r aster syrell: Approaching the Garden

May 2–July 13, 2025

The Question: "Are we ever really finished?"

You have come to see an exhibition. What you have found instead is an active artist’s studio. The difference between the two is important because an exhibition is static— comprising an extant body of work onto which a didactic narrative is often grafted. An artist’s studio, conversely, is a place in formation, where progress is not linear, time splinters and multiplies, and singular narratives dissolve.

For a period of 73 days and nights, the artist r aster syrell is creating art in this room. Her process is the exhibition’s primary subject. Everything is in flux: The drawings and paintings you see today will not look the same in a week. When the exhibition ends on July 13th, she will have a finished body of work, ready—ludicrously, just when it is too late—for an exhibition.

syrell is an observational painter, meaning that she draws and paints what she sees. Here she is responding to the changing reflections in the gallery’s tall corner windows, using the glass in a mode adjacent to how one might deploy a Claude Glass. Plein air painters in the 18th century used dark, handheld mirrors, called Claude Glasses, to capture an image of a landscape that they would then transfer to their canvases. But syrell’s approach is different. First, she thinks of “observational painting” in broad terms, allowing for the inclusion of memory alongside sight. Second, these windows are large. Rather than seeking to reduce and control the world she sees in the reflect- ions, she is exploring the chaotic, rupturing, reflective translucence of the windows themselves. She layers this slowly changing constellation of image-objects into her canvases to activate myriad temporalities. In working this way, she is pushing back against a particularly structured and commodified view of time and space born with the advent of Capitalism.

Queer and trans discourses often describe time in anti- or para-Capitalist terms. It is non-linear, full of shifts, recursions, and discontinuities. This is where the ostensible subject of this exhibition (a non-linear artistic process) and the painting’s actual content (the complex experience of being in the world) intersect. It is also what fuels the metaphor in the exhibition’s title, “Approaching the Garden”. Think of it as a search for a truth or ideal comprised of paradoxical realities, one that is likely unattainable but worth the pursuit.

r aster syrell teaches at St. John’s University in New York and Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland. This exhibition is presented on the occasion of Arundel County Arts Month, Paint Annapolis, and Pride Month.

Kimsooja: A Homeless Woman

January 23–April 6, 2025

The Question: "What is alive?"

Born in Taegu, Korea, Kimsooja works nomadically but maintains studios in New York, Paris, and Seoul. Her art frequently focuses on migration, displacement, and belonging.

This video, made in 2001, documents Kimsooja performing in her personae the Homeless Woman. It is one of many artworks in which she lies, sits, or stands motionless in a busy metropolis. "My body becomes like a stone on the street," she has said.

Kimsooja practices a principle of "non-doing" and "non-making". She intends to make aware what already exists without the intent of making it.

Special thanks to Kimsooja Studio and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for lending this artwork.

Two Art Books: Louise Bourgeois and Fischli/Weiss

April 19–September 8, 2024

Lillian Vanous Nutt Room, Greenfield Library, St. John's College.

The Question: "What is it to be human?"

This exhibition presents two small, zine-like art books, each featuring a single body of work. Though different in temperament and focus, both ask fundamental questions about the meaning of life and our place in the social or natural order.

Les Fleurs (The Flowers) includes reproductions of 28 gouache paintings created by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois in 2009–10, a year before she died at the age of 97. Flowers typically symbolize growth, fecundity, and rejuvenation. Here the flat, silhouetted images—laid out in a regulated sequence—call to mind leafy specimens pressed under glass gathered for future study. In structure, they also evoke human anatomy; in hue and translucency, the paint looks like fresh blood. Bourgeois herself has verbally made this connection between the natural world and the human body, saying, “It seems rather evident to me that our own body is a figuration that appears in Mother Earth.”

Ordnung and Reinlichkeit (Order and Cleanliness) by the Swiss artist duo Fischli/Weiss, contains 15 black and white drawings by the artists from 1981. (The zine on view here is from 2016.) As if extracted from a corporate report­­ or a textbook, each drawing is labeled as a figure (fig. no. 1, etc.), supporting a text that is nowhere to be found. The diagrams tackle such topics as the will to power, love, anxiety, and the constitution of an organism. One of them intertwines big timeless questions (e.g., “Is the galaxy still growing?”) with small ones (“Is the bus still running?”). The tone seems earnest but the small scale and humorous insertions suggest otherwise. Fischli/Weiss are poking fun at the high expectations we have of them.

Polly Apfelbaum: Sampling a Sampler Sampling

January 20–April 21, 2024

The Question: "Why do we look down on art?"

A critique of judgment is at the core of New York-based artist Polly Apfelbaum’s work, which comprises textiles, and, as of late, ceramics. At /m, she is creating a new installation of unaltered, commercially produced fabrics laid out in a grid on the floor.

The installation is an evolution of her well-known “fallen paintings,” which are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Experiencing “Sampling a Sampler Sampling,” we are forced to look down, literally, on artwork that encompasses design, craft, and traditional women’s work. Any superiority one feels, however, is quickly undermined when we realize that the single artwork, light as it is, asserts a claim to the entire gallery while we, the viewers, stand with our backs against the wall. The installation poses several questions, among them, “What is order?” “What is originality?” “What are the bases of our judgments?” and “What do we look down on?”

The Open Museum

February 17–March 26, 2023

The Question: "What is a museum?"

We reopened after a three-year closure by inviting the public into an otherwise empty museum and asking them to make their mark directly on the clean, white walls. Over the course of five weeks, a cacophony of doodles, diagrams, drawings, and texts filled the space, resulting in an extended portrait of the Mitchell Art Museum’s community. The exhibition was the analog denouement of Pontus Hultén’s concept of the Open Museum and asked, “What is a museum?”