spare room

Trespass

Lynn Silverman & Glenn Shrum, Trespass, March 2006

Trespass uses light, image, and reflection to explore the changing conditions found in an empty room. Steady and intermittent shadows from a single window animate the space. A photograph records the seasonal transformation outside the window, and a mirror provides additional views of the room. The order of the two inserted elements becomes apparent as night falls in the urban environment. After dark, the wall opposite this display becomes animated with moving light from passing traffic.

Lynn Silverman received her BFA in Photography from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, and her MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths' College, London. She has produced more than 15 exhibitions of work, and her photographs are included in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and the Middlesbrough Art Gallery, Middlesbrough, among others. She currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

Spanning the fields of design and art practice, Glenn Shrum's work with light places him at the center of converging professional disciplines. A member of the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 2001, Glenn Shrum has received numerous awards for his work in lighting design, exhibition design, furniture design, interiors, sculpture, and architecture. Originally trained as an architect at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Shrum completed a Masters of Fine Art in Studio Art with an emphasis on light-space installations and history at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Shrum's interest in the junction of art and design led him to establish Flux Studio, a multi-disciplinary design practice in 2006. Recent Flux Studio projects include the Legg Mason Worldwide Offices with Gensler, the Gateway building at MICA, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and the National Aquarium.

Night Light (Isometric Delight)

Jason Urban, Night Light (Isometric Delight), February 2005

Night Light (Isometric Delight)... a glow-in-the-dark installation influenced by a variety of sources including anamorphosis, op art, and the movie Tron. This installation was about drawing, light, and the relationship of two- and three-dimensional forms. Upon entering the room, the viewer was enveloped by complete darkness from which the glow-in-the-dark isometric cube pattern emerged. The overall effect was disorienting in that the viewer was unsure of where "the room"- its corners, ceiling, etc., was situated.

Urban installing project

installation view in full light

installation view in the dark

detail in the dark

Jason Urban is a visual artist living and working in Austin, TX. In addition to making prints, drawings, paintings, installations , he is also a co-founder/contributor of Printeresting.org -the world's greatest printmaking website. Urban teaches printmaking and drawing at University of Texas - Austin. He studied at Kutztown University – BFA and University of Iowa – MA and MFA.

Cicada

Jessie Lehson, Cicada, December 2004

Jessie Lehson's site-specific work, Cicada, was constructed of handmade paper made from weeds, grass and cicada wings. Her work transforms mundane organic materials into elegant sculptural forms.

Jessie Lehson received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002 and will complete her MFA at the Rinehart School of Sculpture in 2008. Lehson lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Lehson’s work has been featured and reviewed in many publications including: The Baltimore Sun; The Washington Post, The Washington Post Express, The Washington City Paper; The Baltimore City Paper, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Colonial, The Washington Times, The Reston Times, The Falls Church News, Hand Papermaking and Mid-Atlantic Art News as well as reviewed on NPR.

Tell Me Window

Temple Crocker, Tell Me Window, October 2004

The installation consisted of antiquated keys attached to the ceiling by threads, door knob back plates that contained fragments of language, hair, photographs and string, a small curiosity cabinet, hundreds of matches and a collection of freshly fallen leaves. Participants were encouraged to use the scissors that hung in the space to cut down a key and take it with them. A sound score created in collaboration with Carol Anne Perini accompanied the installation.

Tell Me Window began as an exploration of the metaphor of the body as a holding house, a complex and mysterious dwelling place that contains not only our expanding lungs and beating hearts, but the nuances of our dream life and the remembrances of our past. I am fascinated with the unpredictable nature of memory and its constant state of flux. There is a subtle terror accompanying the discovery that a person, place or feeling from the past has faded so dramatically that it lacks any definition in the mind’s eye. Why does one image become soft around the edges to a point of indecipherability and another shine with fragmented clarity? And do we have any influence on what comes and what goes?

In ancient Chinese medicine autumn is associated with grieving and the sound of weeping. The element of the season is metal mined from the earth and melted by fire. The parts of the body associated are the lungs, skin and hair. While creating work in a room with a window that offers a view of the changing season I witness the leaves of the trees brighten to an excess of color before falling and inevitably fading. With this observation comes the insight that the experiences of my past have their own autumnal season and live in my memory as a part of that same cycle of change.

