Leah Bailis Dawn Gavin Courtney Jordan Bridget Sue Lambert Isabel Manalo Aili Schmeltz Kazue Taguchi
Ethnography of No Place
presented by the art + art history department
Goucher College
R o s e n b erg G a l l e ry
Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places are thought to reaffirm our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of grounded identity. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
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When we can move quickly and easily from place to place, and every place seems much like every other, where do we belong? In an increasingly globalized culture, a growing sense of placelessness makes it more and more difficult for us to place our own identity. The works in Ethnography of No Place are studies of geographical dislocation and its attendant complexities, as well as antidotes to the prevailing psychological need to belong somewhere. Each artist investigates the effects of globalization and placelessness in terms of light, perception, distance, memory, and the body. They give us fragments, vignettes, invented landscapes and environments that explore the contradictory notions of here and there, architecture and geography, and place and no place.
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Courtney Jordan’s drawings in ink and graphite on Mylar rethink architectural forms and structures from the human-built environment. Her work uses familiar details from built structures and urban industrial infrastructures that are encoded with social and emotional values. In her restructuring of these elements, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, leading us to re-evaluate our sense of place in this energetic, overbuilt, complex world.
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Isabel Manalo is fascinated by photographs and their ability to capture a whole narrative in one frame. Changing and translating a photograph into a painting seems to hold the moment in a way that makes it even more distant and melancholy. Currently, her paintings explore the relationship between her two young children and use both interior and exterior spaces. The negative white space in her work becomes a source of an almost apocalyptic white light in order to create a picture where the positive is emerging from that light.
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Using a 30-year-old dollhouse built by her grandfather, Bridget Sue Lambert stages and photographs vignettes of domesticity, tension, loss, and presence-versus-absence. She explores the physical and psychological spaces that we inhabit in relationships and how those spaces are disrupted or abandoned when a relationship ends.
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Leah Bailis constructs inaccessible spaces—a chain-link fence, a windowless façade—with surfaces that act as protective barriers between public and private areas. These barriers highlight the tension between the things considered worth protecting or containing and the things that need to be protected against.
Dawn Gavin’s interest in maps and related documents suggests a long-term preoccupation with boundaries and demarcation zones (both real and imagined), specifically those associated with the self and the formation of identity. She is interested in the space between places, and so her work charts the uncertain terrains and cartographic landscapes that exist precariously at the threshold between the visible and the invisible, simultaneously lost and found.
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Aili Schmeltz’s installations look at the ideas of comfort, contradictions, and connections through the lens of her daily life. Often employing mundane materials, she creates room-sized installations that respond to the space and simultaneously reference architecture and landscape.
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Kazue Taguchi’s installations, made from reflective materials such as Mylar and mirrors, create magical landscapes in a built environment. When light hits the surface, there is a complex interplay of reflections and shadows. Taguchi is interested in creating works with light that produce both a relaxing and sublime space as well as an experience of visual phenomena. The flow of air as one walks by, for instance, is an integral part of this piece, activating reflections that shimmer and dance across the wall.
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By blurring the boundaries between landscape and architecture and scrambling the distinctions between real and fictitious, these works explore the experience of place, the melding of places. These artists are less interested in traveling from place to place, however, than in examining the mental territory left behind and how the journey becomes an integral part of the traveler: the mountains, the desert, the rivers, the buildings, the parks, the beauty, the joy, the desire, the pain, the emptiness, the isolation—the accumulated life experiences of geographical places and psychological spaces.
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List of works Courtney Jordan
Leah Bailis
Genetic Marker, 2008 Ink on Mylar 5.25” x 7.25”
Fence, 2007 Cardboard and paint 59” x 36” x 30”
Audiograph 2, 2008 Ink on Mylar 9” x 6”
Dawn Gavin
Isabel Manalo Azalea, 2008 Water-soluble oil on gesso board 24” x 36” Chandelier, 2008 Water-soluble oil on gesso board 30” x 30”
Bridget Sue Lambert Always End the Conversation First Digital pigment print, edition: 5 20” x 30”
Subduction II, 2008 Installed wall drawing, acrylic, paper, and insect pins Dimensions variable
Aili Schmeltz String Mountain, 2008 String, wood and nails Dimensions variable
Kazue Taguchi Llum d’onada, 2008 Mylar, glue, light, and air Dimensions variable
Hoping to Spend the Night Digital pigment print, edition: 5 20” x 30”
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C8368-03/08
Leah Bailis Dawn Gavin Courtney Jordan Bridget Sue Lambert Isabel Manalo Aili Schmeltz Kazue Taguchi
Ethnography of No Place March 24 – April 30, 2008
Reception: Friday, April 11, 6-8 p.m. Directions
Baltimore beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus. Gallery Hours
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays Call 410.337.6333 for evening and weekend hours. The Rosenberg Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.
www.goucher.edu/rosenberg