BmoreArt

The series speaks to the cruel irony of that aforementioned pastoral romanticism—the desire to occupy or consume nature inevitably destroys it. The seeds of America’s ubiquitous highways can be traced back largely to Robert Moses’ system of parkways, intended not for daily commuting en masse, but as “Sunday drive” leisure destinations in and of themselves for the privileged few who could afford the shiniest, newest toy: the personal automobile. The original parkways represented high-speed sightseeing—landscape made commodifiable moving image in competition with cinema. That image was later used to sell the “best of both worlds” myth of the suburbs, and the rest is infamous history. 

Asphalt has now covered so much of Maryland—think the veritable moats of it surrounding the allegedly “riot proof” fortress-campus of my alma mater, UMBC—that it has become a defining feature of the regional landscape. (Read Bart O’Reilly’s excellent conversation with Rebecca Rivas Rogers about how America’s paving obsession and the resulting time spent in cars staring at subtly different blandscapes changed the work of the Irish painter). Think of all those poor critters we’ve killed to make our lives more inconvenient! 

Liaretidis’ memento mori are haunting showstoppers, and the above train (or, er, highway) of thought they inspired leads to two important revelations. Young Blood is so very vital to Baltimore’s role as a “college town” with a functional discursive ecosystem—without survey shows like this, it’s unlikely most of these artists in their far-flung academic enclaves would ever be in the same room. But mostly, all this sprawl angst reminds me how lucky we are to have Amy Cavanaugh at the helm of MAP, who Cara Ober rightly identified as “one of Baltimore’s hardest working cultural leaders.”

What curator dreams of diligently schlepping themselves from visitor parking lot to visitor parking lot of glamorous destinations ranging from scenic Arbutus to College Park? Someone please make this woman the world’s best mixtape for all the hours I imagine she loses in beltway traffic for the sake of art and artists. 

Cavanaugh confessed to me at the opening that some years it’s hard to wrangle Young Blood into a cohesive exhibition, “because that’s not really what it’s about.” But this edition feels unified by the demanding objecthood of its components. Almost nothing in this show is something that could be enjoyed as richly if it were a JPEG. The works’ materiality and scale and how they relate to one another are vital. Take, for example, the delicate plaster body parts of UMBC’s IMDA grad Elly Kalantari. Like Liaretidis’ work, they’re life-size casts, meaning that from a distance one wall of a dozen discs—each a different skin tone and hung with ample breathing room—reads as an abstract Pantone gradient of flesh. When one approaches them one-by-one, they’re revealed to be disembodied ears. 

Photos likewise don’t do justice to the experience of viewing the figurative digital prints of Ann Zellhofer, another IMDA grad. The monochrome silhouettes float ambiguously above Liaretidi’s deer. Are they falling? Swimming? They’re rendered like topographical maps, implying a relationship with a similar scanning technology to that which produced the casts for roadkill below, but are also perspectively disorienting as viewers walk around them—nudes that complicate and confuse the gaze art history has problematized. 

Nearby, UMD grad Dan Ortiz Leizman’s video loop “sonogram.trinity1945” casts a more sinister connotation over its neighbors. The AI-generated video seems to conflate prenatal sonograms and atomic mushroom clouds, as if the machine brain had tried to grasp humanity’s #Barbenheimer double-feature mania last year by exclusively combining the last lines of Barbie’s gynecological dialog with the latter’s special effects climax. In a gallery of so much other work referencing the body, I started to view the show like a post-apocalyptic anthropologist. How will the technology of the next century perceive the corpses and detritus left charred or contorted by the technology of the last one?

In this context, the ceramics from MICA Mount Royal School of Art’s Grusha Sabharwal start to read as organic forms made unfamiliar—burnt to a crisp and mangled, teasing moments of recognition, slowly being consumed by some petroleum-eating day-glo lichen that’s been mutated by radiation. It turns out that tension between the familiar/alien and painterly glaze application grew out of a studio practice that became more experimental as an adaptation to a new context and the sense of displacement it inspired. Sabharwal trained as a painter in her native New Delhi, and began exploring other materials in response to her move to Baltimore. 

There’s a similar story behind the work of IMDA’s Andrew Liang, who is—surprisingly—the only artist in Young Blood that I knew before seeing the show. Liang’s work has always been wonderfully, unabashedly weird. Think air fresheners with perky little butts or neon drawings of sexy potatoes inspired by chips packaging. It’s always been impeccably crafted and pop–adjacent enough to be accessible to a general public without necessarily being “legible” in a narrative sense. 

