CHRISTINA MARTINELLI

This week Cara Ober reviewed “Falling Off the Edge” in Urbanite Magazine.
Link Here

Thank you so much Cara Ober!

February 08, 2011 Arts & Culture

*Hot Pursuit *
Falling Off The Edge at Open Space showcases the work of two young sculptors
by Cara Ober

The quintessential “artist’s search” for a work that captures a unique, ephemeral thought is a fitful and frustrating process. Younger artists tend to be the best examples of raw, passionate energy, but their output is typically uneven. Among more mature artists, there are few who can sustain this type of hot and fast intensity for long. For this reason it is rare to encounter strong, professional works in an established gallery that don’t resort to some type of safe repetition of past success. Falling Off the Edge: New Works by Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli at Open Space is a rare opportunity to experience the unbridled energy of young artists who have the training and editing skills to properly harness their ideas.

Ann Kelly’s work emits a youthful optimism and a confident, collage aesthetic. She combines unrelated objects and materials—including stone, wood, concrete, mirrors, and tile—and assembles them in human-sized piles, like wonky obelisks or totem poles. The wide variety of materials keeps her process fresh and helps her to avoid formulaic solutions. “One piece uses rocks and chunks of concrete I collected from the beach below the Brooklyn Bridge,” says the 2010 MICA grad, who now lives in Manhattan. “For another work, I bought a stone for carving from a sculpture store. The stone is Red Raspberry Alabaster.”

No matter which type of material Kelly chooses, one senses that each piece is a swan song: She seems to put all her energy into each one and never uses a material in the same way twice.

While Kelly investigates the ‘thing-ness’ of specific materials, Christina Martinelli makes inquisitive, experimental explorations into a range of mark-making, using India Ink, acrylic, graphite, pencil, charcoal, sandpaper, and even coffee on paper. Martinelli earned a graduate degree from MICA’s Rhinehart School of Sculpture in 2010—and, like Kelly, has since relocated to New York. “I still think of these drawings as sculptures in a sense,” she says.

In a series of small, rectangular pieces, whirling layers of wet and dry marks aggregate into curving forms that resemble galaxies or cellular organisms. “The drawings are points of entry into another place,” Martinelli says. “Its important for me that people can get somewhere by looking at them, but their destination is up to them.”

This is the second Open Space exhibit curated by Neil Reinalda, who is one of the gallery’s founding members. “I was interested in having Ann and Christina show together because their work seems to be at odds with a lot of younger artists’ work, who want to encompass an entire idea in a work, to make a ‘watertight’ argument,” Reinalda says. “Ann and Christina tend towards an open interpretation and let the work stand on its own. I think they both have a lot of faith in art, that art can really be profound and transformative and personal.”

In Baltimore’s cultural landscape, Open Space bridges a gap between the young, warehouse art spaces and the more traditional, commercial galleries, offering professionally curated shows of work that are both challenging and emerging. It was created in the summer of 2009 by a handful of recent MICA graduates in a former Remington auto body shop. Open Space is similar to many artist collectives in that each participant is required to volunteer a number of hours in order to participate in gallery decisions. What makes it unique among collectives is that its members don’t exhibit their own art in the gallery; their role is purely curatorial. All programming decisions are made democratically, after individuals submit proposals for projects.

Reinalda says the gallery has tried to raise the bar for work that is worth exhibiting. “I think good work is good work and we shouldn’t be holding Baltimore to a different standard than other cities,” he says. “It’s like anything… if you think you can do it better you should do it! That’s what makes a healthy cultural scene. I think that was our approach to Open Space… this was how we thought a gallery should be.”

Falling Off The Edge: New Works by Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli will be on display from January 29th – March 6th 2010 at Open Space Gallery, located at 2720 Sisson Street, behind the giant alligator mural.