"It's sort of like driving your car backward to work one day to see if that has any effect on anybody," says David Brown of "Project: Exhibit," the show he's curating. "Maybe it will and maybe it won't."
If comparing an art show to driving backward sounds far-fetched, the two do have one thing in common. Probably no one has ever really driven a car backward to work. And probably no one has ever done a show quite like "Project: Exhibit," which will continue to evolve and change throughout its three-month life.
In planning most shows, the curator knows the artists and even the specific works long in advance. Once the show's installed, everything stays the same until it closes.
Not "Project: Exhibit," which recently opened at the Fox Building of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where Brown is director of exhibitions.
It will include works by 28 artists, from computer-created advertising posters to hooked rugs made with dog hair and old clothes. But only a few artists will be shown at one time, and every week or so they'll be changed in overlapping fashion throughout the show's run.
The idea, says Brown, is to see work in different contexts, to evaluate and re-evaluate it in relation to different works of art.
It's also an effort to get people to sit up and take notice. Students, faculty and staff of the institute wander through the Fox building's first-floor gallery all day, every day. "But you would be surprised at how many just walk through," says Brown. "I want to have something to surprise them."
It's also an effort to bring the larger community into the show and get its members to come back. The gallery, like all the Institute's galleries, is open to the public free. "It's one of our efforts to bring the community together," Brown says.
The show was his idea, and he's not aware of anything else just like it. To keep it as fluid as possible, although he's picked the artists, he knows only about half the works that will be in the show. "And I don't know in what order the work will be here. I'm going to have to start to juggle that."
The first three artists are what might be called an eclectic mixture. In fact, one of them, Jim Shaw, provides an eclectic mixture all by himself. His "Thrift Store Painting Show" brings together 156 paintings that he and others found in thrift stores, flea markets and similar places around the country, each bought for less than $25 and most for about $5.
This intriguing conglomeration, shown from coast to coast, has elicited serious reactions from critics and delight from viewers. "Shaw calls himself an anthropologist of American pop culture -- silly, profound, perverse and twisted, as we all are," says Brown. "It's had critics questioning their own values." And indeed, there's no denying that while these awkward to awful paintings -- of everything from nudes to robots to a Jif peanut butter jar -- would be nothing individually, taken all together, they produce a kind of high. They have a kaleidoscopic presence and are evidence of the profound urge to create out there.
Sharing the gallery with "Thrift Store Painting Show" are works by two artists who reveal different takes on technology. Lance Hidy, a highly successful graphic designer, creates slick advertising posters with computer-generated imagery.
Alan Rath, trained as an electrical engineer, fabricates works out of electronic components to investigate the machine's relationship to the human body and how humans and machines interact. His "Fool Box" looks like a tool box with a beating heart, out of which stretches a long umbilical cord with a small television screen on the other end, showing a picture of a mouth. It does look like a hybrid between machinery and a human, and reminds us of how little we know about both our technology and our bodies.
Compared with Hidy and Rath, Brown observes, " 'Thrift Store' is out the other end. The paintings have nothing to do with technology, they're not as planned or precise, there's a pureness and directness about them."
Among the artists coming up are Ken Butler, who builds hybrid musical instruments -- a cross between a guitar and a cello, for instance; Charles Krafft, who produces hand-painted plates called "Disasterware"; Shari Urquhart, whose hooked rugs, made from wool, dog hair and other materials, combine personal and fantasy imagery; Stephen Robin, who makes large-scale cement public sculpture; and Steven Cushner, who paints geometric abstractions. There will even be works by now-dead artists -- Marsden Hartley, an early 20th-century modernist painter, and Charles White, a black artist who created murals on black subjects.
But what's up next is anybody's guess, including his, Brown says. "Let's see how it unfolds. Can we pull it off?"
Good question.
ART PREVIEW
What: "Project: Exhibit"
Where: Meyerhoff Gallery, Fox Building, Mount Royal and Lafayette avenues, Maryland Institute, College of Art
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays (until 9 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays), noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, through April 23
Call: (410) 225-2300