Fishing line. A syringe. Gum wrappers, a dart board and the handle of a leather suitcase.
They're not the scraps some lonely scavenger dug up at the Millersville landfill. To more than 80 artists, they mean what bronze meant to Degas, oils to Monet and Picasso.
Life's rubbish is the stuff of the latest show at the Maryland Federation of Art in Annapolis, a national juried exhibition called "Eye of the Beholder: The Art of the Found Object" that opened this week and continues through Aug. 15.
It's the first time the MFA, a nonprofit organization with more than 400 members, has officially exhibited found art, a genre that sparked controversy as far back as 1913, when French-born visionary Marcel Duchamp got tongues wagging by presenting a urinal as a work of art.
Such pieces forced a reassessment of what "art" is and paved the way for Dadaism in the 1920s, Surrealism in the 1930s, not to mention what is now called found art — art, broadly speaking, that incorporates at least one worldly object.
"You're working with [material] that had another purpose in life before you discovered it," says David Diaz, chair of the museum's exhibition committee. "You then reposition it, turning it into something else" that can be shown in a gallery.
Most MFA exhbitions deal with two-dimensional, representational art, but organizers, sensing a growth in the popularity of found art, sent out a nationwide call for works. They were stunned at the response. More than 130 artists submitted 331 pieces. Juror Peter Leibert, an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, chose 122. Eight of the 86 artists chosen live in Anne Arundel County.
As Diaz and colleagues set up the space, passers-by stopped in to see what the fuss was about. They saw pieces large and small, three of them lit from within, one that looked like a moose head and another a crow, and others that incorporated a shovel, garlic cloves and a sifting tool for grain.
People, it seems, are still talking about found art. Four of the Anne Arundel artists shared what it means to them.
Annette Uroskie, Annapolis
In her career as a teacher at the Key School in Annapolis, Annette Uroskie often shared a cosmic sort of mantra with her art students. "Don't think too much [about your work]," she'd say. "Use the Force, Luke!"
The lifelong artist followed her own advice in creating "Aunt Marietta Was a Social Butterfly," a work in the Victorian-era shadowbox style that blends photographs, found objects and origami. It won one of the show's six Awards of Merit.
A veteran in watercolor, batik and etching, Uroskie, 66, came to found art late in her career and in a roundabout way. Two years ago, her son gave her a Mac computer with an editing program, and Uroskie, who says she'd never quite seen photography as a fine art, found herself fooling around with a camera.
Now she's an outre digital photographer.
"Everything I do is Photoshopped," she says, "not to make [the pictures] look better, but to turn them into something else."
She found inspiration when her mother gave her a batch of old family photos. One depicted a great aunt named Marietta, a woman Uroskie remembered as a free spirit who had moved to New York by herself long before most girls would consider such a move.
"That just wasn't done in those days," Uroskie says. "She must have been a doozy."
Found art is largely about blending, and Uroskie had also been pondering a black-and-white photo she took — an image of a palm leaf. One night, she folded it into a fan, origami-style, and placed it behind Marietta's photo as though it were wings. She later added a little red vase and a gold butterfly pendant that were lying around the house.
It's tempting to think and plan, but Uroskie said she let the process unfold naturally. She knew she had something when the piece had the right "flighty, girly" sort of beauty — while also feeling grounded.
"That's Marietta," she says, "or at least Marietta the way I remember her. Making art is so much about using the back of your mind."
Kass McGowan, Severna Park
A wife and mother who had always loved art, Kass McGowan changed directions at age 40 when she enrolled at the Atlanta College of Art.
Her husband, a manager with Merrill Lynch, and three sons were supportive of the move, she says, but that didn't mean her tastes always pleased them.
"When the kids were teenagers, it was hard for them to be there when Mom stopped to go through [somebody's] trash," says McGowan, 65, a self-described rubbish lover. "Nothing pleases me more than finding something on the ground and turning it into something else."
That's how "Congenital Effect," one of her three works in "Eye of the Beholder," was born.
One day, McGowan says, she was out for a walk when she spotted two strips of wood. "How could anyone throw these out?" she thought. Back in her garage studio, she intuitively joined two molded portions together at an angle, then anchored them to a base made out of an old bookshelf.
The shape called to mind a church, and McGowan, a grandmother of seven, found herself pondering what we "worship" in life and what we're leaving behind for later generations.
Too often, McGowan says, we spurn reusable materials for stuff that clashes with nature. And the next element of her piece came to her: those tiny silica-gel packets used as desiccants in everything from camera-lens packages to dog food.
Ever-present and almost gemlike in appearance, the little packets are made from materials that don't decompose.
