Exhibitions

The Peale is Baltimore’s Community Museum.

Balancing Acts

August 17 – September 22, 2024

We throw what we witness about the world around us into categories. We can’t help it. Red car, black car, blue car, silver car, etc. We do this out of some kind of craving for order. Yet, if we allow ourselves to think our way out of this craving, we realize that what we are experiencing resists much simple classification.

New red minivan with beige interior, old blue truck with ripped vinyl seats, middle-aged silver sports car with wood trim. . . . Everything is deeper than the surface — we are multiple things at one time. Similarly, the artists in this show create work that freely toggles between defined categories, uniformly those of realism and abstraction.

About the Artists

John Bohl (Baltimore, MD) mines images for his paintings from everywhere imaginable, including stills from YouTube videos, vintage print advertising, and sometimes photos taken in his Baltimore home and studio. He takes recognizable and sometimes disparate images and manipulates them until they nearly shed their meanings. The newly distilled results feel all at once impersonal & intimate, provocative & subdued, inappropriate & well mannered.

Phaan Howng (Baltimore, MD) creates lush theatrical paintings and immersive installations that tease a post- human ecological condition. Working within either the tradition of floral still life or landscape, Howng’s aggressively lurid botanical visions seem are ready to escape the confines of the canvas, either threatening, satirical, or darkly seductive.

Ed Istwan (Baltimore, MD) produces geometric works that appear at first glance to be about pleasing arrangements of color, taking cues from 20th-century color theory or current decorative trends. This easy classification holds up until they are contextualized in these gallery spaces as exaggerated vertical columns. These works possess the very real compositional capability of directional road signage, steering the viewers’ roving eye into overlooked gallery corners.

Magnolia Laurie (Baltimore, MD) paints delicate yet forceful landscapes. Her beautifully detailed works reference the continued human need to create or build, while hinting to its escalating negative impact. Alternating between melancholic and hopeful, one can’t help feel the shifting ground move when witnessing her loaded yet barren pastoral compositions.

Details

Date: August 17 – September 22, 2024
When: Open during regular hours, plus after-hours special events
Location: The Peale, 225 Holliday Street, Baltimore

Collaborators

Featured Artists: John Bohl, Phaan Howng, Ed Istwan, Magnolia Laurie

Donations

Cost: Free | Donations Welcome
Programs at The Peale are often free. Please help us keep programs free for all.

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