about the artist : work on display : artists : process of installation
Curatorial Statement
In the exhibition Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square,10 artists from Maryland Institute College of Art enter into a dialogue with a scenic and historic urban site in the center of Baltimore—Mount Vernon Place. The exhibition is part of the city-wide celebration of Festival of Maps, which was initiated by The Walters Art Museum exhibition, Maps: Finding our Place in the World. The conceptual starting point for the works of art included in Mount Vernon Place reflects the tradition of map making, represented in the Walters exhibition, which asserts that maps help find your place in world. While typically used as tools for navigation, maps can also be used to document history as well as creative and scientific exploration. It is because of this versatility that they provide a rich starting point for artistic inquiry.
Mount Vernon Place is a 200 year old site first proposed in 1809 to honor the combat victories of George Washington. The adjacent buildings were first constructed in the 1850s, most notably the Garrett-Jacobs mansion, now the Engineering Society, designed by Stanford White and John Russell Pope—architect of the National Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art—and The Walters Art Museum, designed by William Adams Delano. By the 1880s Mount Vernon was the most desirable residential area for Baltimore’s elite. Later, sculptures of Baltimore figures General Lafayette, John Eager Howard, and the controversial Roger Brooke Taney along with replicas of Antoine Louis Barye’s sculptures from the Louvre, were donated to Mount Vernon Place by the Walters collection. The work in Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square is site-specific, thoroughly contemporary, and not permanent. The works do not permanently alter the landscape, but rather impose a new interpretation of the space to inspire a reinvestigation of Baltimore’s past through dialogue, to better inform its future.
Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square begins with the notion that maps utilize an internally referencing code, using symbols to convert complex terrain into a concise reference document or object. Recognizing the power of this translation, the code claims the space that it is encoding, because it can exclude those not familiar with its language. One might ask: What is this desire to find our place in the world? Is it the need to define boundaries so that we know where we are coming from or where we are headed? Some pieces in the exhibit such as Resonance, Michael Ries and Dana Solano attempt to expose that desire by drawing attention to emotions relative to place. To do this, viewers are asked a series of questions, and their answers control sounds and visual patterns. Others such as Emma Fowler’s Right, Left, or Straight attempt to subvert traditional way-finding by providing a spherical guide with a twisting path, activating a potentially unending journey open in time, distance and without rules. Um-Gi Lee’s Exploring Mount Vernon Place uses a series of models that reduce the scale and dimension of buildings surrounding Mount Vernon Place, highlighting the intimacy gained when the monumental becomes accessible. Everyone, including children, can participate by collecting a stamp from each location on a provided “passport,” a take-home souvenir of their adventure. Similarly, Mackenzie Peck’s video installation The Park documents the process of traveling through Mount Vernon Place. By preserving that journey through video, it allows you to re-experience the action of moving through your world by focusing on the experience of a particular place. Essentially, you are invited to re-consider a mundane routine as a work of art.
Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods, and Mount Vernon is its geographical center. By remapping the site, many of these works of art attempt to bring the peripheral neighborhoods literally and metaphorically into the center. Baltimore Sweep Action is a street sweeping parade organized by Jonathon Taube. The parade will literally sweep the streets along it path toward Mount Vernon Place collecting debris which will then be preserved in a plexi-glass vitrine with the brooms used that will be erected as a modern day monument to community labor. For the duration of the exhibition, the statues of individuals are themselves transformed by Rebecca Nagle in her piece New Outfits. In New Outfits, garments made by five different Baltimore communities are placed on five of the monuments to individuals in Mount Vernon Square, made in response to the histories that they personify. The Knitted Bridge similarly engages Baltimore communities but seeks to unite four separate neighborhoods to the community of Mount Vernon with the creation and display of a work of art. Rachel Faller also seeks to unite old and new through the installation of a climbable playground structure in an otherwise formal setting. Two other works of art seek to redefine the nature of Mount Vernon Place. Lee B. Freeman’s Framing Mount Vernon Place surrounds the site with a golden fence, enclosing what is normally open, and temporarily denying access to it. Acting not only as a frame surround a painting, Framing Mount Vernon Place also prepares the viewer for something extraordinary—a public space is transformed into a dynamic contemporary art space. Last but not least, Dan Allende writes alternative historical accounts with Mapping History and goes on to question the authority of the history reflected in Mount Vernon Place’s statuary, landscape, and buildings.
In curating an exhibition of contemporary art in Mount Vernon Place, we have had to navigate the politics of our ‘gallery,’ a prized historic landmark. Creation and curation were simultaneous processes, an intellectual collaboration between creative minds striving to respect the legacy of mapping and the imprint of history, both of which inspire and form the experience of our environment. Understandably, by creating and showcasing interactive reinterpretations of the history of mapping, these works add new and sometimes subversive voices to a public arena. That voice is a struggle for power, a struggle that has always been the essence of this site, symbolized in the Revolutionary War’s fight for freedom. It is that voice Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square hopes to amplify now, juxtaposed with this historic site, along the quest to find our place.