ART .357
Journal
In the fall of 2022, I took a fine arts class at Towson University where we went on a field trip each week to a different gallery space, artists’ studio or museum institution to learn about how they operate, and how it could apply to us in our own careers as creatives.
November 30th
Connie Imboden
This trip was something of a combination of previous trip formats, showing us both a facility where creative professionals work as well as highlighting a particular artist. Connie Imboden has been a practicing photographer for over 30 years, now working out of her own studio in the outskirts of the city. The downstairs space acts as a digital lab and viewing area as she selects her images. We sat there as Connie explained her career to us.
Connie is an artist with a particular method that has stuck with her across decades. In the 80s, she came up with her initial idea of photographing human subjects interacting with the surface of water. She came up with a
After walking us through all this, she took us upstairs in groups to check out her studio proper. These days Connie achieves the affect she desires with a large piece of plastic in a plywood frame, lit in various ways and dripped with water and other liquids. The plastic has a very particular reflective quality that allows two human subjects to be visible in the same spot with differing levels of opacity, letting Connie make even more surreal human body-creations.
very good method for isolating her subjects in darkness, and manipulating surface tension and pose to make extremely surreal and visceral but identifiably human imagery. You can watch her branch out and get more complex in her methods over the years, both in subtle ways like adding mirrors and other materials to her work, as well as jumps in method like her switch from black and white to color, or from film to digital.
Connie’s studio, with her plastic sheet front and center in the space. I had a fun conversation with her here about her lighting setup.
November 2nd
Edwin Remsburg
Edwin Remsburg strikes me as someone whose found great success in his field, while making his business unique from any other in a way that keeps things interesting for him. We drove out to Mr. Remsburg’s farm in the countryside (finally I don’t have to park in Baltimore!) to hear about his photo business, which includes aerial photography, stock photos, and more.
The first words out of Edwin’s mouth were perhaps the most valuable thing he said to us on the trip: He essentially explained that the only difference between a successful freelancer and an unsuccessful one, is their business and marketing knowledge. He went on to show us his business model, and explain a few things that have made him successful.
One thing he stressed heavily was organization. As a company that makes much of its income off stock photos, they have a giant pile of digital information to manage. Edwin stressed that an image that isn’t catalogued and searchable in your database might as well not exist, and that a ton of man-hours go into properly keeping records.
One piece of advice I really took to heart was to take advantage of your own niche experiences. A large portion of Edwin’s clients are in agriculture. His unique knowledge in that area gives him an edge in dealing with those clients, who know his experience will be useful when working with them.
Later I’d come to understand that there was a little more to the internship offer than Edwin let on. His entire business model centers around hiring many interns at a time, and sending them off to generate and organize a constant stream of stock photos.
I immediately felt a familiar homieness when I saw this half-indoors half-outdoors room full of miscellaneous and goofy items
Sheep!
October 26th
Full Circle
Catalyst Contemporary
Full Circle is an old school photo service business, providing development services for a variety of different film processes, as well as digital printing and framing services. They operate out of two conjoined row houses down in the city. We got a chance to tour Full circle, seeing a portion of the frame shop as well as the digital printing area and part of the film lab.
The ground floor of Full Circle consists of a front desk area, with a winding set of stairs that lead to the upper level of the frame shop. The lower level houses all of the woodworking equipment, while the top area (pictured above) serves as a finishing area, with a frame samples filling the walls of the room.
From there, we went up a half-floor to the digital area. This room housed a bunch of printers as well as photo editing workstations. Some cool clients we learned about in this room include the Lady in the Lake production, a movie that’s been filming in the Baltimore area for the last few months (last time I checked they have a downtown section of York Road painted up to look like the 1960s, old cars and all. They’re directing traffic thru the set in between takes! absolutely wild)
One level up from this is the photo lab, which includes a number of darkrooms as well as a main area full of large self-contained film processing machines. This room was full of all kinds of interesting things I wish I had asked about; in particular there was a vintage computer of some type sitting on a shelf, that I can only guess was used to control some old piece of film processing equipment.
At the very top of the building is a small gallery space, which at the time happened to be showing our host’s lovingly photographed, manipulated and printed images. This space is available for interns and anyone who uses Full Circle’s darkrooms; as well as offering its services directly, Full circle runs a number of small classes on how to process film.
October 19th
Wide Angle Youth Media
In a lot of ways, Wide Angle reminds me of a makerspace like Openworks. They provide creative equipment, spaces and means for the local populous. What’s different about Wide Angle however, is their outspokenly political focus on benefitting youth in underserved communities in Baltimore. They work as a media production company with this goal in mind, providing cameras, computer labs, printing equipment and other graphic media resources.
This commitment seems to extend heavily to the hiring practices of the company, with internships and permanent positions offered regularly to their community.
The presentation we were shown was mainly about how we as Towson students could work with the organization in the future; I could tell the staff were genuinely interested in crosspollinating with as many art and media communities as possible, for the benefit of their own.
After this presentation we did a short exercise which consisted of taking pictures around the building. This was fun, and felt mainly like a chance for them to take photos of us taking photos, for their social media.
A stairwell in Wide Angle’s enclosed courtyard, which we wandered and photographed for a time
October 12th
Marcy Lightfoot
Navigating the professional world as a creative is a tough thing to do, no matter what your specialty is. Marcy is the Assistant Media, Arts & Communications Director in Towson’s career center, and specializes in this area. She gave us a lot of practical answers to our questions, and filled in some really big knowledge gaps such as: how should we format our resumes to best work with automated systems? What career resources does Towson have specifically for creatives? I was especially impressed with how much personal advice I got as the only EMF major in the room, when the vast majority of people were Photo majors. Marcy made sure to include my specific needs in the conversation when I very easily could’ve been ignored.
