Anybody who has ever wanted to have a spaceship in the living room is going to take one look at R.L. Croft's "Silo" and start planning a way to steal it. The large metal sculpture does resemble its namesake's grain storage receptacle, one of those two- and three-story turrets familiar to anybody who grew up near or around farm country, but its painstaking assemblage--silver metal tubes riveted together with various other colored pieces of scrap metal--makes the sculpture look more like the tail end of a rocket's fuselage, the part that gets jettisoned right before some manned capsule is shot into deep-space orbit. With its four finlike legs and pointed oval doorway, "Silo" could be some found scrap of Mercury-era NASA detritus turned into a Quonset hut-qua-jungle gym place to chill out. And that sense of reused material and re-purposing is a nutshell overview of the Whole Gallery's All That Remains curatorial vision.
Organized by local artist (and City Paper contributing artist) Emily C-D, Remains features works from found and otherwise salvaged materials. The show is in part informed by C-D's past year working as a "transformation specialist" for Civic Works, the Baltimore-based AmeriCorps program that focuses on revitalizing areas of urban blight through community-based projects, such as turning abandoned lots into gardens. Recycling isn't merely something to be done with glass and paper for this 24-year-old Maryland Institute College of Art graduate; it's a creative strategy, one that the 13 Remains artists and one collective tackled with verve and wit.
Witness Tony Smith's "Nothing Old Is Useless (When You Can Add Six Strings and Tune It to a Chord and Sing a Song)." Smith took six different hollow bodies--a pot, film canister, some empty tortoise shells--and turned them into mandolinlike instruments by affixing wooden necks, bridges, various tuning pegs, and strings. They're installed on the wall together, hanging by string as if pots in a kitchen, which accents their pragmatic creation: Simply grab whatever strumming tool you need when the time comes.
Other artists made instruments, too, and they're some of the show's more impressive works. Abu the Flutemaker turns a metal wash basin and some two-by-fours into an upright "First Bass Harp," while Lee Conah makes "Tea Can Guitar" and "Tape Can Banjo" out of some empty Arizona iced tea cans in the former and an old Scotch tape roll in the latter. These two instruments are gorgeously detailed, with "Tea Can Guitar" having a red, orange, and yellow starburst, glitter-lined headpiece with an inlaid Madonna figure, its slim body using five cans as sound chambers.
Other artists pursue a less functional route. Rachel Bradley takes a smorgasbord of found objects and turns them into variations on framed knickknacky displays in her series of "Hellboxes." Some act as mere middle fingers in the domesticated eye of such traditional decorative ideas: One features a toy dinosaur, a dismembered female doll, and cutout coital details from skin magazines; another mounts what looks like a phallic cake pan with girlie star-shaped happy face stickers and a toy cherub. Others are less obvious with their transgressions. For one, Bradley collages an old business book with magazine images--featuring two women talking to a man--and with highlighted lines and handwritten notes slyly compares selling and marketing to sexual negotiations. What's most fun about these hit/miss pieces is that Bradley is indiscriminate in her sources: A found anything could be transformed into a "Hellbox" idea.
The CanCollective's "The Dumpster Circus" takes a similarly anything's-game approach. The site-specific two-wall mural incorporates old tools, rusted pieces of metal, what could be discarded swing-set scraps, glass bottles, rakes, an old wok, beyond-useful mechanical parts, hangers, and saw blades with some paint and turns out a kaleidoscope of a busy, swirling image. Some component regions suggest something from the natural world--organized metal parts as a school of fish, bent hangers sweeping upward like birds in flight, oceans of colors congealing into a metal-lined totemic animal--but the installation in toto is too shape-shifting to settle into one specific narrative, instead feeling like a psychedelic scene that might adorn the cover of a 1970s Hermann Hesse paperback.
Local artist Don Griffin may be Baltimore's Rauschenbergian figure of just this sort of work. A longtime scavenger of items for re-purposing into his art, Griffin also has the wry eye to tap into his so-called trash materials for their past histories. His five pieces here split the difference between personality portraits and abstracted history lessons: Each piece is an organized item collage that feels like it speaks to a very specific persona while inviting you to travel back to their times and places.
Anchoring a group show to such a open-ended idea as found materials is why the work itself varies so wildly, from Croft's superbly made "Silo" to Griffin's enigmatic constructions. And your response to the show is sinusoidal, liking some work, disliking other, and feeling absolutely nothing about a fair share. It's a polarizing choice--the method behind the show obviously comes from a sincere place, but not everybody turns it into something visually compelling.
When somebody does, though, its hard to miss. The strongest two pieces in the show are also the most conceptually simple and sly. Elizabeth Morisette's "Platelet" and "Sponge Worthy" both take a large quantity of something--bright red plastic rings and colored sponges, respectively--and mount them as densely packed upside-down rhomboid figures that are not even shy about suggesting the pudenda. Take what you want from the hemoglobin and birth-control associations of their titles, the pieces mirthfully extrapolate abstract-expressionism's color layering into 3-D blobs just to see what happens. In these two cases Morisette achieves cheeky assemblage as resonant abstraction, and the works themselves transcend the materials protocol of the show's organizing theme.
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