Welcome to the classiest place you’ve never heard of.
Tucked in the furthest corner of Baltimore’s Power Plant Live! Plaza, away from the scampering children outside Port Discovery and shielded from the bustle of surrounding bars, Maryland Art Place unobtrusively houses its current collection, Small Magic: Photographic Transformations.
Curated by Nate Larson, a full-time professor at MICA, Small Magic is a collection of seven artists working closely with small-scale physical materials.
“The intimacy created by this proximity,” a simple sign by the entrance reads, “transforms what might be an insignificant object or material into something worth examining at a closer range.”
Each of the seven artists takes common things we see in our everyday lives — pebbles, maps, dust, even human hair — and manipulates them through photographic genius, creating a tiny magical world with each object.
Maryland Art Place is everything you would expect of a small art gallery in a big city. Housed in a simple brick building, the blank white walls and unassuming wooden floorboards provide a quiet environment that focuses solely on the art; Small Magic is so intriguing that you don’t want to notice anything but the photographs surrounding you.
Immediately to the right of the entrance hang three masterpieces by John Mann, who chose to work with maps. One photograph zooms in on a three-inch cutout, held up by an unbent paper clip.
With the plain monotone background, you can really focus in on the texture of the paper — the font used to spell out “OCEAN,” even the shape of the degree symbol on the longitude numbers along the bottom edge of the map.
Two material-manipulation photographs appear next — a burgundy and cream-colored map of Moskva with cut-out slits curved upwards, and a spiraling “on-ramp” rising out of a colorful map in which words like “Bacon’s End” can be read.
Both are prime examples of the “imagined world” curator Larson attempts to portray. The intimacy of the beautifully colored Moskva map and the juxtaposition of a swirling 3-D tower with the chromatic 2-D map demands consideration from you, an extrapolation of thoughts to the world within the photograph.
The works of the other artists showcased are no different. “Minor Planets,” by Michael Sherwin is comprised of twelve pictures of singular pebbles on a black background, taken at an extremely close range. As a result, the photographs show every crease, every indent, every facet of color created by erosion and they become something akin to planets.
The shadows across a smooth white one mimics pictures taken of the moon, while the depth of color in another reminds you of an alien planet seen only in movies.
Christine Shank continues the trend of themed photographs, choosing to center her work on a feeling of domestic discomfort.
A maimed chest of drawers through a doorway, its dark wooden splinters stark against a wall of sky blue; empty picture frames hanging in an ornate room while soft, golden sunlight filters through the window; a beautiful coral room with a dazzling chandelier and bricked-over doorways — all these images recall relationships shattering, houses imploding.
Pensive titles such as “Unforgettable Little Mistakes” and “The Expectation Continued to Remain” only further this theme.
There were two artists whose works were less evocative.
Marni Shindelman had three monochromatic pieces showcasing the body of a giraffe in dark grey, a horse in hot pink and a camel — or perhaps a duck, possibly a turtle — in lime green.
Each animal was skillfully molded and patterned in scraps of velvet (hence the name “National Velvet Trophy Collections”) but they didn’t impress. You’d look at them, they were nice, you moved on.
The same can be said about almost all of Libby Rowe’s pieces, the most prolific artist in the exhibit.
Some of her pictures had intriguing premises like the close-up of a dustball, or a clothesline of shirts hanging in the autumn forest, but they were executed poorly.
The lighting was flat, and it wasn’t an imagined world, it was just a dustball or a weird row of clothes. Others were creepy — who wants to see a close-up of a man’s tangled, dirty beard?
She did have two successes though — “The Greenhouse Effect” was a close-up shot of the fern-patterned forest floor with absolutely gorgeous lighting, while “Seen but Not Heard” shows a women’s open mouth with a honeycomb poised between her lips while slick rivulets of honey run down the sides of her mouth like blood.
It was unique, chilling and most definitely provocative.
Adam Ekberg was the only one who used a multi-media medium; “A Disco Ball in the Woods” is a projector showing the image of — who would have guessed — a disco ball in the woods at night.
A light source from outside the shot shines on the spinning disco ball, which glitters as it throws circles of light into the dark woods. It’s a magical image, like a fairytale, and you can definitely see a whole other world within the shot provided by Ekberg.
The only disappointment is that his other two shots — stimulating, beautifully-lit, amusing and unique — are housed in the same dark room and cannot be seen clearly; a shame as they are both extraordinary.
Finally, the works of Peter Happel Christian are perhaps the most interesting ones at MAP, but you might mistake them for residual construction pieces.
He has four booklets; most pages empty save for random blocks of splattered blue construction paper, confusingly non-descript until you flip to the back cover and read “This dust gathered at the U.S./Mexico border.”
Other places where dust was gathered included in the Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport, by the National Weather Service in Southern Arizona, and at the foot of Sue, the giant T-Rex skeleton in Chicago’s Field Museum.
Small Magic Photographic Transformations is running at the Maryland Art Place until March 19th. Entry is free.
