Ethnography of No Place

Release date: March 03, 2008 |

Ethnography of No Place, an exhibit that examines geographical places and psychological spaces, will be presented in Goucher College's Rosenberg Gallery from Monday, March 24, through Friday, May 2.

This exhibit, which is free and open to the public, can be viewed weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and during scheduled events in Kraushaar Auditorium. An artists' reception will be held Friday, April 11, at 6 p.m. in Rosenberg Gallery. Call 410-337-6477 for more information.

Leah Bailis' sculptures, Dawn Gavin's maps, Courtney Jordan's drawings, Bridget Sue Lambert's photographs, Isabel Manalo's paintings, Aili Schmeltz's paintings and installations, and Kazue Taguchi's installations are fragments of invented landscapes and environments that stem from each artist's response to the thoughts of placelessness in contemporary culture.

Bailis constructs inaccessible spaces -- a chain-link fence, a windowless façade -- that have surfaces that separate public and private spaces. These barriers represent the tension between what is judged worthy of protection and the perceived danger or risk from which the space is being protected.

Gavin uses maps and related documents to construct both real and imagined terrains and cartographic landscapes that exist at the threshold between the visible and the invisible. She is interested in occupying the liminal space between places -- the area where boundaries dissolve -- and negotiating this alternative position.

Jordan's drawings in ink and graphite on mylar are her interpretations of architectural forms and structures. Her works include details found in buildings and urban industrial infrastructures that she feels reflect social and emotional values.

Using a 30-year-old dollhouse built by her grandfather, Lambert stages and photographs vignettes of domesticity, tension, loss, and presence vs. absence. She explores the physical and psychological spaces that people inhabit in relationships and how those spaces are disrupted or abandoned when a relationship ends.

Manalo translates photographs into paintings to create layers of distance and melancholy, often touching on the psychology of domestic space. Her work explores the relationship between her two young children and interior and exterior spaces. In her paintings, the environment surrounding her children becomes subsumed by a negative white space to create a picture where the positive is emerging from that light.

Schmeltz's installations examine the ideas of comfort, contradictions, and connections of daily life. Using mundane materials, she creates room-sized installations that respond to the space while simultaneously referencing architecture and the landscape.

Taguchi's installations are made from reflective materials such as mylar and mirrors. When light hits the surface, reflections and shadows interplay to create magical landscapes in a built environment.

The Rosenberg Gallery program at Goucher College is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.