Julie Ann Cavnor
Occupation: Executive Director, Maryland Art Place
Neighborhood: Charles Village
Why I love this piece: My most recent favorite work of art, a diptych by artist Hadieh Shafie, is contained in Maryland Art Place’s current exhibition, “Hidden & Revealed.” The work is incredibly beautiful with its rich contrasting colors, alluring surfaces and seemingly effortless symmetry.
In one panel, the artist has applied multiple layers of thin pigment overlapped with rich black calligraphic marks. The first panel, “14,350,” reveals a web of concentric circles and abstracted text representing the number of times she wrote the word “love” in Farsi. The second panel, “Overlap,” features paper textual scrolls which have been tightly rolled and inserted into a square wooden frame. The work provides insight into the artist’s personal history and memory of growing up in Iran, while affording the viewer an opportunity to become fully engrossed in this highly methodical art-making process.
Details: “Hidden & Revealed” is on view through Sept. 6 at Maryland Art Place, 8 Market Place in Baltimore. – Jessica Novak
BEYOND THE EYE
While you’re there: Check out the rest of “Hidden & Revealed” at MAP. The diverse exhibit gives viewers a better understanding of artists’ creative processes.
“During the creative process, how does an artist decide what to hide and what to reveal?” writes Curator Peter Dubeau. “What images ultimately lie on and beneath the surface and how do they interact, if at all, with one another? ‘Hidden & Revealed’ features six artists who layer content and/or image in their works and examine how they use this additive and subtractive process with a wide range of media.”
“Hidden & Revealed’s” ink-pencil drawings, abstract paintings, photographs, monoprints and mixed media paintings come from Michael Iampieri, Kevin Kepple, Dean Kessmann, Michelle La Perriere, Randi Reiss-McCormack and Hadieh Shafie. – Jessica Novak
