Current Gallery’s newest show, Getting to Know the Window, is a mixed bag from local artists that captures moments of reflection and insight from the perceptive of an outsider. The art comes from a field of mediums: collage, digital prints, drawing, painting, sculpture, and video. Many of the pieces play with the idea of distance between the viewer and the artwork through means of visual or physical obstructions, shift in size, or actual screens and looking glasses. All of these diversions create a conceptional, sometimes literal, window that reenforces one’s sense of self as the outsider, or stranger, looking in.
Matthew Fox’s collage series captures surreal moments, scenes within scenes, whose distances set the viewer back from the artwork. Some depict small stone figures crowding around windows, peeking through looking holes at cityscapes, classical figures, and St. Andrew. Others are less clear; bits of figure and landscape are suspended across the canvas, eerily floating without direction. Visually, Fox’s collages address the idea of “outside perceptive” straightforwardly. While his stone figures look on to modern cities and saints, his work also alludes to ideas of reverence.
Other notable pieces include Brendan Sullivan’s engaging digital print series. The prints smell of fresh illustrator files, each using a few basic shapes in red/yellow/blue color schemes floating about with spare lines of text. However, upon reading Sullivan’s uncluttered “prose” (one piece simply states “hospital coffee”) a flood of vivid imagery bursts forth. The work seems like diary entries, bits of eavesdropped conversion, or an online post found out of its intended context. Despite being removed from an obvious whole, the snippets of sentences and ideas throughout the prints are highly relatible; the obscurity forces personal reflection through what can be seen as the artist’s personal editing process.
The engrossing sculptures of Patrick David tell absurd narratives no less surreal then Fox’s photography. Viewers witness forgotten memories on desolate landscapes: a train wreck without tracks, a severed, honeycomb marked hand reaching for a single tree. David’s sculptures distance themselves from the audience with their small size and lowness to the ground, creating a bird’s eye view. Whether it is the viewer or the objects within the work itself, all interaction seems alien. The sculpture titled “Drive-in” is one of the strongest piece in the show. Sitting on stilts, a sloped, barren landscape floats in a corner of the gallery. Placed at the bottom of the slope is a peephole, not unlike one from a neighbor’s front door. Through the looking glass a yellowed image, an old photo containing a pair of eyes, stares back. Embodying the show visually and conceptually, the view is a clear instance, a window, through the remoteness and uncertainty surrounding everything.
Author Sean Ostrowski is a MICA Graduate and Baltimore-based Designer, Artist, and Writer.
Getting to Know the Window ended at Current on January 6, 2013.
