In the month long run-up to Artscape, the city's annual outdoor festival of the arts that runs July 20-22, there are any number of shows to whet your appetite for the celebration to come. Here's a short list of intriguing exhibitions to check out:
At Maryland Art Place, the show Obsessive Aesthetics presents four artists whose works involve such incredibly labor-intensive fabrication techniques and attention to minute detail that they suggest a pathological compulsion. Yet they also exert a powerful allure.
All the exhibitors - Leslie Hirst, Renee van der Stelt, Larry Bamburg and Dawn Gavin - might be described as "process" artists, in the sense that the various activities involved in making their artworks are as important as the objects that ultimately result from them.
Hirst, for example, bases her glossy, enameled mixed-media paintings on the patterns fashioned from four-leaf clovers that she finds on walks.
Because four-leaf clovers are relatively rare compared to their three-leaf cousins, the "process" of searching out, gathering, sorting and collating the plants becomes as integral to Hirst's art-making as the painting, gluing and enameling that go into the final products - which, incidentally, are stunning.
I also was mesmerized by van der Stelt's drawings and sculptures based on azimuthal and stereographic map projections and Gavin's unbelievably precise pin-and-paper constructions, which are likewise inspired by the processes of surveying and mapping.
I can almost guarantee, however, that practically everybody's favorite in this show will be Bamburg's fantastic, whirling kinetic sculpture, which, depending on how you look at it, resembles nothing so much as a basketful of leaves blown by the wind or a giant, sticky spider's web.
Titled The Nature of Things: Handmade, Custom, 100 per cent, this site-specific installation, which the New York-based artist created over a span of several days just before the show opened, is surely one of the most unusual and original artworks to be seen in Baltimore in recent months.
Obsessive Aesthetics runs through July 21 at Maryland Art Place, 8 Market Place. Call 310-962-8565 or go to mdartplace .org.
Larry Scott
Larry Scott's spontaneous mixed-media drawings at Touchet Gallery in Fells Point seem to take inspiration from Willem de Kooning's figurative Abstract-Expressionism.
