The horizontal, rectangular photograph, stretching 80 inches across a wall of C. Grimaldis Gallery, jolts the viewer with a sea of aluminum siding. In the far left corner, a piece of bold blue sky can be seen behind a jutting, K-style gutter. Welcome to "Wasteland."
This image by Sofia Silva, titled "siding," is one of 20 compelling works in an exhibit that casts an eye - at once coolly objective and hotly provocative - on a desensitized world. "It's about wasted time, wasted things, wasted political systems," Grimaldis says of the show, which features six artists, most of them local.
The theme might sound like a downer, but the result is remarkably exhilarating, uniformly attractive. This is virtuosic photography writ large and message-packed.
Silva's panoramas from 2007, each framed with a Fuji film border, capture tract housing at its most homogeneous and banal, what Grimaldis calls "the real wasteland."
In "housing," a row of identical, gray siding-covered residences stretches far in the distance. A border of red shrubs along the sidewalk provides the sole assertion of nature, a solitary American flag hanging inside one window the sole reminder that human beings occupy these barrackslike structures.
In composition and content, it's an indelible shot. Same for "fence," which peers through a latticed enclosure into backyards of another mass-manufactured maze of suburban impersonality.
The strikingly colored, empty spaces captured in 1999 by Dimitra Lazaridou suggest elegant theaters, complete with framed Renaissance paintings and ornate balconies. But these are melancholy arcades, dotted with pinball machines, out of place and out of use - remembrances of lost time.
Lynn Cazabon remembers lost craft in her striking "Discard" pieces, each using for subject matter films tossed out by the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Out of this celluloid refuse, the artist creates painterly photos, the swirls from unfurled reels generating a fresh animation of their own. A close look reveals individual frames of the original film, reminders of an intricate product that can now be thrown away, perhaps having been converted to some coldly digital format first, or simply deemed worthless.
An iconic symbol of the 20th century, the Berlin Wall, became a kind of refuse, too, after its fall. Leland Rice's 1980s photos of the graffiti-filled Western side of that wall are vibrant souvenirs of scrawls and words and images that gave the cruel barrier a dynamic, even optimistic quality. The tightly packed photos become lively abstract jumbles of image and emotion.
The imposing black-and-white photos from the past decade by Christopher Myers include "St. Petersburg Passage," a beautifully composed study of decay and neglect, with just a hint of renovation suggested by the light behind the closed doors at the end of the hallway.
Several items from Leslie Furlong's "Parking Lot Series," which helped the artist become a finalist for the 2009 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize, rounds out the exhibit perfectly.
These hypnotic photographic landscapes depict skies vast and inscrutable, with vehicle-less parking lots below creating strangely artistic patterns with their lines and angles. In the distance, as if emerging from some industrial fog, are uninviting worlds of fast-food chains, home improvement superstores, construction sites, factories - the utilitarian, neon-accented wastelands we all know too well.
If you go "Wasteland" continues through April 10 at C. Grimaldis Gallery, 523 N. Charles St. Call 410-539-1080 or go to cgrimaldisgallery.com.