Standing at the corner of Maryland and North avenues, Megan Hildebrandt trained her tiny video camera on the passing pedestrians.
"I'm trying to make you feel safe and secure," she spouted yesterday in a mildly creepy way. "You're under my watchful gaze. I'm on every street corner."
Her outfit completed the project: The 23-year-old performance artist wore a helmet with a blinking blue light, an oversized "Believe" sticker and a Baltimore police shield.
Hildebrandt's turn as the human embodiment of the city Police Department's surveillance cameras was part of the fifth annual Transmodern Festival - the Baltimore art community's showcase of experimental theater, nontraditional creations and performance installations.
There was a man with a suitcase full of Wonder Bread who invited visitors to make sculptures out of the soft, moldable loaves. There was a pair of artists on stilts, wearing ball gowns made of black garbage bags and babbling in French accents as they swept up cigarette butts, candy wrappers and empty soda bottles. And there was a trio of mimes silently playing rock-paper-scissors in an alley.
Giving tours of the various installations in the Station North Arts District were ostentatiously outfitted guides who called themselves the Pedestrian Service Exquisite.
"It's especially exciting to have a street festival like this mixing with people who would not go to an art museum. You're asking people to make great leaps on their way to McDonald's or the Family Dollar store," said Hildebrandt, whose police surveillance camera performance drew strange looks - and more than a few angry outbursts - from people walking through the neighborhood. "It's also nice to know that there's a festival dedicated to performance art that doesn't fit anywhere else."
Yesterday's walking tour revolved around the Load of Fun Galleries on West North Avenue, just a block from the eastern end of the Howard Street Bridge. Within a three-block radius of the gallery building were 25 individual art presentations, as well as several roaming performers.
Almost everyone visiting the art tour began with a stop at the table of Melissa Ultra Sharlat, a 41-year-old singer also known as the "Compliment Fairy." There, visitors picked up a map, a "passport" to collect stamps at the different art installations and, of course, a compliment or two from the woman in the pink ball gown, sparkly tiara and pale purple wings.
