EVENTS

Staging over Manipulation is a group exhibition which brings together four artists whose works transcend traditional processes of manipulation. The exhibition explores roles in which artists set and shape the organizational context.  These artists’ works reflect on attributes of a culture that demonstrates a malignant conscience in exposing an excessively branded society. While employing methods typically used for staging, the artists challenge not only the contextual framework of branding, they also expose the arena from which works are seen, i.e., the art branding syndicate.

Works By:   Julie Benoit   Eric Doeringer   Jenny Drumgoole   Kim Llerena

Julie Benoit was born in Gambrills, Maryland in 1975 and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.  She received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.. Through wandering about the city she has developed an interest in all of the small, unnoticed moments that surround her.  Benoit has shown her work in galleries in Baltimore, DC, New York, Oregon, Los Angeles, and other cities.  She also writes an occasional art review for local blogs and has in the past written for other local magazines.

Eric Doeringer is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY.  Much of his artwork involves re-making the work of other artists.  Doeringer has exhibited at institutions including MoMA PS1, The Whitney Museum, La Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MUSAC, The Bruce Museum, and The Currier Museum.  In 2011, he curated the exhibition “I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me” at EFA Project Space in New York and had solo shows at Another Year In LA (Los Angeles) and Plush Gallery (Dallas)

Kim Llerena is currently earning her MFA in Photographic & Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She was and raised in Gaithersburg, Maryland before attending New York University, where she received dual BA degrees in Journalism and Spanish. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she interned at Jeff Harris Photography Studio, shot freelance photography work, and worked full-time as Assistant to the Director at CITYarts, a public art non-profit organization in Manhattan. Llerena has exhibited in Maryland and New York.

Philadelphia artist Jenny Drumgoole inserts herself into marginal spaces for pseudo-celebrity within popular culture—most recently, by entering absurdly humorous videos of herself in a “Real Women of Philadelphia” online video recipe contest sponsored by Kraft. Her most recent video-based performance work involves the artist physically and virtually infiltrating competitive events with subversive art actions which question our obsessions with celebrity, desire, and the limits and illusions of individuality in popular culture.  Drumgoole received her MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art  in 2006.

Curator

Heather Loughran was born in Baltimore, MD and currently lives and works in New York City.  She is earning her BFA in Photography from Parsons the New School for Design. Loughran began working at Guest Spot as a Curatorial Assistant,  starting when the Gallery opened in June. This is her first official collaboration working with professional artists.

Opening For ZIG-ZAG

Friday March 9th 7pm-10pm

Curated by: Rod Malin

Zig-Zag is a group exhibition that derives from a formal drawing-base aesthetic, while encapsulating a political regard. The exhibition will consider the departure from the formulaic critique of the line to recognizing that the mere action of drawing a line represents a primal political act; the divide. Making no distinction between drawing and intervention, forming a relationship in which artist and intent is merged, thus nullifying the neutralizing effects of formalism on the discussion.

Works By: Shaun Flynn  Katie Kehoe  Rob de Oude  Meridith Pingree

Lifted from Curator notes: Thinking Your self into Oblivion ; Politics- Formality- Context

“The mutual disdain between Art and Politics has been repeatedly defined and examined, within each separate category. Determining that Art has a singular context in relation to the Artist’s intent limits a contextual critique, thus persuading a singular perspective. The attitude of defining art as ‘if I call it so’ usually is tied up in an ideology of self ego. The object is usually critiqued and examined within the construct of the time and place it was made, and by whom.  If a piece has an anonymous author, a romanticized artist persona is created, thus displacing the formality as something intrinsic to the nature of the object itself.  The role of curation is to allude to the creator’s original intent, ownership and demise.  However, rarely does the Artist’s intent for an object get completely seen through; if it is, how long can it be preserved?  The ability to critique a work from an ‘Art object’s perspective’ may fulfill the role in which its contextually regarded and serves the idea that, since all art is created from opposition, it is inherently political.”

Katie Kehoe (b. Canada, 1979) earned an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA. Katie uses the word  “AND” as a mode of expression as well as a structural tool and by drawing it through processes of repetition, overlap, magnification and distortion she investigates the nature of form and language as constructions. Her work has been presented in various festivals and galleries in Canada and across the United States. Recent exhibitions include LOL: A Decade of Antic Art, The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore and Construct, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore.

