Young Blood , Maryland Art Place’s fourth annual exhibition of regional MFA recipients, offers its wall space to a full range of talent—that is to say, from bad to good, as well as across the spectrum of media. Representing the Maryland Institute College of Art, Towson University, and the University of Maryland’s College Park and Baltimore County programs, the annual exhibit allows students to showcase their work outside of an academic setting, alongside work of hopefully consistent quality, a potential stepping stone for future exhibitions. Curated this year without the guidance and dedication of a MAP executive director (the position was eliminated at the end of the calendar year) and relying heavily on MAP’s volunteer Program Advisory Board (made up of busy art professionals), the works selected vary greatly in refinement. Where with other MAP programs, such as Curators’ Incubator and Critic’s Pick, the gallery produces a small publication and advises participants in the written material accompanying their show, Young Blood seems comparably marginalized, receiving few resources.

In the front room, three female artists, Amy Boone-McCreesh (Towson), Jill Fannon (UMBC), and Sarah McNeil (MICA), each exhibit brightly colored works that start the show off on a strong note. Boone-McCreesh’s installation, which consists of two separately titled pieces, “Oval “and “Cones and Frills,” resemble a votive shrine mixed with a piñata and doilies, an omni-cultural craft combination. Saturated-color felts and found fabrics are arranged in wall and floor pieces, the focus of which is the larger “Oval” piece. Shiny, metallic materials are layered fringe-like with the fabrics; the effect is something of a softer take on the elaborate decorations of Confetti System, a New York-based design team.

McNeil’s “Manchine” creeps up on you as you’re struggling to figure it out. Most obviously, a cluttered desk sits to the right of the gallery; medical illustrations and stacks of paper are strewn across it and hang high on the wall behind the object. An empty chair is tucked beneath the desk, like the remnants of a performance, separated from its impact. On a pedestal, a miniature plastic house plays a tiny embedded animation on the side that faces the desk. In an illuminated window on the opposite side, the desk arrangement reappears at miniature scale, offering a startling tug between the toy object and physical space. Fannon’s photographs, while beautiful and well presented, are strikingly similar to those of Baltimore photographer Milana Braslavsky, who showed work of identical compositions and subject matter in the same space only months ago.

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