"[Centuries] from now, if aliens landed on Earth, they'd find those things unchanged," she says. "They'd wonder, 'What were these for?' They'd probably think they were our holy objects." McGowan put a bunch in a flat glass box, fastened it inside the "church," and realized she was looking at an 18-by-24-inch monument to our short-sighted values.
It felt just right. Found Art, McGowan says, is about "taking the things that might seem mundane and normal and repositioning them so they come alive in a gallery."
And giving them what she got 25 years ago: a new life.
Patricia Nees, Arnold
A painter and collage artist who started exhibiting locally two decades ago, Nees, 72, is more loathe than some of her colleagues to analyze what she creates.
"I'm often asked about my work, 'What does it mean? How and why was it made?'" says Nees, who has one piece in "Eye of the Beholder." "I can answer how it was made, and maybe why it was made, but the meanings are unclear to me. ... That part of making [art] is to me a mystery."
She does know she loves junk and making things with junk. Sometimes she has to look no farther for material than her own Arnold home, which she decorates with off-beat chairs, sofas and lamps she finds in local antique shops.
Not necessarily antiques, mind you — just old stuff. "I couldn't tell you when something's an antique or not," Nees says. "I can tell you if an object pleases me." It might be simply that the object has been thrown away (a common draw for found artists), but it's always something that simply strikes her as out of the ordinary.
One such thing came her way when a friend gave her a drawer from an old computer desk. Nees made it the frame for her "assemblage" piece, "Poet's Epitaph." Working in a stream-of-consciousness way, she layered the back with a collage of old photos from the New York Times Magazine, then started "filling" the drawer with 3-D objects that have caught her eye: an old stationery box, some chess pieces, a kneeling-angel Christmas ornament, a forearm-and-hand mold once used to stretch gloves.
She arranges materials without reference to their meaning. "I just am making a composition like I might with a painting," she says.
Whatever her aims, the 18-by-18-inch work evokes feelings of thwarted spiritual hope (the prayer figure is inside the box), frustrated aspiration (the upreaching hand) and other shadowy things.
Or does it? Interpretation is so far from her mind, Nees can't even explain her title, a phrase she says struck her as interesting but that she probably just remembered from long ago. "Titles can provoke thought," she says. "They don't always make sense."
Angela Petruncio, Arnold
She grew up an only child, so she never had to share her toys or pass them along. That's one reason Petruncio, a photographer-turned-mixed-media artist, feels she never lost her sense of childlike wonder.
That quality comes in handy in her latest incarnation, as a maker — and cheerful promoter — of found art.
Petruncio, 57, who has two pieces in "Eye of the Beholder," never set out to work in this form. She got a college degree in photography and made a name for herself (if not a living) with a camera). Over the years, she painted, did gold leafing and decoupage and worked with clay and papier mache. "I've always loved playing with art supplies," she says.
But a retrospective of the works of Joseph Cornell, an early 20th-ccentury American artist who worked found objects into Victorian shadowboxes, opened her eyes to new possibilities. She made a few found art pieces, often incorporating toys from her childhood. They stirred enough local buzz that MFA decided to launch the current show — and asked her to organize it.
Her pieces, too, take shape circuitously. Petruncio starts out simply, with something that grabs her attention and lets things evolve. "Don't start out with some heavy message. Just start," she says.
Recenty, she did just that. Peering over her backyard fence, she spottted the wooden top to an old crab barrel. It was covered with vines, cobwebs and wasps' nests — a thing, she felt, of frail physical beauty. She took it home and firmed it with wooden backing, and a process began.
Gently, she worked in other items, mostly organic ones — bits of crab claw, strips of bark, patches of moss. She added color (blotches of red). The piece started telling her it was a sort of shield that had been used in battle. And she saw a theme staring back at her.
"The natural world is our protection," Petruncio says, "not something we should be taking down or breaking up. But we're eating holes in the ozone, destroying our own natural shield in so many ways." She called the piece "Aegis" — the name of Zeus' breastplate in ancient mythology.
Petruncio hopes every guest will see the show with childlike eyes. "People will look at specific pieces and say, 'Yech,' then go around the corner and see something that stuns them with its beauty," she says. "Those who are open to [found art] … will realize, 'Oh my gosh, you really can make art out of that thing.'"
If you go
What: "Eye of the Beholder: The Art of the Found Object" national juried exhibition
Where: Circle Gallery, Maryland Federation of Art, 18 State Circle, Annapolis
When: Through Aug. 15
Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday
Admission: Free
Artists' reception: 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 25, Circle Gallery. Free and open to the public.
Information: mdfedart.com or 410-268-4566