm
Baltimore,
MD – Between August 30 and October 15, 2005, Maryland Art Place
(MAP) presents a dynamic pair of extremely diverse exhibitions by two
Maryland area curators as part of its Curator’s Incubator Program.
This juried annual program, now in its third year, was designed to encourage
diversity while mentoring emerging curators and fresh new talent by offering
a flash-point look at contemporary art in and beyond our community.
This year, both of the curators in the program are Baltimore-based, with
minimal experience curating visual arts exhibitions. While their exhibitions
provide stark contrasts and ironies that are easily identified by the
nature of the artworks and the platitudes they represent, the curators’
elemental and primary concerns are by no means unrelated. This is evident
when comparing both exhibitions. One exhibit focuses on works representing
low-tech work reminiscent of artwork one may find in a state fair exhibition:
Liz Flyntz’s homespun Craft Pathos, features Mid-Atlantic area artists
Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger and Michael Paul Oman-Reagan,
and explores recent politics of crafting that have moved beyond traditional
unsophisticated (or middle-school) leisure activities into spheres that
are more dependent on collaboration, conceptual theory, and which are
based in narrative and technological experimentation.
Meanwhile,
curator Timothy Nohe’s high tech exhibition X/Y, featuring Mid-Atlantic
artists Christa Erickson, Christina Nguyen Hung and Paul Vanouse focuses
on their highly engineered (and politically visible) works responding
to culture and discourses that trace prevailing currents of human exchange
and power. Several of the artists in X/Y are collaborators in the internationally
acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) based in Buffalo, NY.
About the Curator’s Incubator Program:
The exhibition curators were selected through an open exhibition call,
reviewed by MAP’s Programming Advisory Committee, and throughout
the season will have participated in a number of special programs assisted
by prominent curators from the area’s art community. The entire
program was designed to hone curators’ intentions and clarify their
plans for specific exhibitions. It is anticipated that their skills and
exhibitions will have been strengthened by result of experiences gained
during the program: audiences should benefit from the curator’s
innovative collaborations with participating artists that infuse the area
arts community with dynamic new works to view and consider. This year’s
program feature two different— though related—
exhibitions exploring various stances that artists may choose to posit
their work and ideas. MAP hopes that this opportunity will advance the
curator’s careers while enriching arts programming in the vicinity.
ABOUT
THE CURATORS:
Curator: Liz Flyntz
Liz Flyntz is an artist, editor, and emerging curator related to a family
of craftswomen. She was a co-curator of the recent Transmodern Age Festival
of performance and video art that occurred simultaneously at Area 405
and the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD in 2005, and was part of the
Women in the Director’s Chair curatorial collective at the DC Underground
Film Festival in Washington, DC. Flyntz’ own artwork has been influenced
by protest aesthetics, amateurism, and queer culture.
Flyntz has written that crafting has emerged as a new approach for individuals
“as an alternative to consumer alienation [which] has developed
a market that delivers the materials one step behind readymade. The materials
themselves aim to seduce, promoting their ease of application, quick results,
low prices, bright colors - similar to consumer goods….Contemporary
art’s absorption of the new craft movement occurs less as an acceptance
of the irony of the handmade/readymade/paint-by-numbers and more of an
embrace of the new energy of accessible multi-media, low-tech electronic
experimentation, ambitious amateurism, outsider art, and narrative psychedelia.
This work belongs to a new dialogue occurring in art that refuses to be
either rejected or be consumed by technology.” Thus, in Craft Pathos,
Flyntz has featured artwork that may be identified as pop art, kitsch
or agitprop documents, yet oddly, they simultaneously appear to be all
and none of these things.
Flyntz is proud to be a self-described “product of an unusual education,”
having received a BA in Visual Arts in 2002 from Antioch College in Yellow
Springs, OH. Flyntz currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
Maryland Art Place (MAP) is a non-profit center for contemporary art established in 1981 to: develop and maintain a dynamic environment for regional artists to exhibit their work, nurture and promote new ideas and new forms, and facilitate rewarding exchanges between artists and the public through educational leadership. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm. There is no admission charge to enter the gallery. For more details, please contact MAP’s Director of Programs at 410.962.8565 or programs@mdartplace.org
The Alex. Brown & Sons Charitable Foundation, Inc. is proud to partner with Maryland Art Place in support of the Third Annual Curator's Incubator Program.
The Baltimore Sun
LiVE!
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Arts
Museums ◊ Literature
MAP exhibits
are a platform for 'emerging curators'
By Glenn McNatt
SUN Art Critic
The idea of an emerging artist is a familiar but still rather amorphous concept.
It can mean young artists fresh out of bachelor's or master's degree programs who are embarking on professional careers.
Or it can refer to artists who are well-experienced but whose works have only recently crossed some major threshold of visibility in the art world - a major museum exhibition, for example, or the proverbial solo show in a prestigious New York gallery.
And it can mean everything in between as well.
Likewise, the "Curator's Incubator" program at Maryland Art Place (MAP), which seeks to nurture the development of fledgling exhibition professionals, is aimed at what you might call emerging curators - people starting out in the business of jurying shows, looking at slides, writing catalog essays and trying to keep up with art world trends.
There is something almost visionary about the idea of a "curator's incubator."
After all, it is obvious you cannot have a vibrant local art community without the people who seek out the hot new talents, put shows together, find venues in which to present them and create a context for viewers to begin to make sense out of an almost chaotically pluralistic contemporary art scene.
The exhibitions that opened at MAP this week were organized by fledgling curators Liz Flyntz and Timothy Nohe.
Flyntz' show, Craft Pathos, focuses on low-tech, personal forms of expression and presents pieces by Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger and Michael Paul Omar-Reagan.
Some of these pieces remind you of junior high school arts-and-crafts projects, complete with paper cut-outs of cars and other consumer goods along with those shiny, foil stars in different sizes and colors that teachers used to paste on students' efforts as a way of saying "Good job!"
By contrast, Nohe's artists - Christa Erickson, Christina Hung and Paul Vanouse - are high-tech virtuosos, whose glowing video screens and sophisticated, interactive projected images are all about the political and social implications of the cybernetic takeover of contemporary life by increasingly all-knowing, all-seeing computerized databases. It would be scary if it were not all so much fun to look at and play with.
Both shows run through Oct. 15. A gallery talk and reception will be held from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sept. 9. The gallery is at 8 Market Place, Suite 100. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. Call 410-962-8565.
Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun