There's a giant wooden pyramid that emits sounds when you rest your palm on the top, and an evocative, nearly wordless film about a working-class Baltimore neighborhood.
The exhibition includes a video of a cloud-filled sky accompanied by a soundtrack of whale sounds, and a series of photographs that were inspired by Tweets. If you look hard, you might even find a couple of paintings in a new exhibition of the work of the seven finalists for the 2010 Sondheim Prize in the visual arts. But canvases of any type are few and far between.
The contestants are competing for a $25,000 award, among the most lucrative prizes for the arts in the Baltimore area. For the fifth annual contest, a three-member panel of experts based in New York and Chicago winnowed a pool of 291 applicants from the Mid-Atlantic down to seven. The winner will be announced July 10.
Finalists get to show their work at the museum for six weeks. Though the five men and two women were scrambling to finish their artwork in time for the exhibit opening this weekend, each of them took a few moments to discuss their lives and their art.
Leah Cooper, 43, of Baltimore
From the time she was a kid growing up in Columbia, Leah Cooper has never liked being the center of attention.
Cooper's twin sister, Laurie, was naturally outgoing. When it came to meeting new people or making a presentation, Laurie lead the way, while Leah trailed quietly behind.
Because the sisters were often together, Laurie's social adeptness left Leah conveniently free to focus on the things that interested her — objects that most other people might consider peripheral, utilitarian or even boring. While others marveled at the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean, Leah was drawn irresistibly to the most minuscule pebbles on the beach.
Now she dedicates her career to putting those overlooked parts of experience front and center. Cooper spent four days inside her exhibition space at the Baltimore Museum of Art, using pencil marks to lightly trace the marks left by shadows on the walls. She installed small, clear Plexiglas shelves to add a further dimension to the space, and mirrors to throw up elongated rectangles of light.
The effect is contemplative and serene. Visitors find themselves focusing on the line where the carpeting meets the wall, or on a small, black security camera hanging from a corner of the ceiling like a drowsing bat.
"I've always been drawn to the everyday elements of a space," Cooper says. "When I'm at home, I can't even install a shelf or place a potted plant on the shelf without taking into account the angle at which the light is coming in through the window."
Ryan Hackett, 34, of Kensington
When Ryan Hackett learned he was going to be a finalist for the Sondheim Prize for the second year in a row, he decided that his installation would include two large-scale canvases painted in peaceful shades of blue and white, making him the only one of the finalists to work primarily in the most traditional of artistic mediums.
"It was the riskiest decision I could make," he says, adding that painting uses a different part of his brain than does crafting an installation or shooting a video.
"An installation is more of a planned-out thing," he says. "I have to decide how I can build this thing, what materials to use, where to put the nails. Painting for me is much more of-the-moment. It's nonverbal. I lose my sense of time and space. It requires a leap of faith."
Hackett experiments in all three genres; his work for the 2009 show, for instance, was largely installation- based, while his 2010 show incorporates a video.
As a child growing up in Beltsville, Hackett was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. His school years were characterized by a series of brief, intense, intellectual fixations: scuba diving, science, the natural world, philosophy and surfing. He clearly remembers declaring in elementary school that he would be "an underwater installation artist" when he grew up.
"And I really have become that, in a lot of ways," Hackett says. "I look at the art world as a salad. If I were to do just one thing, it would be like only eating the lettuce. I need a more complex combination of flavors."
Matthew Janson, 28, of Baltimore
A sculpture hunkers down in the center of Matthew Janson's exhibition space. The piece includes part of a camelback chair, a lace doily and fragments of broken mirrors.
It also has a mysterious title — "Parlor Rat" — which turns out to have been Janson's nickname when he was growing up on a Minnesota dairy farm.
While nothing about this piece brings to mind cows, milk pails or even rats, the experience of working with animals left the artist keenly aware of life's robustness and fragility.
Many of the pieces that Janson creates express a tension between lightheartedness and danger. His work frequently incorporates mirror fragments, which have a sparkly quality that appeals to viewers, while the mirrors' sharp edges warn them to keep away.
Other artworks have a thick, gooey texture that simultaneously brings to mind frosting and viscera.
"Birth and death was a daily experience for me when I was growing up," says Janson, who earned a master's degree in 2009 from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
"Just before I came to Maryland, I was woken up one day at 4 a.m. to help my father with a cow that had just expelled her uterus while giving birth. I was sitting there holding the uterus on my lap while my father was trying to push it back in.
"I was covered from head to toe with blood and guts. And I kept thinking that in two days, I was going to get on a plane and go to art school."
Nate Larson, 32, of Baltimore
The photograph was taken at a literal crossroads, at the intersection of Randolph and LaSalle streets in Chicago's downtown financial district. Regardless of whether the passer-by is coming or going, the way is hard, comfortless, and gray.
The text below the photo: "Well, I just got laid off," the Tweet reads. "Despite the raise, I had a sneaking suspicion there was no money. And yep, I was right. I knew something was off."
Another photo is a nighttime photo of a frame house. The viewer's eye focuses first on a rusting iron gate fencing off the backyard, and then the security light that emits a harsh glare.
The Tweet sent from the home reads: "Why doesn't he understand I dnt want to be kissed let alone seen while I'm sick. Ugh"
Larson, a faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art, is fascinated by the accidental poetry that can result from the compressed, 140-character limit imposed on those who post on the social-networking service Twitter.
He monitors public posts, some of which contain embedded information about the location from which a particular Tweet was sent. When Larson finds a post that he finds especially compelling, he travels to the spot, photographs the site and then pairs it with the original text, leaving the original spelling, grammar and punctuation intact.
"These photographs are historical monuments to small lived moments," Larson says. "I select texts that I respond to on an emotional level because they reveal something personal about the users' lives, or about the national climate in the United States."
Christopher LaVoie, 29, of Baltimore
LaVoie has spent his life traveling between opposites, between the majestic vistas of Tucson, Ariz., and more intimate close-ups of life in Baltimore, between the Christian schools he attended in Arizona and the freewheeling environs of the Maryland Institute College of Art.
He has learned not to accept anything at face value — especially those objects and experiences that present themselves as innocent.
"I like to take things that I grew up with and reinterpret them in the world I live in now," he says.
"So, for example, I took a pair of Mickey Mouse slippers and cast them in concrete. You grow up and become an adult, and the world seems a little bit menacing."
His work frequently incorporates objects that are traditionally associated with masculinity, which the artist then subverts.
So, for instance, his installation includes a hatchet made from sediment that collected in a workshop sink, a dumbbell created from old CDs that were pureed in a blender and a two-by-four propped on a sandbag — but placed so as to show the "tears" in the wood grain.
Though LaVoie doesn't use images from nature in his work, he says that the move from Arizona to Maryland about 10 years ago provided a useful lesson in dualities.
"When you live in the Southwest, you see these beautiful, stunning landscapes. But when you get up close, they look sparse," he says. "I don't see those views in Baltimore, and I miss them. But on the East Coast, there's a lot more going on right in front of me."
Matt Porterfield, 32, of Baltimore
Matt Porterfield makes films that are tone poems to the working-class neighborhoods in Baltimore in which he was raised, films that straddle the line between the cinema and the art museum.
In 2006 and while the artist was still in his 20s, "Hamilton," Porterfield's nearly wordless, 65-minute movie about a Baltimore working-class neighborhood, was praised by The New Yorker magazine as "a minor miracle." Now, Porterfield's new film, "Putty Hill," is being shown at film festivals in Copenhagen and Berlin.
For the Sondheim competition, Porterfield has cut "Hamilton" to 50 minutes. He eliminated some of the dialogue and much of the exposition, with the aim of changing the focus from the story to the visual images. In the future, he says, he will make films that are specifically meant to be shown in art galleries.
"When I first thought of 'Hamilton,' I thought of it almost as a silent film," he says.
"This version takes it even more in that direction. I really like that the experience is cyclic, and that as soon as the film ends, it starts up again. It emphasizes the circular nature of my themes."
It's not that Porterfield hasn't experienced other environments — among them, New York, where he lived for seven years. At the moment, he's contemplating adapting a Russian novel to film.
"When I lived in New York, all the movie plots I came up with took place in Baltimore," he says. "Even if a story is set somewhere else, I'll only do it if I can move the story here.
"In many ways, Baltimore is my muse."
Karen Yasinsky, 44, of Baltimore
Artists are accustomed to bad years, discouraging years, draining years. They're used to years when they're locked out of all the good shows, when they couldn't sell so much as a postage stamp, when even their mothers stop asking about their current projects.
So, when a year comes along like the one that Karen Yasinky is having right now, they savor every golden moment.
Yasinsky, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and at the Maryland Institute College of Art, uses animated film stills to explore how artists create particular moods. For her current project, she has excerpted images from two 1974 Robert Altman films — "California Split" and "Thieves Like Us". Yasinsky drew over the frames of Elliott Gould standing in a casino and of Shelley Duvall filling a pot of water, detached the images from their narrative context and added a soundtrack.
The Sondheim Prize has been around only since 2006. Yasinsky has made the cut and been chosen as a finalist three times —by a different panel of judges each year.
In the past six months, she also won a prestigious Baker Artist Award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize, and picked up a highly competitive fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome. (She leaves for Italy in the fall.)
"This year has been hugely satisfying," she says. "Things go in waves. Some years, absolutely nothing happens, and I think about going back to school and being a veterinarian."
If you go
The seven finalists' work will be on display starting this weekend through Aug. 1 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive. Free. Call 443-573-1700 or go to artbma.org.