Dutch native Rob de Oude lives and paints in Brooklyn, NY. He has been educated at the Hoge School voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam, in painting, sculpture and art history and has followed the Graduate program for painting at SUNY Purchase, NY, as part of an educational exchange program. de Oude has shown in the Netherlands, the US and France. He has participated in Red Dot and Fountain Art Fairs in New York and Miami, Slick Art Fair in Paris and has, amongst others, been featured in the NY Post, L Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, Artnet Magazine and NYArts Magazine.  As initiator and founding member, de Oude is the current gallery director of Camel Art Space in Brooklyn, NY.

Based in Baltimore, Shaun Flynn has been an active member of the city’s art and music community for the past 14 years.  He also is a founding member of the multi-purpose performance, music, and arts venue Floristree, that has been hosting memorable shows and events and feasts since 2004. His body of work is a varied but complementary synthesis of these elements, often utilizing photography-as-evidence-as-the-art of his ephemeral sculptures and interventions in public spaces. Formally, the sculptures seem to be concerned with extracting difficult and fragile realizations of common material elements, like plywood, sheetrock, sign-making vinyl, and traffic cones, in and out of the spaces where these materials are indigenous. Flynn recent exhibited at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Space 1026, Philadelphia, and Contemporary Museum, Baltimore.

Meridith Pingree is a New York based artist known for her quirky reactive sculptures, and squishy geometric forms. Her work has been shown in New York, LA, and around the country including two recent solo exhibitions at Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles, and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Other recent exhibitions including her work have taken place at the Bronx Museum, Smack Mellon, The Soap Factory, BravinLee Programs, Triple Candie, James Nicholson Gallery, among others. Pingree received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in sculpture and an alumni of Skowhegan. Pingree’s work has been written about in the New York Times, Art Week, The Brooklyn Rail, Vellum Magazine, and numerous art blogs. She recently finished a kinetic sculpture commissioned by Richard and Lisa Baker.

Guest Spot 1826 Fleet Street Baltimore 21231

WWW.GUESTSPOT.ORG

(A.)

image: Carl Gunhouse Kids, Sunland Park, NM 2011

CLOSING ARTISTS BRUNCH BOUNDARY PROOF

Saturday December 3rd 2011  1pm-5pm

Location: 1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

Boundary Proof is a group exhibition that features three artists whose works address cultural use of border limitations, and the ability to navigate beyond and challenge specific cultural red lines. Each in their own right justifies expectations associated with their subject and examines contextual and metaphoric limitations, thus  pushing past preconceived ideas.

Works by:  Gina Dawson  Carl Gunhouse  Cyle Metzger

Labels such as “rebel”, “freak” and “prophet” mainly serve to marginalize, thus reinforcing preconceived ideas about cultural boundaries. As didactic as one may be about transformation and innovation, programmatic barriers are still usually fully encouraged, driven by apprehension of existing restrictions.  The line is drawn in the sand not to casually walk over, and it is the strained relationship between boundaries that one must supersede. In order to maintain a viable state, keeping up the appearance of boundaries and borders cultivates a close relationship with the opposition, creating a unique exchange that is anything but unpoetic.

Gina Dawson was born in Dallas, TX and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from the University of North Texas in 2002 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2005. While in graduate school, she received a Dean’s discretionary fund and a travel grant. She has been in multiple group exhibitions in Texas, Boston, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. In January of 2010 she had  a solo show at Galerie Jeanroch Dard in Paris and in April of the same year was in a two person exhibition at Judy Rotenberg Gallery in Boston.

Carl Gunhouse was born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts, but he spent his formative years in suburban New Jersey. Growing up, he developed a love/hate relationship with suburbia that led to the angst familiar to most suburban youth. With this unrest came the discovery of the anger and DIY ethics of hardcore punk rock. Yearning to be part of the hardcore scene, he started photographing bands, which began his love of photography. To escape suburban New Jersey, Carl enrolled in Fordham University in New York City. While completing a BA in European History at Fordham, he discovered that photography could be something to pursue as career so he decided to simultaneously complete a BFA in Photography. After going on to earn his MA in American History from Fordham, Carl threw himself into finding an expression for his suburban angst in street photography. In a hope to develop and refine his photography, Carl completed his MFA in Photography at Yale University. Since graduating, he has found a great deal of personal satisfaction teaching as an Adjunct at Montclair State University, Cooper Union, and Nassau Community College. He has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Searching For the Light, Skuawk, and BigREDandShiny. His photography has been shown nationally and internationally. As an artist, he has produced a body of landscape photographs in New Jersey that deals with his complex personal relationship to suburbia. He is now investigating the suburban experience by driving around the United States and exploring what it is to be an American. Carl currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cyle Metzger is an artist and writer raised in southern California. His work is inspired by inaccessible spaces and experiences of negotiating social barriers. Since receiving his MFA from MICA in 2010, he has been granted residency fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and New York State’s Salem Art Works, a number of exhibition opportunities in California, New York, Maryland and Delaware, and the opportunity to teach at Towson University in Maryland. He currently lives in Baltimore.

