If there is a common theme linking the finalists for the Janet & Walker Sondheim Prize, it may be that the methods of creating art can be as important as the art itself.
"This year is a very process-oriented, installation-based type of show," says Gary Kachadourian, visual arts coordinator with the Baltimore Office for Promotion in the Arts, which created the prize to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Artscape in 2006. "It is a good mix of people, representing a good mix of ideas."
Those ideas include finding the artistic potential in dirt, photocopied books, recycled materials, barren parking lots, a polar bear's heart rate and even vintage cartoon character Mr. Magoo.
The finalists were selected from more than 300 applicants living in the Baltimore/Washington region. One will be selected by a jury for the $25,000 prize on July 11.
Baltimore Development Cooperative
Art and activism meet. The cooperative, founded in 2005 by three Maryland Institute College of Art grads - Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester and Nicholas Wisniewski - has made its most prominent mark on the city through Participation Park in East Baltimore. Created out of a vacant lot, the park offers urban farming and a place for the community to socialize.
The cooperative's activities are represented by two items in the Sondheim exhibit. Outdoors on the Baltimore Museum of Art terrace sits a geodesic dome made from a colorful collection of recycled materials, housing a table and benches where museum visitors are welcome to spend some time.
Inside the BMA, a large sculptural object confronts viewers, suggesting a giant toy construction crane that is about to roll through the museum on its cardboard tracks. Also made up of recycled bits and pieces, the crane doesn't just symbolize over-development. Closer inspection reveals what Berzofsky describes as "a montage of different buildings in Baltimore," fashioned out of odds and ends that evoke a jumbled, menacing view of our own cityscape.
Leslie Furlong
Baltimore-based Furlong, 40, takes a look at contemporary landscape in distinctive ways, inspired in part by Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century.
A two-channel video installation, Tokyo to Osaka, offers the view out of rain-streaked train windows. Periodically, the sight of gray buildings is interrupted by sudden bursts of green. "There are these tiny agrarian plots of land every now and then," Furlong says. "I wanted to riff off the flashes of agrarian land in this deep urban landscape."
