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Human Conditions

For Immediate Release: May 25, 2005

For more information contact:
Julie Ann Cavnor 410-962-8565 / jcavnor@mdartplace.org

Maryland Art Place announces
Human Conditions

with participating artists: Emily J. Denlinger, Sarah Hobbs, Jason Hughes, Wes Kline, Kelly Maron, John Morris, Dan Schlapbach, Jacqueline Schlossman, Arthur Soontornsaratool, Allison Turrell, Edward Winter, Ed Worteck

“The twelve artists in Human Conditions represent a broad continuum of contemporary photographic practices and concerns.  The works in this exhibition range from highly constructed images that are every bit as fantastical as the worlds created by Hieronymus Bosch (and every bit as connected to real world concerns as those paintings), to quietly astute observations of landscapes, buildings and slices of space, to explorations of the human form that ask as many questions about the nature of photography as they do about what it means to be human.”- Laura Burns, Artist and Curator

Baltimore, MD – This is the time of year when most art venues prepare for the slow and quiet summer season when fewer people visit galleries. Thus, many venues plan for less challenging exhibitions, imagining that their audiences will be small and less concerned with significant issues. However, as proven in many important exhibitions in the region (such as the summer 2004 exhibit, Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, at the Baltimore Museum of Art), the summer season can provide an important opportunity to mount significant exhibitions that viewers otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to see. With this in mind, Maryland Art Place has prepared an important exhibition of dynamic artists using photography in a variety of ways, each sharing a commonality of exploring what it means to be human. Many of these artists are young and emerging, while several work in a variety of media, or live in other regions of the nation. The exhibition will be on view between May 31 and August 20, 2005, with a variety of special talks with many of the artists, to be announced shortly. We invite the public to attend the opening reception on June 2, starting at 7pm.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: The twelve artists in Human Conditions represent a broad continuum of contemporary photographic practices and concerns. The works in this exhibition range from highly constructed images that are every bit as fantastical as the worlds created by Hieronymus Bosch (and every bit as connected to real world concerns as those paintings), to quietly astute observations of landscapes, buildings and slices of space, to explorations of the human form that ask as many questions about the nature of photography as they do about what it means to be human.A sly playfulness functions almost as a material support in many of the photographs, and this subtle accumulation of odd real world convergences and almost overwrought studio concoctions suggests that beauty, humor and gravity are not mutually exclusive. Ed Worteck shows us a partially wrapped barn that might please (or disappoint) Christo and Jean Claude while Wes Kline’s frozen figures literally point out photography’s ability to stop action and time. Kelly Maron asks us to look again and again and again—and although each look brings us more photographic description it moves us no closer to reading a psyche in a pair of eyes. Emily Denlinger treats the very serious subject of what it means to be female in the 21st century but makes us laugh so hard that we cry by combining the high tech world of digital imaging with the low tech mystique of homemade paper dolls. And in Jacqueline Schlossman’s Baltimore, it is the gentle digital tweaking of color that asks us to reconsider a speed hump and a now elegant pile of trash.

And of course there is the undeniable power of beauty at work: in Dan Schlapbach’s world that’s made to spin by a slow shutter speed and shallow depth of field, in the minutely descriptive detail of Edward Winter’s warmly cold landscapes, in the long slow roll of Jason Hughes’ rotating head, in the repetition of Sarah Hobbs’ candy wrappers and John Morris’ pathetic suburban bushes, in Allison Turrell’s nuclear Benedryl idyll and Arthur Soontornsaratool’s colorfully false memories.

Each one of these artist’s work can stand forcefully alone. Yet there is a different kind of satisfaction to be had and a different set of questions raised when images begin to converse with other images, and when the opposing camps of the seemingly real and the blatantly fictitious come together to make something else. In this time of divisive extremes, it is heartening to see opposites attract.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

EMILY DENLINGER
Denlinger received a MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a BFA from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH. During spring 2005, she worked as a teaching assistant to Piper Shepard in an introductory class in Fibers at the Maryland Institute College of Art, as well as in classes with Steve Pauley and Irna Jay. She has exhibited her work in photography during recent years in a number of art venues in Ohio and Maryland.

SARAH HOBBS
Sarah Hobbs received a BFA in Art History and an MFA in Photography from the University of Georgia. Her first solo museum exhibition was earlier this year at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee.  She has taught photography at the University of Georgia and Georgia State University. Hobbs currently lives and works in Atlanta.

JASON HUGHES
Jason Hughes grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and moved to Baltimore in 1996, at age eighteen. In 1999, he and a collaborator opened an artists’ run exhibition space called Gallery Four.  While spending several years renovating the Gallery Four, Hughes along with a handful of other artists occupied individual studios and a shared living space within the gallery.  Within one year Gallery Four was recognized as “Baltimore’s Best Proof of Contemporary Art Life” by the City Paper and after their second year, Gallery Four was invited to organize a satellite exhibition in Miami, Florida for the inaugural Art Basel in Miami Beach, FL in 2002. Since 1999, Hughes has organized 11 exhibitions, independently and collaboratively for Gallery Four as well as for other local venues. Hughes works in a variety of mediums but focuses on drawing, sculpture, and photography. His work is visually coded with the dynamics between our physical bodies and space, however, he’s more acutely concerned with how our personal and collectively psychology is affected by our perception of space and experience. By utilizing architecture and landscape in his work he builds a metaphor that illustrates a psychological and emotional attentiveness that is incorporated with spatial planning, design, and self-awareness. His work is a compilation of objects and images familiar to everyday experiences, however his manipulations are also intended to provoke subconscious feelings and memories.

