June 19, 2010|By Mary Carole McCauley, The Baltimore Sun
There's a giant wooden pyramid that emits sounds when you rest your palm on the top, and an evocative, nearly wordless film about a working-class Baltimore neighborhood.
The exhibition includes a video of a cloud-filled sky accompanied by a soundtrack of whale sounds, and a series of photographs that were inspired by Tweets. If you look hard, you might even find a couple of paintings in a new exhibition of the work of the seven finalists for the 2010 Sondheim Prize in the visual arts. But canvases of any type are few and far between.
The contestants are competing for a $25,000 award, among the most lucrative prizes for the arts in the Baltimore area. For the fifth annual contest, a three-member panel of experts based in New York and Chicago winnowed a pool of 291 applicants from the Mid-Atlantic down to seven. The winner will be announced July 10.
Finalists get to show their work at the museum for six weeks. Though the five men and two women were scrambling to finish their artwork in time for the exhibit opening this weekend, each of them took a few moments to discuss their lives and their art.
Leah Cooper, 43, of Baltimore
From the time she was a kid growing up in Columbia, Leah Cooper has never liked being the center of attention.
Cooper's twin sister, Laurie, was naturally outgoing. When it came to meeting new people or making a presentation, Laurie lead the way, while Leah trailed quietly behind.
Because the sisters were often together, Laurie's social adeptness left Leah conveniently free to focus on the things that interested her — objects that most other people might consider peripheral, utilitarian or even boring. While others marveled at the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean, Leah was drawn irresistibly to the most minuscule pebbles on the beach.
Now she dedicates her career to putting those overlooked parts of experience front and center. Cooper spent four days inside her exhibition space at the Baltimore Museum of Art, using pencil marks to lightly trace the marks left by shadows on the walls. She installed small, clear Plexiglas shelves to add a further dimension to the space, and mirrors to throw up elongated rectangles of light.
The effect is contemplative and serene. Visitors find themselves focusing on the line where the carpeting meets the wall, or on a small, black security camera hanging from a corner of the ceiling like a drowsing bat.
"I've always been drawn to the everyday elements of a space," Cooper says. "When I'm at home, I can't even install a shelf or place a potted plant on the shelf without taking into account the angle at which the light is coming in through the window."
Ryan Hackett, 34, of Kensington
When Ryan Hackett learned he was going to be a finalist for the Sondheim Prize for the second year in a row, he decided that his installation would include two large-scale canvases painted in peaceful shades of blue and white, making him the only one of the finalists to work primarily in the most traditional of artistic mediums.
"It was the riskiest decision I could make," he says, adding that painting uses a different part of his brain than does crafting an installation or shooting a video.
"An installation is more of a planned-out thing," he says. "I have to decide how I can build this thing, what materials to use, where to put the nails. Painting for me is much more of-the-moment. It's nonverbal. I lose my sense of time and space. It requires a leap of faith."
Hackett experiments in all three genres; his work for the 2009 show, for instance, was largely installation- based, while his 2010 show incorporates a video.
As a child growing up in Beltsville, Hackett was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. His school years were characterized by a series of brief, intense, intellectual fixations: scuba diving, science, the natural world, philosophy and surfing. He clearly remembers declaring in elementary school that he would be "an underwater installation artist" when he grew up.
"And I really have become that, in a lot of ways," Hackett says. "I look at the art world as a salad. If I were to do just one thing, it would be like only eating the lettuce. I need a more complex combination of flavors."
Matthew Janson, 28, of Baltimore
A sculpture hunkers down in the center of Matthew Janson's exhibition space. The piece includes part of a camelback chair, a lace doily and fragments of broken mirrors.
It also has a mysterious title — "Parlor Rat" — which turns out to have been Janson's nickname when he was growing up on a Minnesota dairy farm.
While nothing about this piece brings to mind cows, milk pails or even rats, the experience of working with animals left the artist keenly aware of life's robustness and fragility.
