the WHOLE Gallery

Heady Mugs @ Nudashank Opens December 11

2009-12-09T20:46:00.001-05:00

Ryan Riss, Nice Day, Ink on Paper 20inx20in

An overwhelming show of psychedelic portraits and trippy faces featuring work by:

Henry Gunderson

Michael Skattum
Luke Ramsey
Benjamin Edmiston
Shaun Flynn
D'Metrius Rice
Lesser Gonzalez
Eric Shaw
Bill Dunlap
Robby Rackleff
Ryan De La Hoz
Matthew Feyld
Bill Fick
Lizz Hickey
Nick Mann (Doodles)
Edward Max Fendley
Ryan Riss
Christian Herr
Caitlin Cunningham
Jordan Bernier
Felipe Goncalvez
David Ubias
Marcello Velho
Mike Bull

Heady Mugs

Opening Reception: Friday Dec. 11th, 7-10pm

Exhibition runs from Dec. 11th through Jan. 1st

Nudashank

H&H Arts Building

405 W. Franklin St.

3rd Floor

Baltimore, MD 21201

Relative Terrain opens SAT 9/26, 8-10pm

2009-09-23T13:01:00.003-04:00

In this exhibition, Geddes installs pedestrian commodities through structures that have been simplified into wood and vinyl; Pham presents drawings in horsehair, silk, and wax that communicate displacement and meditation; and Weishaar explores different modes of location, destruction, and play in his dollhouse installations. Geddes and Weishaar both teach art in the Baltimore City school system, and Pham works as a book conservator. All three artists reside in Baltimore.

RADIX Installation Shots

2009-08-06T09:15:00.009-04:00

RADIX!

Jennifer Becker, Jennie Fleming

Ellen Ann Gallup, Ben Piwowar, Gina Denton

Gina Denton

Renee Rendine

Dawn Gavin

Brent Crothers, Doug Hansen, Ellen Ann Gallup

A well attended opening!

2009-07-18T09:06:00.006-04:00

from the Citypaper Arts section:

Orbiting Artscape

By Bret McCabe | Posted 7/15/2009

...The H&HScape after-Sondheim party Saturday night was hot, humid, enthusiastically attended, and a little overwhelming. Three galleries on two floors of the H&H Building at Eutaw and West Franklin streets opened their doors to a steady throng of people after the BMA award-presentation reception ended. If crowd density is any way to gauge interest, people adored the shows at both Nudashank (co-owned by City Paper contributor Alex Ebstein) and Whole (whose Radix show is co-curated by CP contributor Emily C-D), where convivial crowds made interacting with the work difficult and a bit pointless....

RADIX installation begins

2009-07-05T19:45:00.007-04:00

Jennifer Becker installs her folded paper Quilt

Detail of drawing by Renee Rendine

Dawn Gavin works the pin factory

Helped Me With The Fall by Brent Crothers

H&Hscape at Whole Gallery

2009-07-05T17:13:00.008-04:00

1st Annual H&Hscape @ H&H Warehouse
405 W Franklin St, Baltimore
July 11, 2009 : 8:30 – 11:00 pm

3 galleries join forces with the BMA and BOPA to present a 2 floor, 19,000 sq ft visual art event

Gallery Four, Nudashank, & Whole Gallery,

3 galleries founded, forged, and funded by artists living in the H&H Arts building, are working in conjunction with the BMA (Baltimore Museum of Art) and BOPA (Baltimore Office of Promotions and the Arts, the organizers of Artscape) to expose the largely unaware regional community to the pulse of Baltimore’s thriving underground art scene. This first Annual H&Hscape features exhibitions on the 3rd and 4th floors of the H&H warehouse.
including...

RADIX
@ the Whole
July 11 - August 9
405 W. Franklin St. 3rd floor

A radix is the basis of a system of numeration, and implies the point from which everything else stems. This exhibit will showcase art that builds on itself and celebrates repetition.

Artists: Jennifer Becker, Michael Benevento, Brent Crothers, Gina Denton, Jennie Fleming, Ellen Ann Gallup, Dawn Gavin, Doug Hansen, Ben Piwowar and Renee Rendine

curated by Emily C-D and Jessica Unterhalter of the TwoCan Collective

CLOSING and Review

2009-05-13T00:12:00.003-04:00

SUNDAY MAY 17, 7-9pm
For those of you who have not yet had a chance to experience OFF THE WALL, I invite you to come to the 3rd floor of the H&H this Sunday evening to see this widely popular show before it comes down. It is truly a joy to hang out amongst such imaginative sculpture and installation!
Check out the great review in the Citypaper...