Grad school, with its prodding towards the explainable, has changed that, I think. This body of work, Home New World—including lovely, washy illustrations accompanied by misspelled text indicative of learning a new language—positions his larger oeuvre as one of alienation and bemusement at assimilating (or not) into American culture when the artist emigrated from Taiwan to Texas at age thirteen. A mobile of Americana kitsch delicately carved and graphically-painted—trucks, Jesus, guns, fast food—swirls around a cramped gallery in the back of MAP like an overwhelming amount of information to process with adolescent wonder. It’s easily the most “charming” and approachable work in the show. 

My one curatorial critique, actually, is that I wish this could’ve been installed in the storefront! With its references to vernacular consumer culture, Liang’s pop-y constellation of recognizable objects would’ve been a happy neighbor to Saratoga Street’s discount shops. It’s graphic enough to read at a distance but fun enough to encourage viewers to get up close. 

Instead, MICA’s Rhinehart alumna Lika (Yuyun) Su’s organic colonnade-like installation “Drips of Me” greets visitors through the sidewalk-fronting windows, a bit removed from the other artists. It’s a big piece that obviously requires breathing room, but given its monochrome white palette maybe doesn’t function as a visual anchor for the exhibition. And I don’t think that’s how the work is necessarily trying to relate to any space, despite its architectural qualities and scale. I wish more viewers had been “forced” into close contact with it in the smaller gallery, because it’s really all about surface detail and subtle shifts of color and texture than the grand gesture as a whole. Complex webs of meshes, resins, clay, and other unidentifiable off-white materials merge and criss-cross like some cross section of unknowable anatomy. It’s an artwork that maybe doesn’t beckon one in with a sleek skin, but does tempt you to stay—visually tracing the sinews usually hidden beneath the epidermis and looking for patterns or surprises. 

That up-close intimacy certain artworks demand is one of the recurring curatorial motifs on display at MAP—a space that could feel hard to fill under less experienced leadership. But there’s a special delight in approaching an artwork you can’t quite make out from across the room and being surprised when you zoom in. 

Evelyn Lee, who recently graduated from MICA’s Photography + Media & Society MFA program, is showing a series of Polaroids she shot in Taiwan that almost make you feel guilty when you get “too” close to make out the desaturated, slightly out-of-focus images. In one, a hooded model in an all-white garment that looks ceremonial sits with a noose around her neck. The Polaroids are arranged almost like a storyboard, but the narrative is unclear. They feel alternately ritualistic and voyeuristic, reminding me of the 2009 controversy when HBO’s Big Love featured an extremely creepy all-white Mormon sacrament. 

Trying to recall details of some of the images that I didn’t get clear photos of, I revisited them on Lee’s website. I was struck by how differently experiencing the images digitally was from the experience of the objects in the gallery. Aside from scale and the quality of back lighting, context matters. The internet is, after all, where everyone goes to look at things they wouldn’t in public—to be a detached voyeur, zooming-in on the details of the other. The act of having to physically position your body in front of an artwork to experience it fully is a good reminder of why all those “online viewing rooms” galleries hyped during COVID totally sucked. It’s also another good reminder of why we need Young Blood to see these art objects in the flesh! 

On the walk home that night, I had that strange post-opening sensation of having been satisfied by an exhibition but still wanting more. How many great MFA thesis shows have I missed over the years that just didn’t make the cut for Young Blood? All because it’s a pain in the ass to get to College Park? I wish more of these suburban universities would take a cue from UMBC’s IMDA program and open satellite facilities in the city, or even collaborate to do a larger-scale version of an exhibition like this. 

I’m always struck by the enormous potential Baltimore, its surroundings, and their institutions have—bringing together great minds from around the world, only to be somewhat siloed once they get here. When I was pursuing my own MFA at UMBC, for example, I don’t think I ever interacted with artists in other grad programs, save for a handful of MICA students who were my neighbors in the city. I would’ve loved more opportunities for exchange with students at other suburban campuses. Our region’s disparate MFA programs might never have the kind of organic interactions that happen in other, more compact college towns or the great classical university cities—where students bump into one another walking to the local coffee shop or dive bar and strike up conversations—but events like Young Blood give me hope. MAP is one of those city-center institutions that offers a site of discourse, and seeing the newly-minted Masters of the Fine Arts mingle at the opening left me feeling optimistic. I might not have seen every MFA thesis this year (or most years), but based on Young Blood, the kids are more than alright.

Young Blood is on view at Maryland Art Place through Saturday, September 7, 2024