Temple Crocker was born in Georgia, grew up in North Carolina and after earning her BA from the College of Charleston in South Carolina moved to San Francisco, where she lived for eleven years. During this time she performed, designed and created theatre with a variety of directors, writers, choreographers and musicians. Some of those artists include Loy Arcenas, Sean Hayes, Mark Jackson, Philip Gotanda, Tom Ontiveros, Pearl Ubungen, Sommer Ulrickson and Will Waghorn. It was in San Francisco that she met her long-time friend and collaborator Annie Kunjappy. Together they founded Strangefruit Theatre Ensemble with Rowena Richie and from 1996 to 2003 created six original performances, including Heat Death of the Universe based on the short story by Pamela Zoline, and Sewing Lessons based on the art and lives of surrealist painters/writers Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Both projects were supported by the Zellerbach Family Fund, and Sewing Lessons was honored with a Bay Area Critics Circle award nomination in 2001 for best direction and costume

Stray Dogs

Cornel Rubino, Stray Dogs, September 2004

installation view

Stray Dogs was Cornel Rubino's homage to the downtrodden and often neglected homeless population during the Bush years. He told the stories of the displaced men and women who serve as reminders of the failings as a society. The work was executed in charcoal "alla prima", without sketches, and continued Rubino's series of direct wall drawings.

detail

Cornel Rubino attended Parsons School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. He is currently on the faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art. He has exhibited at spare room and Creative Alliance, Baltimore, Gallery FE, Pittsburgh, and Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta. His illustrations are seen regularly in The New Yorker, and appear in The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, and other national newspapers and magazines. He is a winner of numerous awards including the Society of Publication Designers Award and Communication Arts Illustration Competition. Rubino has created posters for the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, International Habitat for Humanity, Lincoln Center, and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, among others. He currently resides in Baltimore.

Matchbook

In August 2004, spare room asked local artists to create art on matchbooks and donate the works to help raise funds for the operation of the space. It was a hot and crowded night at spare room, as patrons danced to the beats of Delano Farm Labs and perused over sixty matchbooks.

Artists in the show included: Emily Boismain, Cara Ober, Mimi Shapiro, Jennie Fleming, Pam Rehm, Troy Collins, Seth Adelsberger, Stephaine Robbins, Cindy Rehm, Julie Benoit, Chole Kutun, Carol Galligan, Bill Sebring, Jo Israelson, Paul Wheatly, Jason Sloan, Laura Amusen, Karen Graff, Jessie Lehson, Alicia Byler, Temple Crocker, Cornel Rubino, John Hanlon, Lauren Bender, Jackie Milad, Renee Shaw, Marc Fanberg, Charnan Lewis, Bonnie Jones, Andrea Biller, Barbara Linder, Ric Royer, Taj Vaccarella, Lynn Silverman, Marian L. Savige and Ellen Slupe.

Chance

Ellen Slupe, Chance, May 2004

The blueprint on DNA remains an unreadable tour book for life's journey. With no preplans and with no guidebook, chance emerges to lead the way. Chance selects love, chance allots heath, chance deals luck.

Ellen Slupe is drawn to straight-sided shapes. Realizing that everything we do is processed by determining the variance from vertical to horizontal, the straight-sided shape became a metaphor for human activity in her work.

Ellen Slupe is an artist and writer.She was born and raised in Lancaster County and of Pennsylvania Dutch and Danish heritage. Her early path in science led to a BS in pre-med biology from Elizabethtown College followed by research at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla CA and at the Penn State University Hershey Medical Center in Hershey PA.

In 1995 Slupe earned a BFA from Millersville University, entered the arts community full of enthusiasm and never looked back. She developed an extensive exhibit history with invitational solo and juried group exhibits at many locations including The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Susquehanna Art Museum Harrisburg PA, Lancaster Museum of Art, the Demuth Museum Lancaster PA, Woodmere Art Museum, New Arts Program Kutztown PA, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Elizabethtown College, Noyes Museum of Art, Berman Museum of Art, Phillips Museum of Art, American College, Liriodendron Foundation, Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery Annville PA, Robeson Gallery State College PA, Spare Room Baltimore MD, The Plastic Club in Philadelphia, Reading Public Museum, Wallingford Center for the Arts, Art Point Black Gallery in Firenze Italy, Gallarie San Vidal in Venice, Fusion Art Institute in Japan and Seoul Korea.