Well Hung
Group show shirks the traditional gallery wall for works that sit on the floor and descend from above

Liz Ensz and Matt Gemmell's roller skate parachutes.

By Bret McCabe | Posted 5/13/2009

Off the Wall

Through May 17 at the Whole Gallery, with a closing reception 7-9 p.m. May 17

Alzaruba's "Within" takes up an entire corner of the Whole Gallery's front big-room exhibition space, and it is impossible to ignore. For one, it's huge: An ungodly amount of colored plastic is knotted, piled into hanging bundles, distressed and suspended, and otherwise hoarded into a foreboding façade that appears to hide some dark, chthonic force inside. Ceiling-mounted desktop fans rotate in half circles and gently move the plastic, as if branches ruffled by the sleeping breath of some extremely large monster. A light fades in and out, intermittently illuminating the interior of the plastic environment and amplifying a sense of potential threat. Winding through the hanging sheets, which is like trying to wind in an out of a small compact thicket of Spanish moss-lined oaks, you arrive at the piece's interior heart, where the installation subtly morphs into an environmental space. Viewed from inside, the moving colored plastic feels less cave-like than improvisational rococo fabric treatment, as if decorated by an itinerant New Orleans bordello madame. A sofa sits against a wall and is lined with flowers. The fan stirs the hanging plastic with a casual nonchalance, as if a cool breeze were coming through an open window lined with a tulle curtain. And the fading in and out light gives this slightly domesticated pocket an invitingly seedy undercurrent, as if you've come to a place to enjoy something you know you shouldn't.

"Within" also succinctly captures the best and worst aspects of Off the Wall. As curated by Whole collective member Emily C-D (an occasional City Paper contributing illustrator), the 20 artists here created works that took the title at its word: C-D's submission call went out "looking for art that does not live on the wall, but grows from the floor and drips from the ceiling." And everything does just that, from Jeanne-Marie Burdette and Ellen Nielsen's floor-installed, plant forms, which felt like some exotic species of ancient ferns, to Gina Denton's "Fsitula," a fabric sculptural form that sits on the floor with a tail--neck? pseudopod? other?--that extends off the floor up to the ceiling, to the aerial performance piece that Elisa Urtiaga delivered at the opening, suspending herself from the ceiling. Everything here is a curveball of ideas, directing the eyes up and down to take in.

Many, though certainly not all, of the works here have a bit of scavenging involved, creatively repurposing materials. Liz Ensz and Matt Gemmell made a pair of parachuting roller skates. Two white skates appear to be floating toward the ground, and they're each attached to the dome of a chute--each a patchwork of what looks like the beige, suede-like roller skates you rent at the roller rink. Kaitlin Murphy's hanging staff of a sculpture appears to use a series of articulating umbrella structure to a vertically stacked group of wings that extend when a cord is pulled. And Edward Knapp's sculpture turns a kitchen sink of miscellaneous objects--antlers, animal skulls, costume jewelry, blinking lights--to create a totem-pole like roadside attraction.

The most impressive repurposing comes from Jill Greenberg, whose "The Fountainhead" is an impressive, visually strikingly, clear plastic sculpture suspended in the air. Made entirely out of plastic food and cosmetics packaging--such as the rectangular forms in which lipstick might be housed at the drug store or six-by-six cupped rows in which some eggs are packaged--"The Fountainhead" is a large, architectural piece, looking a bit like a floating chandelier city of the future or a shiny headdress/helmet from some ancient armor system. And its translucence lends it an ineffable mood. Ornately pieced together and intricately arranged--Greenberg forms curves and draped extensions out of these rectangular plastic shapes--the piece looks like it should be more dense and physically resolute, yet because you can see right through it you experience it more as an imposing ghost.

Liz Zacharia's hanging, interactive white and black globes are playful in a different way. They look like ordinary hanging lamps, but they don't emit anything. In fact, you wear them over the head like a mask: inside the black one, tiny pinpricks of holes in the surface turn the object into your own personal planetarium, while inside the white one, which is lined with a reflective surface, becomes like standing inside a disco ball--and it is probably a world of interactive fun after an entire bottle of wine.

