All Terrain
Amanda Burnham
Baltimore, Maryland
David Constable
Norton, Virginia
Susan Main
Rockville, Maryland
Curated by Dawn Gavin
College Park, MD – All Terrain features work by three artists, Amanda Burnham, David Constable, and Susan Main, who each draw upon their immediate surroundings as a vehicle to explore the transitional and tenuous nature of place. As a series of shifting environments, the landscapes represented both construct, and are constructed by, those who negotiate their terrain.
Exhibition March 5th-April 2nd
Opening Reception March 12th 5-7 PM
Dawn Gavin, Curator of All Terrain
Dawn Gavin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park. Originally from Scotland, Dawn currently, lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
Amanda Burnham
Amanda Burnham uses drawing in her work to investigate and record evolving urban and suburban built landscapes. Her work has been exhibited extensively; selected venues include the Julio Art Gallery at Loyola College, Maryland, the Dorsch Gallery (Miami, FL), GV/AS Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Harrington Arts (San Francisco, CA), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, and the Cranbrook Institute of Art. She is also very involved in collaborative work with writers; a book, “Never Cry Woof”, featuring her drawings alongside the work of poet Shafer Hall, was published by No Tell Books last year.
Amanda holds BA and MFA degrees from Harvard and Yale, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Towson University. Despite having traversed the east coast for the better part of the last decade, she was born in Toledo, Ohio (1979) and traces her fascination with derelict warehouses, sign architecture, purposeless and repurposed spaces, and cars to that city’s rust belt landscape.
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-Rainer Maria Rilke
Writ large on the surfaces of urban space in thousands of ways is the tension between the organism of cities and the greatest hopes of their individual architects and residents.
I am moved by the ways cities don't work. Painting on a wall, I tease out the edges of nameable things, then suppress them in silhouette, or literally fence them in. Drawing quickly and voluminously with ink on small, heavy, and unevenly deckled pages resembling chipped paint, I seek to record, from as many vantage points as I can see and imagine, the hysteria, confusion, and loneliness arising from the confrontation between individuals and the overwhelming, unknowable structures of cities.
David Constable
David Constable received his BA in Fine Art from Grays School of Art, in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1989, and subsequently completed his MFA at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2002. He lives in Norton, Virginia, and is an Adjunct instructor at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. Recent exhibitions include ‘Marginal’ at The University of Seville, Department of Architecture, Seville, Spain, and a site-specific installation in the John Cooke Wyllie Library at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
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The German theorist, Walter Benjamin, has written about the remorseless effects of technology’s vaunted progress. Writing about a drawing of Paul Klee’s, Angelus Novus, 1920,
“…shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” 1
I commit these modest studies to this storm.
1. Art since 1900 Vol. 1 Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh Thames&Hudson 2004 p.141
Susan Main
Susan Main uses drawing, painting, video and projection to explore events that are overlooked, ordinary, constant yet constantly changing…including natural phenomena, the daydream, the movement from thought to language and the shifting, dislocating relationship between perception, attention and mediation. Susan received her MFA from the University of Maryland at College Park and is currently enrolled in the Imaging and Digital Arts MFA program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She has exhibited her paintings and drawings nationally including selected solo exhibitions at Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco) and Peng Gallery (Philadelphia). Awards include a Juror’s Merit Award in the New American Talent exhibition juried by Lisa Phillips, a Full Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and the RTKL Fellowship in 2008. Main’s work is in numerous collections including Reuters (San Francisco). She is represented by Peng Gallery and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
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- Winter Journal 2007
The world actualizes for a moment, under our fixed, attentive gaze, only to slip into a state of wild fragments: the "whole story" now uncharted, in-between versions. A map of this liminal landscape might be full of holes, revealing the gaps between perception and reality, the visible and the invisible, the public and the private. It is precisely this uncertain, overlooked, yet ordinary territory that marks and is marked by attention and consciousness.
Grid, plot, mark, axis, word and time locate and orientate. Using the structural tools paired with natural phenomena, the unpredictable potential of live, real time, recorded video and drawing. I am exploring individual and social contracts with space, time and attention.
