A photographer to keep an eye on

A month ago or so, I juried a show from slides for Gallery International in Baltimore.

Last Friday I went to the opening and selected the prize winners.

The Best in Show was won by Washington, DC area artist Paul Ellis, while the two awards of excellence went to Spanish-born New York photographer Yolanda del Amo for two-dimensional work and to Andrey Tsers for three-dimensional.

Yesterday the Baltimore Sun's art critic Glenn McNatt had a review of the show. McNatt writes:

"A touch of whimsy

The title of the exhibition at Gallery International, All Media Competition and Show, sounds a bit grandiose, but actually it's as apt as any for this sparkling group show, which brings together 48 artists from far and wide chosen by guest curator F. Lennox Campello.

Campello, a co-owner of the Fraser Gallery in Washington, selected the works on view from the more than 200 entries submitted, and he readily concedes that he followed no formula or format other than his own whimsy in making his choices.

The results, however, are as delightful as they are occasionally surprising. And, true to its title, the show's offerings are divided almost equally among paintings, sculpture, photography and mixed-media works.

There are also quite a few Duchamp-inspired artworks of the buzzing, whirling, mechanical variety, including Wade Kramm's ingenious Candle flipbook, an electric-powered contraption that mimics the flickering motion of an animated cartoon, and Adam Bradley's Dandelion, a weirdly alluring wind-up diorama depicting the soul's reluctant fall from grace.

One of the most polished works in the show is New York-based photographer Yolanda Del Amo's Domestica, a large-scale color photograph mounted on Plexiglas and aluminum that recalls the staged but unforced naturalism of Tina Barney's upper-middle-class domestic dramas. The Spanish-born Del Amo, whose photographs convey a compelling but stubbornly ambiguous narrative thrust, is on the evidence of this work clearly an artist to watch.

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