This September, the conversation is corporal with three exhibitions at two local galleries. The Compound is staging a group show with The Misfire: Engorgement and Constipation and Night Owl Gallery, as part of its final booking, is displaying: Vivisepultura by Rory Holcomb and Parallel Play by Jonah Brock.
Together, these exhibits cover swollen bodies, buried bodies, conjoined bodies, bodies at rest, and bodies in motion. And the artists prove no matter how close the subject matter, it offers vast realms to explore.
The Misfire: Engorgement and Constipation at The Compound
Through September 5 – 28, 2025
Hours: Friday – Sunday, 12-4 p.m.
Although some Baltimoreans may pigeonhole The Compound as a music venue, the organization launched a multi-disciplinary arts program earlier this year. The venue’s gallery is already showing its second exhibit, called The Misfire: Engorgement and Constipation.
Featuring works by six multidisciplinary artists—Christian Amaya Garcia, Colin Klavins, Christine McDonald, Angelica Neyra, VILLAGER, and Echo Youyi Yan—the exhibit is “drawing from queer phenomenology and critiques of productivity.”
“Engorgement is the pent-up, unresolved pain that has not yet erupted outward; it is pain that progresses toward outward expression due to excess. Constipation, on the other hand, is the inward-directed pain caused by accumulated tension that has not been released; it is systemic failure and marginal pain triggered by blockage and stagnation,” the curatorial statement says. “One expands outward toward pain; the other collapses inward into dysfunction.”
Sound artist Colin Scott Klavins presents a video of himself playing a trumpet while blindfolded, titled “Sound Painting.” Omitting the audio track from the video, the artist-described “silent sound art piece” explores the awkward gap between understanding, perception, and communication, satirically presenting a creative musical gesture thwarted by barriers of the artist’s own making. Both frustrating and humorous, Klavins’ message is applicable to individual relationships but also to a larger zeitgeist where information consistently falls on deaf ears.
Christian Amaya Garcia’s sculpture from a paint roller, an extension pole, and a piece of drywall could be mistaken by a humorless viewer for a set of tools stored in the back room of this industrial-chic building. Instead this cheeky sculpture functions as a meditation on the banality of painting, as a process and perhaps as an art medium.
Angelica Neyra’s “Mother’s Mother’s Mother,” is a stack of bathroom scales with a plastic apple on top. Leaning in close, you can see the scales boasting very high numbers, referencing the obesity epidemic in America and ironically topping it with faux food which appears to be healthy but in reality offers no nutritional value.
The cute but menacing sculpture “Sitz” by Echo Youyi Yan includes a piece of stainless steel hanging wire, that appears like one of the functional chains running along the windows. The steel wire suspends a foxtail made of ruddy, synthetic fur, reminiscent of taxidermy, road kill, and luxury garments.
Christine McDonald’s “Centennial Rust,” inflates a plastic sheet to look like a car, with fans in place of wheels. The sculpture undulates and expands, engorged in place, buffeted by fans. Full of hot air, but going nowhere, this vehicle functions like an inflatable cartoon, simultaneously recognizing the power of the automobile but rendering it useless except as decoration.
Several pieces maintain this sculptural play, altering the perception of any viewer willing to focus on the message in the materials. VILLAGER’s “labe pata/ what’s under your trousers?,” a black twisted canvas with African coral beads, is encased by metal chains and hangs from the ceiling. Incredibly, the painting captures the essence of BDSM without depicting any recognizable image, it’s rippling surface fleshy and struggling against its wooden frame.
On the whole, this exhibit reads as deadpan but with hints of cynical humor and sometimes, rage. All the artists included have leaned heavily into the power of materials to convey complex and sometimes, competing, ideas.
The gallery operates Friday through Sunday, from noon to 4 p.m., although the room remains accessible during some of The Compound’s other events. The gallery will keep the pieces on display through Sunday, September 28, 2025.
Vivisepultura and Parallel Play at Night Owl Gallery
September 12 – October 18, 2025
Hours: Thursday and Friday, 4-8 p.m., Saturday, 12-5 p.m.
After last month’s lark of an erotic art show, Night Owl Gallery has returned to form. The venue is hosting two exhibits, Vivisepultura by Rory Holcomb and Parallel Play by Jonah Brock.
According to the exhibition statement, both artists’ works “imagine a form of sociality that is opposed to dominant American forms of relationality and sovereignty with its insistence on staying with the body’s material presence: its vulnerability, its unruly pleasures, and its refusal to be reduced to mere image.”
Vivisepultura takes its name from the term “vivisepulture,” a fancy word for a live burial. Holcomb’s pieces confront the line between dark and playful. Some incorporate a few textural elements, like a fake mustache glued onto the surface of a painting. For the most part, the acrylic paintings on canvas depict realistic figures physically entangled with each other and piles of household objects in intimate states of precariousness, reducing the viewer to a voyeur. We can all feel some familiarity in being swallowed up by all manner of stuff, whether we are hoarders or just capitalists, Holcomb’s visions are the stuff of nightmares.
Given the layout of the building, Vivisepultura bleeds into Night Owl’s other exhibit, Jonah Brock’s Parallel Play. Parallel Play immerses the viewer and is arranged like a mad scientist’s lab, full of shocking details.
Stuffed animals sat in clusters at the edges of the floor. Close-up videos of the body are projected onto one of the fiber works as part of an installation called “Knead Me Til I’m Tender Like Play Doh.” One room contained a pencil-on-paper draft of “in my dream we were conjoined twins,” the previous room’s standout painting showing two hands conjoined at the finger.
At the back of the exhibit, Night Owl displays a collaborative piece between Holcomb and Brock. It portrays several scenes of mutilation by needles. Primarily a fiberwork, it also includes found objects like syringes, biohazard bags, and condom wrappers. The work expands on the textural experimentation in Vivisepultura. By sewing these vignettes and found objects onto a quilt, the artists give this piece a foreground, middleground, and background, unlike some of Brock’s graphite doodles on the wall across from it. Each artist elevates the other.
Unfortunately, Night Owl declined to renew its lease in this building. “Right now we don’t have plans for another brick-and-mortar. We’ll exist online and also continue to curate work at Snake Hill in Highland,” gallery owner Beth-Ann Wilson says. “I’ve looked at a few commercial spaces in Station North and Highlandtown but none of them have felt right so far. We’ll probably do pop-ups here and there as well.”
In other words, this is Night Owl’s last exhibition at this location. Visit while you can.
On Friday, October 10, 2025, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m., Holcomb and Brock’s exhibitions at Night Owl will be accompanied by an evening of improvised ambient soundscapes with Vagrant Diva and Now Birds. Reserve your spot here.
Header Images: (top-bottom) Christian Amaya Garcia, “Untitled (Pushing)”, Rory Holcomb, “Rat King- I want more and more and more and more-I hardly even know her!” and Jonah Brock, “pinky promise”
