BmoreArt’s Picks: September 7-13
BmoreArt’s Picks presents the best weekly art openings, events, and performances happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas.
This Week: We are featuring online events that you can participate in from the comfort of your own couch and some that you can safely leave the house for, plus a few calls for entry to get involved locally and nationally. Stay home, stay healthy, stay engaged in the arts.
BmoreArt’s Picks presents the best weekly art openings, events, and performances happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas. For a more comprehensive perspective, check the BmoreArt Calendar page, which includes ongoing exhibits and performances, and is updated on a daily basis.
To submit your calendar event, email us at events@bmoreart.com!
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann: Water Ribbon
Wednesday, September 8 | Ongoing through October 6
@ Morton Fine Art
Morton Fine Art is pleased to present Water Ribbon, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Washington, D.C.-based artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, on view from September 8th – October 6th, 2021. Featuring a collection of recent pieces by the artist, the exhibition offers an evocative perspective on contemporary ecologies during a time at which environmental destruction and the consequences of climate change loom ever larger.
Utilizing acrylic, sumi ink, and collage, Mann draws from traditions of Chinese landscape painting to create mesmerizing, vibrant depictions of organic matter. Mann begins her process by pouring liquid pigments onto paper, allowing them to dry and yielding a stain of color from which the work is then based. Through an embrace of the indeterminate qualities of her materials—the ink or paint takes its own course, without the artist dictating its shapes or forms—Mann demonstrates a symbiotic relationship to her materials that serves as an apt metaphor for coexistence with the natural world. What results from Mann’s subsequent additions to the paper are rich, layered tableaus imbued with an affective interplay of ideas.
Of the challenges posed by her recent work, Mann describes her rumination upon “the
resuscitation of landscape painting in a world where ‘landscape’ is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms.” At times almost dizzying, the pieces shown in Water Ribbon eschew Western conventions of spatial perspective and inert figuration, instead embracing qualities of movement and monumentality central to Chinese landscape painting traditions.
Bright hues and a multiplicity of patterns are nestled among Mann’s illustrations of flora and fauna, with streams of ink evoking vines and riverbeds. Lying in the tension between the artificial and the organic, Mann’s renderings suggest an intertwining of systems rather than a constant grappling for control or domination. Splashes of ink seep across each image, traversing various shapes and forms. Elsewhere, translucent swathes of paint filter views of plant life, appearing like stained-glass windows through which to gaze.
“In my most recent work, I hope to live in the tradition of landscape painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term that sustains us,” said Mann. Amongst all the chaos and beauty, Water Ribbon proposes a mode of coexistence attuned to change, reciprocity, and an honoring of diverse forms of life.
Kei Ito | Artist Talk
Thursday, September 9 • 6pm
@ UMD Stamp Gallery
Screening in the Univesity of Maryland Stamp Nanticoke Room
In conjunction with this exhibition, join the Stamp Gallery for an artist talk by artist Kei Ito, artist of acquisition Under My Skin #1.
Kei Ito is a visual artist working primarily with camera-less photography and installation art who is currently teaching at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in NYC. Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology followed by the MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. Ito’s work addresses issues of deep intergenerational loss and connections as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography.
Ito’s work addresses issues of deep intergenerational loss and connections as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography, specifically the idea around visualizing the invisible such as radiation, memory and life/death. His work, rooted in the trauma and legacy passed down from his late grandfather – a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage through examining the past and current threats of nuclear disaster and his present status as an US-immigrant. Most of Ito’s prints are made with exposing light sensitive material to sunlight, often timing the exposures with his breath, influenced by his grandfather’s words describing the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima “…was like hundreds of suns lighting up the sky.” These X-ray like prints are usually installed in a way that provokes a monument.
He was the recipient of the 2020 Marva and John Warnock Biennial Artist in Resident Award and participated in other artist residencies such as: MASS MoCA, the Center for Fine Art Photography, CPW, and Creative Alliance. Ito’s works are collected by major institutions including: the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Norton Museum of Art, En Foco, the Candela Collection and California Institute of Integral Studies. His internationally recognized solo and group shows can be read in reviews and articles published by Washington Post, Hyperallergic, BmoreArt, Chicago Magazine, Studio Magazine, ArtMaze Magazine, and BBC Culture/Art.
Website: Kei-ito.com
Instagram: Kei.ito.art
Viewers who wish to join the lecture virtually on Zoom may do so at https://go.umd.edu/keiitotalk
