Despite possessing the typical accoutrements of a gallery space—white walls, wood floors, a discreet price list—the two small rooms that make up the Guest Spot in Fells Point feel a bit like a tony living room. This sensation is no illusion. Guest Spot isn’t just a gallery; it’s also director/curator Rod Malin’s home. The juxtaposition of exhibition and habitation space is an intentional part of Malin’s curatorial program, which he says emphasizes “integrating ideas and having personal dialogue surrounding the importance of an intimate space.” Malin’s ongoing program is focused on liminal states, i.e., thresholds or transitions, and the current show fits the bill. Boundary Proof explores the in-between, be it the border between the United States and Mexico or the fine line between success and failure.

A large photograph of four children behind a chain-link fence, titled “Kids, Sunland Park, NM 0810, 2010,” anchors the main room of the gallery. Carl Gunhouse—who curated Guest Spot’s first show back in June—spent the past several years traveling the country documenting suburbia and the American experience. When the housing market crashed, he found that his photographs of American homes had a timely significance. “I got very interested in what it is to photograph political events, or current events, and how to do it in a way that might go further than just being superficial,” Gunhouse says. Last summer he traveled to Texas and New Mexico to photograph the American border with Mexico.

It’s a bit of a soft pitch to lead a show about boundaries with photos of kids and fences, but the images are compelling and accessible. On an opposing wall, three more of Gunhouse’s photos depict the border. The most interesting thing about these pictures is the fluidity of the border itself: It is at times invisible, at others demarcated by nothing more than the outfield of the local baseball field, the low wall of a golf course, or the back fence of a community college. The images are hauntingly nondescript—they could be anywhere with an irrigation system and imported palms—and yet they represent some of the most contested ground on the continent.

Gina Dawson, a Texas native who lives and works in Brooklyn, creates darkly humorous work with craft techniques learned as a child. Along two walls of Guest Spot, letters of rejection from residency programs and artist registries hang dejectedly, painstakingly recreated in cross-stitch. The pieces highlight an inverse relationship between the brief seconds it requires to dash off a standardized dismissal and the hours it takes Dawson to stitch them in all their mundane detail. Permeated with self-deprecating humor, there is something touchingly vulnerable about these homely craft objects. “The language people use to sort of console you in this really generic way,” Dawson says, became for her a subject of morbid fascination.

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