(B.)

(A.)

CLOSING ARTISTS BRUNCH NARRATIVE LIMINAL

Saturday October 15th  1pm-5pm

1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

Narrative Liminal features the work of John Bohl and Mike Peter Smith. Both Artists’ concepts refer to the in-between states and conditions that allude to disarray. Their work is critical of the discontinuity of traditional narrative while contributing to the dissolution of order.  At the same time, the work is informative of the continuity of tradition.

Works by: Mike Peter Smith • John Bohl

Journalism is being challenged by increasing Balkanization, resulting in a gap in perspectives that is also redefining the way in which sources are established and fact is formed.  Currently, substrates of traditional ethics in Journalistic Narrative are the topics for critique in this niche media landscape.  As individual personas are established to maintain a ringside media perspective, a dialogue heavily reflected by bias is created. This is reflected in everything from small scale blogs to corporate conglomerates. The gaping margins of perspectives create an ambivalent moral market for inhabitants of the American home.

(B.)

Opening for Boundary Proof

Friday October 21 7pm-10pm

1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

Boundary Proof is a group exhibition that features three artists whose works address cultural use of border limitations, and the ability to navigate beyond and challenge specific cultural red lines. Each in their own right justifies expectations associated with their subject and examines contextual and metaphoric limitations, thus  pushing past preconceived ideas.

Works by:  Gina Dawson  Carl Gunhouse  Cyle Metzger

Labels such as “rebel”, “freak” and “prophet” mainly serve to marginalize, thus reinforcing preconceived ideas about cultural boundaries. As didactic as one may be about transformation and innovation, programmatic barriers are still usually fully encouraged, driven by apprehension of existing restrictions.  The line is drawn in the sand not to casually walk over, and it is the strained relationship between boundaries that one must supersede. In order to maintain a viable state, keeping up the appearance of boundaries and borders cultivates a close relationship with the opposition, creating a unique exchange that is anything but unpoetic.

Gina Dawson was born in Dallas, TX and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from the University of North Texas in 2002 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2005. While in graduate school, she received a Dean’s discretionary fund and a travel grant. She has been in multiple group exhibitions in Texas, Boston, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. In January of 2010 she had  a solo show at Galerie Jeanroch Dard in Paris and in April of the same year was in a two person exhibition at Judy Rotenberg Gallery in Boston.

Carl Gunhouse was born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts, but he spent his formative years in suburban New Jersey. Growing up, he developed a love/hate relationship with suburbia that led to the angst familiar to most suburban youth. With this unrest came the discovery of the anger and DIY ethics of hardcore punk rock. Yearning to be part of the hardcore scene, he started photographing bands, which began his love of photography. To escape suburban New Jersey, Carl enrolled in Fordham University in New York City. While completing a BA in European History at Fordham, he discovered that photography could be something to pursue as career so he decided to simultaneously complete a BFA in Photography. After going on to earn his MA in American History from Fordham, Carl threw himself into finding an expression for his suburban angst in street photography. In a hope to develop and refine his photography, Carl completed his MFA in Photography at Yale University. Since graduating, he has found a great deal of personal satisfaction teaching as an Adjunct at Montclair State University, Cooper Union, and Nassau Community College. He has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Searching For the Light, Skuawk, and BigREDandShiny. His photography has been shown nationally and internationally. As an artist, he has produced a body of landscape photographs in New Jersey that deals with his complex personal relationship to suburbia. He is now investigating the suburban experience by driving around the United States and exploring what it is to be an American. Carl currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cyle Metzger is an artist and writer raised in southern California. His work is inspired by inaccessible spaces and experiences of negotiating social barriers. Since receiving his MFA from MICA in 2010, he has been granted residency fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and New York State’s Salem Art Works, a number of exhibition opportunities in California, New York, Maryland and Delaware, and the opportunity to teach at Towson University in Maryland. He currently lives in Baltimore.