September 21st
Different from other trips we’ve taken so far, the goal of this one was more to make us aware of a local resource for artists, rather than viewing a particular body of work. Openworks is located across the street from scenic Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, in a very nice multi-level building with a variety of facilities available to artists for a cost. Openworks has a full suite of Mac workstations, large-format printers, a competent woodshop, open studio space available to rent and much more that we didn’t pass by on our tour. I have been aware of the “maker” community for a long time, and Openworks is one of the nicest facilities there is. This is convenient in a city, as it gives artists who live in apartments access to a larger shop space and equipment they wouldn’t be able to have at home.
To me one of the most interesting things about this place is the community its situated in. In a few blocks radius around the facility are several other businesses that work together as a little ecosystem for artists. Across the way from Openworks are apartments subsidized to artists, enabling artists to live close and use Openworks as their main practice. Nearby is a ‘tool library’, which allows people to borrow and return tools they need but not often enough to own. It seems like a budding artist looking to throw themselves at their work could set up very nicely here, with a good living situation and access to tons of resources to perfect and continue their work.
Also worth noting is the socioeconomic situation Openworks and its art community finds itself in, unfortunately an all-too-common one in Baltimore. It exists in a little island of pure gentrification, surrounded practically on all sides by strife. Could the money concentrated on the benefit of artists, have been spread out over a greater area to fulfull basic needs for a larger number of people? Perhaps, I don’t know enough about Openwork’s funding to draw a conclusion completely one way or another, but it’s certainly food for thought.
OpenWorks
A subtle example of Openworks’ immense purchasing ability. They sprung for a building full of pricey Uline packing tables, without using the attachment system that makes those tables worth the price
September 14th
The BMA is a well-known attraction in the Baltimore art world, however most visits are confined to the public areas of the museum. As with virtually all museums, the BMA houses an extensive collection of work that lives out of the public view, in a private archival section of the building. We’re lucky that the BMA has a robust program for allowing outsiders to come in and view their full collections, in particular having an entire room in the lower level dedicated to viewing prints from their photography collection. We were granted access to this room, and allowed to view a selection of prints from a variety of photographers from across the 20th century.
I was struck by the architecture of this room. This level of the museum feels like the basement architecturally, however the room opens out on the other side to a courtyard. Here is part of the large arch that makes up the main entrance, with a glass pane door filling in the space underneath, sealing the room off from the public space.
BMA Print Room
The BMA is a well-known attraction in the Baltimore art world, however most visits are confined to the public areas of the museum. As with virtually all museums, the BMA houses an extensive collection of work that lives out of the public view, in a private archival section of the building. We’re lucky that the BMA appears to have a robust program for allowing outsiders to come in and view their full collections, in particular having an entire room in the lower level dedicated to viewing prints from their photography collection. We were granted access to this room, and allowed to view a selection of prints from a variety of photographers from across the 20th century.
I’m always interested in the technical side of things, so I took note of the unique ways each artist handled displaying their work.
Often a physical piece in a gallery will have accompanying ambient sounds of some kind. There were a few pieces here that did this, and the Peale’s solution is quite neat. A 360 degree speaker is hung from the ceiling with a concave bowl shape surrounding it, which surrounds a listener standing underneath in a cone of sound. This isn’t surround sound per-se because the speaker likely only has one or two channels, but it’s a efficient way to have a single-person audio experience without forcing people to put on headphones. I also like that it implies a specific spot to stand while viewing the artwork.
September 7th
Grace Doyle - Exit
A highly detailed oil painting by a Towson grad student. Two-dimensional works in this show were hung by wires from the ceiling. This allowed some larger images to angle downwards a bit, looming over the viewer.
The Peale Museum is an art development in Baltimore with an extensive history as more than just a gallery.
Opened as a museum in 1814, it has also served as an early demonstration of interior gas lighting, as well as “Male and Female Colored School #1”. Since that era, the building had fallen into disrepair and has since been revitalized as a nonprofit gallery space.
We saw an exhibition called Spark: New Light at the Peale. It included 24 artists affiliated with Towson and UMBC, using all different forms of media, from traditional oil painting to animation to Hollywood-esque found-object wardrobe construction. We received a tour from Jenee, our professor who’s also in the show. The Peale is a tall thin building with three floors of exhibition space; we started at the top and made our way down.
Adam Droneburg - Top Five Outfits Trending Right Now
From the perspective of a film major, these Mad Max-esque costumes are very cool. They’re built out of found parts, in a way you might expect to need to in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. This is also very reminiscent of how many sci-fi movie productions of the 20th century would build their props and costumes, that is to say entirely out of random found objects. In this case the components are deliberately left in their original state to give the costumes a handmade-from-scraps look, but this is a common practice even with much more streamlined, futuristic sorts of aesthetics. The artist was almost certainly inspired by these sorts of movies, and the pessimistic future of humanity they often paint.
For me, seeing this sort of work in a gallery feels really good. When it comes to the movies, this sort of creative effort is usually done behind the scenes of a much larger production and doesn’t ever get properly recognized on its own.
SOURCES CITED
https://www.thepealecenter.org/history/
The Peale
This exhibition included a new development in art that I’ve been interested in, and am glad to have seen in person: a showing of AI-generated artwork. This particular one is focused on volume: hundreds of images loaded into two Ipads’ camera rolls allows a viewer to take in the strange, almost-identifiable shapes and textures at their own pace.