WES KLINE
Born in 1974, Wes Kline studied literature at Grove City College as well as photography and art history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  He later pursued an MFA in photography and video, graduating in 2005 from the University of Illinois in Chicago, IL. He currently splits time between Chicago and Baltimore, and exhibits his photographs and videos throughout the nation.

KELLY MARON
Kelly Maron is a photographer living in the Chicago area.  For the past seven years she has been a photo and arts instructor in Virginia and Illinois.  Maron’s education spans several states and schools, beginning with fine arts at the University of Maryland, photography at the Corcoran in DC and art education at Virginia Commonwealth University where she earned her BFA magna cum laude in 1998. Maron is completing a MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005, graduating with a concentration in photography.  In addition to her academic record, Maron remains active within the art community: her photographs have been exhibited in many galleries throughout the country. Recently she wrote two articles on contemporary photographers for inclusion into “The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography” published by Routledge, envisioned as the first comprehensive compilation of information about all aspects of photography in the Twentieth century.  Maron currently teaches at a high school on the North Shore of the Chicago, IL, though expects taking a sabbatical next year to focus more fully on her photography.

JOHN MORRIS
John Morris was born and raised in the south. Morris earned his BFA from the University of Georgia and moved to Baltimore in 1998 to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where he received a MFA in 2001. Morris has been consistently working and showing in the region since that time, expanding beyond his work in photography, to include drawing, sculpture and digital output devices as part of mixed media and new media works. Morris’ work reflects his interest in contemporary social, political and cultural events, and many of his works incorporate these issues to encourage a more interactive experience for his audiences. Currently, Morris is teaching and working at Goucher College and the Maryland Institute, College of Art.

DAN SCHLAPBACH
Dan Schlapbach received his MFA from Indiana University in 1996. He is currently Associate Professor of Fine Arts and the Director of the Photography Program at Loyola College in Baltimore. Schlapbach’s work has been exhibited throughout the nation, including a presentation at the 1996 New York Film Festival.

JACQUELINE SCHLOSSMAN
Schlossman is an artist currently living in Baltimore who has worked to document area sites and views that would otherwise be overlooked or ignored. Her works include images shot in Tide Point, Fells Point and Bolton Hill. Schlossman’s images provide compelling ways of reconsidering landscape and an artists’ participation in the image making process.

ARTHUR SOONTORNSARATOOL
Arthur Soontornsaratool was born in Baltimore in 1980, is currently lives in Annapolis, MD. In the spring of 2005, he received a BA in photography, with a minor in art history and theory from University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This fall he will begin work towards a MFA in photography and digital imaging at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Soontornsaratool’s works have exhibited in Maryland, New York, and Virginia, and often explore the many possibilities of performance and the constructed environment in order to examine theatricalities of modern society.

ALLISON TURRELL
Allison Lincoln Turrell was born in 1974, the year of All in the Family, Barry Manilow’s Mandy, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, and Nixon’s resignation. The youngest of four children, Allison was raised in an extended family of depression era Germans and Irish in Connecticut and upstate New York. Turrell studied literature, feminism, and sexual politics as an undergraduate at the University of Southern Maine and worked as a chef while writing short stories and poems. On a whim after a cross-country road trip, she settled in Austin, TX in 1998. After a lifetime of snapshots and two chance meetings with Nan Goldin, Allison turned down two graduate school opportunities in creative writing and women’s studies to pursue photography in 2000. By day she worked in educational publishing and at night studied commercial and portrait photography and digital imaging. She most recently received her Masters of Arts degree in Digital Arts and will continue onto the MFA program in Photography and Digital Imaging at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited in Austin at Gallery Lombardi: Collections Mas! Mas! Mas!, 2001, PhotoAustin III, 2002, and Erotica, 2003. She’s also exhibited at 5x17 in Washington, DC in 2004 and just finished her mixed media installation Nothing But Blue Skies at MICA. She splits her time between Baltimore and Austin, TX.

EDWARD WINTER
Edward Winter was, born in 1977 in Frederick, MD and is an emerging artist currently living in Baltimore.   As a 2004 graduate, Winter studied Sociology and Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He received a Maryland State Arts Council, Individual Artist Award in 2005 for his work in photography. Winter has worked as a teacher for Art With A Heart Inc., a non-profit arts-outreach program, and currently works as a Museum Specialist at the United States Department of State, Art Bank Program. 

ED WORTECK
Ed Worteck is currently a professor of Art and Communication at Goucher College, in Baltimore, MD.  After receiving a MFA in 1980 from the University of Maryland, College Park, Worteck began exhibiting his work throughout Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC, in both group and individual exhibitions. His pieces also appear in a number of permanent collections including a group of works at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Worteck has concentrated in landscape photography since his career began thirty years ago, however has most recently begun to experiment with  panoramic angles as a fresh mode of expression.  He currently resides in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  

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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 never an admission charge. For more details, please contact MAP’s Executive Director,Julie Ann Cavnor at 410.962.8565 or jcavnor@mdartplace.org.