The Eye
Name: Anna Fine Foer
Occupation: Artist
Neighborhood: Annapolis
What I chose: Sue Johnson’s mixed-media print “What Makes Today’s Home so Different, So Appealing” from the Maryland State Art Council’s current exhibit, “Personal Vocabulary.”
Why I love this piece: This work exemplifies the theme for this show, which is an artist’s unique visual language, their method of expression, combined with an underlying message that is conveyed. In the painting, a seemingly comfortable, 1950s-era woman, (housewife waiting for her husband to come home?) is confronted with an alien object that beamed down into her suburban living room. Her double image is seated across from her also gazing at the alien invasion into their “comfort zone.”
Sue Johnson’s piece is a reinterpretation of scientific illustrations or perhaps better stated as pseudo-scientific.
She invents her own encyclopedia and taxonomy and then places those inventions in an imagined landscape. Animals are situated in an environment that may include recognizable advertisements or furniture from another era that may or may not be comforting.
A can opener is transformed into a flying insect, while the background tells us what kind of laundry detergent to use. The images are a suggestion, a reminder of another time and place. – Jessica Novak
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Curated by Anna Fine Foer, “Personal Vocabulary” from the Maryland State Arts Council features paintings and works on paper by Maryland artists who received a 2008 MSAC Individual Artist Award.
Exhibiting artists include Seth Adelsberger, Tom Block, Alyssa Dennis, Melissa Dickenson, Sue Johnson, W.C. Richardson, Chris Siron, Nora Sturges and Jessica Van Brakle.
The free exhibit runs through Dec. 18 at the MSAC James Backas Gallery, located at 175 W. Ostend St. in Baltimore. For more information, call 410-767-6555 or visit www.msac.org.