Further info at: www.guestspot.org or contact rodmalin@guestspot.org

image:  Tiana Peterson; Frank Gehry in Pop-up, three 2009, pop-up book page 23 x 15

CLOSING ARTISTS BRUNCH EDITED STATE

Saturday, August 27, 1 – 5pm

1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

Edited State is a group exhibition of artists who deliberately utilize elements of subtraction to expose existing systems. These three artists will consider the departure of an object’s existing infrastructure and venture into creating a paradox with their process of re-appropriation.

Works by:  Skye Gilkerson  • Keith Sullivan  • Tiana Peterson

Through the course of the twentieth century, the liberation of art objects occurred hand-in-hand with the breakaway from the containment of traditional infrastructure.  However, it may seem the paralleling state of what the market determines as substantial art is reflective of the politics out lining the architectural fibers that make up our culture.  As resources are in flux and current restrictions are placed on societal living conditions, we are faced with interrelated systems that oppose each other. The dominant cultural structure is strained not from the lack of resources, but from understanding the total phantom structural state of that infrastructure under the global market.

NARRATIVE LIMINAL OPENING RECEPTION

Friday September 2nd  7pm-10pm

1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

Narrative Liminal features the work of John Bohl and Mike Peter Smith. Both Artists’ concepts refer to the in-between states and conditions that allude to disarray. Their work is critical of the discontinuity of traditional narrative while contributing to the dissolution of order.  At the same time, the work is informative of the continuity of tradition.

Works by:  Mike Peter Smith • John Bohl

Journalism is being challenged by increasing Balkanization, resulting in a gap in perspectives that is also redefining the way in which sources are established and fact is formed.  Currently, substrates of traditional ethics in Journalistic Narrative are the topics for critique in this niche media landscape.  As individual personas are established to maintain a ringside media perspective, a dialogue heavily reflected by bias is created. This is reflected in everything from small scale blogs to corporate conglomerates. The gaping margins of perspectives create an ambivalent moral market for inhabitants of the American home.

John Bohl was born in 1983 in New York. He graduated with a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently lives and works in Baltimore. John uses painting and sculpture as a platform to examine utopia, kitsch, and romanticism. Recent exhibitions include Baltimore Liste (Contemporary Museum) and Full Color (Current Gallery).

Mike Peter Smith is currently represented by Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City. His solo exhibitions include Ambrosino Gallery, Miami and Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, Chicago. His sculptures have been included in group exhibitions at Art In General, The Bronx Museum of Art, Exit Art, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, and the Queens Museum of Art. He received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA from The University of Utah. He lives and works in New York.

CLOSING ARTISTS BRUNCH TEMPORARY HOME

Saturday July 16 2011 1pm-5pm

Guest Spot 1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

In support of our current show Guest Spot will organize •Artist Brunch•. A more intimate setting to meet the exhibiting artists and enjoy some refreshments… This will as well be the closing day of

•Temporary Home•.

Temporary Home is an exhibition of artists who use their interest in the transitory nature of current events as a starting point for their art. Each in their own way finds the ability to comment on the world around them without being overtly political or didactic.

Works by: Becky Alprin • City Blossoms • Jason Hughes • John Lehr • Christine Rogers
Curated by: Carl Gunhouse

The best of dreams and aspirations tend to get bulldozed by history, which makes fools of even the most enlightened of prognosticators. Our current state of economic turmoil, with its sluggish recovery and disappointing gains, seems more than ever to indicate that the uncertainty of history has become a certainty. The recession has ended the middle class’s expected birthright, to reach or exceed the standard of living of their parents. Gone is a shared confidence that through hard work and education a college graduate can find a job that provides healthcare, a comfortable retirement, and the ability to buy a home.

RSVP on Facebook

EDITED STATE OPENING

Friday July 22nd  7pm-10pm

Guest Spot 1826 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21231

Edited State is a group exhibition of artists who deliberately utilize elements of subtraction to expose existing systems. These three artists will consider the departure of an object’s existing infrastructure and venture into creating a paradox with their process of re-appropriation.

Works by:  Skye Gilkerson  • Keith Sullivan  • Tiana Peterson

Through the course of the twentieth century, the liberation of art objects occurred hand-in-hand with the breakaway from the containment of traditional infrastructure.  However, it may seem the paralleling state of what the market determines as substantial art is reflective of the politics out lining the architectural fibers that make up our culture.  As resources are in flux and current restrictions are placed on societal living conditions, we are faced with interrelated systems that oppose each other. The dominant cultural structure is strained not from the lack of resources, but from understanding the total phantom structural state of that infrastructure under the global market.