BALTIMORE — Maryland Art Place (MAP) is pleased to present the work of Abhidnya Ghuge and Heather Harvey in a double solo exhibition exploring space intervention and material use. The two shows, Our Lives Are Green (Ghuge) and ENCAMPMENT (Harvey) will be on view from January 19th to March 11, 2017 at Maryland Art Place (MAP), located on 218 W Saratoga Street in downtown Baltimore. A reception for the artists will take place at MAP on January 19th at six in the evening.
Abhidnya Ghuge is a Texas based multidisciplinary artist who uses printmaking techniques on paper plates to create site-responsive installations. Originally from India, Ghuge draws inspiration from Indian henna designs, the microscopic and macroscopic world, and cultural landscapes of America. Her work celebrates patterns, organic forms, and allows for a rich sensory and spatial experience. Ghuge’s installations are typically vast and comprised of many small parts, (in this instance the plates), to create imaginative, free form, colorful structures. Abhi draws on the similarities between paper disposal and human disposal; the point being that they are both disposable. She adds, What really matters is the time between the beginning and the end – the purpose and the impact each life has made in the world around itself. Growing up in India amongst billions of people, there was no sense of value to a life, especially a female life. Transformation of a life from completely disposable to one of importance came about after my immigration to the United States in 1993. Ghuge is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Art and Art History at the university of Texas at Tyler. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and has public and private collections in the UK, USA, and India.
Heather Harvey creates site-specific installations and objects that straddle traditional boundaries between painting, drawing, and sculpture. Harvey explores themes of hidden infrastructures and invisible ordering mechanisms – such as gravity, quantum physic, and radio waves. These mechanisms also include the human body, memory, and contradictory emotional landscapes and internal unfolding thought processes. The exhibition, ENCAMPMENT, is an elegiac celebration and defensive stance for all that is marginal, invisible, undervalued, and under threat. Working off of the fragile, provisional, absurdist, and dangerous climate of our current national moment, it recalls itinerancy and life on the periphery in all its forms. The makeshift, transient constructions are both welcoming refuge and aggressively defended bulwarks that straddle the line between elegance and the grotesque using primarily collected trash from daily walk.
Harvey has exhibited her work in venues across the country, including The Painting Center, NYC, McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, TX, and the Claremont Graduate university gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Harvey has received several awards including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Artist Fellowship 2009-2010 and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2003. She is currently Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Studio Coordinator at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, USA.
Connecting artists with communities since 1981, Maryland Art Place (MAP) is a Baltimore-based nonprofit contemporary art center. MAP energizes the region’s cultural environment through dynamic exhibitions, events, workshops and programming.