That whimsical spirit becomes the show's dominating theme, which is both a blessing and a curse. A sense of fun in a gallery is never a bad thing--see Jen Kirby's string installation running between a pair of walls, which practically begs for you to stand against the wall beneath one side and be surrounded by strings--but it become a tad distracting with this density of glee. When everything is unorthodox--see Melissa Webb's impressively ambitious four-story rooftop installation, "The Temporary Nature of Ideas," which premiered at Transmodern Festival and incorporated performers, props, and lights and works better at night--the overall effect mutes the works' creative individuality, leaving only the impish impression. And it's an impression that you can't escape: When the work leaves the wall in favor of the floor and the ceiling, it radically reorganizes the gallery experience, the most interesting byproduct of the show. Off the Wall has transformed the Whole Gallery form the usual white-wall exhibition space into a helter-skelter jungle gym to be navigated, a maze of artworks that doesn't so much invade personal space as make you feel like you're invading its quirky turf.

More Pictures of the Work

2009-04-28T17:53:00.016-04:00

Fistula by Gina Denton

Fistula detail

Interactive wings (they expand when you pull the cord!) by Kaitlin Murphy

Floating lights by Rachel Schmidt

Fountainhead by Jill Greenberg

Optical thread effect by Jen Kirby

Fibrous mass by Phuong Pham.

Nuggets (detail) by Sarah Matson

Rollerskate parachutes by Liz Ensz and Matt Gemmel

Point trees by Jeanne-Marie Burdette and Ellen Nielsen, blue silk nautilus by Rebecca Habtour

Point forest flanks Within by Alzaruba

Within by Alzaruba

Within Within

Within main entrance

Within side entrance

Liz Zazharia and John ham it up inside Liz's lovely dome headpiece experience globes

Navigational Map

2009-04-28T17:23:00.002-04:00

So visitors know who made what within the space! by Emily C-D

Wonderful Opening!

2009-04-26T23:23:00.009-04:00

Bag blob by Christina Martinelli, web and spider by Freda Mohr.

Nugget bed by Sarah Matson, flying pterodactyl by Annie Gray, dome globes by Liz Zacharia, horsehair floating fiber by Phuong Pham, radiating thread installation by Jen Kirby.

Plastic jellyfisheque headress by Jill Greenberg, floating red globe lights by Rachel Schmidt, skull ladder by Edward Knapp, fibrous apendage by Gina Denton.

Freda in Melissa Webb's ladder and pully world.

Rebecca by Jeanne-Marie Burdette & Ellen Nielsen's point forest, Liz Ensz & Matt Gemmel's skate parachutes, and Rebecca Habtour's silk nautilus.

Thank you Pacofish for snapping such lovely shots!
Also, check out more photos and the nice review on TenTigers. Thanks Alex!

Installation Continues!

2009-04-17T10:44:00.009-04:00

Paul tests out Kaitlin Murphy's anamotronic wing sculpture.

Sarah Matson communes with her nuggets.

Phuong Pham arranges her fibers.

Christina Martinelli puts the finishing touches on her explosion.

Jen Kirby extends her drawing off the wall with miles of thread...

Off the Wall INSTALLation begins

2009-04-11T21:14:00.005-04:00

Jill Greenberg hanging her Fountainhead, as seen through the installation by Rachel Schmidt.

Another corner of the space begins to become Alzaruba-fied.

OFF the WALL! Opening APR 17

2009-04-11T20:28:00.001-04:00

OFF THE WALL
Art that Grows from the Floor and Drips from the Ceiling
curated by Emily C-D

Opening SATURDAY APRIL 18TH, 7-11pm
with performances that will challenge the verticality of the space!

@ the WHOLE gallery
405 W. Franklin St.
3rd Floor of the H&H Warehouse
Baltimore

thru May 17th, hours by appointment, email shout@emilycd.com

Exhibiting Artists:

Alzaruba
Jeanne-Marie Burdette
Gina Denton
Liz Ensz
Matt Gemmell
Annie Gray
Jill Greenberg
Rebecca Habtour
Jen Kirby
Edward Knapp
Christina Martinelli
Sarah Matson
Kaitlin Murphy
Freda Mohr
Ellen Nielsen
Phuong Pham
Rachel Schmidt
Melissa Webb
Liz Zacharia