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Young Blood, on view now at Maryland Art Place through September 3rd, features the works of nine Maryland-based recent MFA graduates. Stop by this Thursday, August 26th, to hear the artists speak about their work. If you’ve already been to see the show and found it difficult to navigate as I did, it might be helpful to attend. Hopefully the artists will have the opportunity to contextualize their respective works. Unfortunately the show doesn’t do that for them. Each artist is only represented by one work, and that makes it hard to get an idea of each artist’s larger project. Furthermore, the majority of the artist statements you’ll find at the reception table are either too turgid to read or too slapdash to take seriously, although Timothy Horjus gives a readable and comprehensive account of his paintings. Ailsa Staub too comes up with a good solution to the statement problem, offering simply a formal description the piece she has in the show.
Anther challenge I encountered with Young Blood is that no account is offered as to why and how the advisory committee chose these artists. Touring through the gallery I soon started to wonder why were these specific artists selected out of all the recent MFA graduates in Maryland. I have a hard time fighting back my inner cynic, and without a confident curatorial hand to help guide my thinking I was left to wonder if maybe these works weren’t selected simply because they looked the slickest, the most sellable of all the works reviewed. Or perhaps whoever did the choosing just wanted to get a nice variety: throw in some feminism, throw in some video art, some performance, show an apt concern with racism, etc.
I have been ruminating on this show for the past week, however, and it seems like some tenuous themes can be discerned. For example, several of the works demonstrate a pretension to architecture (Maggie Gourlay’s, Timothy Horjus’, Benjamin Kelley’s, and Ailsa Staub’s), with Kelley taking it furthest– his sculptures make as though they were actually buttressing the gallery walls.
One work stood out to me as not-so sellable, slightly less polished and more open-ended. It is these attributes that slowed me down and demanded I invest time in John Farrell’s “In The Name of the Voice Shines the Light”. Farrell works with portions of Robert Bresson’s 1962 Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, and in a dual projection installation, he restricts the communicative powers of cinema to text in the first instance and to sign language in the second instance. It is a spare and scientific handling of material, and while the effects are not entirely clear to me, I understand that the artist has approached a film that deals principally with signs (the movie’s dialog includes references to signs from God, signs of loyalty to the French king, signs of Joan’s gender, and linguistic signs), and then feeds it through two systems of signs– English script and American Sign Language.
I’m not convinced Farrell has fully considered the installation of his work, because it looks so shoddy. The two videos are projected on to opposite sides of a thin white sheet that hangs from monofilament. They then play back to back, one on each side of what is basically a piece of drawing paper hanging alone in the middle of a darkened room. We see how both images sit only on the surface and how there’s nothing behind, that the depth of the picture plane is illusory. The effect is to augment the insubstantiality of the image and, by virtue of analogy, the insubstantiality of the sign itself. In this way, the poverty of the installation strategy contributes to the work’s content.
I still have a lot of questions about this work, though. Why these two specific sign systems? Why project them back to back rather than side by side? What sense does it make to interpret the movie with sign language when subtitles would work just as well for the deaf? Farrell studied philosophy before he studied art, and I could tell from his statement that he thinks in a complex way. As it stands now, however, it was a little too complex for me to read.
Young Blood
Maryland Art Place
Aug 3 – Sept 3
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