A large black table constructed of pressboard and sawhorses stands along one wall of David Armacost’s Highlandtown studio, its surface strewn with dozens of abstract painted drawings on cheap paper. Many resemble doodles, with shared features like squiggles or letters or diagonal lines. A few are even crumpled up, and at first the whole setup seems part and parcel of the studio’s general state of disarray. But the table and its contents are actually a small taste of what will be a huge site-specific exhibition opening at the Open Space gallery in Remington on Sept. 3. When fully constructed, the final table will be about 26 feet square. Hundreds of drawings will lie across it in more or less the same random way. The project, titled Disorderly Construct, is the work of first-time collaborators Armacost, 31, and Nikholis Planck, 23. Neither is particularly concerned that their work could be mistaken for messiness. “It’s not about what this stuff actually looks like,” Armacost says.

What it is about is process, and the artists have developed a unique one. For the past year or so, they have traded several drawings a week—or photos of drawings—back and forth. Each artist produces a riff or a parody, a drawing somehow derived from what they’ve received, and sends this new work back. It has become, they say, a visual correspondence. The emphasis is on quantity and the dialogue between the artists, not on the finished pieces. “This is just a way of explaining that we’ve been doing this work and we might have gotten a show and we’re grateful,” Planck says, “but we’d still be doing this work if we had a show or not.”

Planck, who moved to Baltimore from Anne Arundel County about a year ago, is fast-talking and overflowing with enthusiasm. Armacost—who starts a graduate program in painting at Towson University this fall—is calmer, but when their conversation turns to art, it is a rapid-fire patter, each one interrupting the other to clarify or disagree or agree or finish a thought.

Armacost and Planck began their friendship this way, by talking about art, and strands of ideas from each of them came together, resulting in their current project. “I’ve been interested in authorship in painting and that’s what I’ve done ever since I was in college,” Armacost says, “which is to copy paintings that I liked. . . . With contemporary painting, what it’s so much about is having your style. ‘This is a David Armacost painting,’ and that gives it value. I always had trouble with that.” Armacost says he began copying famous paintings but eventually started copying his artist friends’ work instead, so it was no leap to take on Planck’s as well. For his part, Planck says he has always been prolific and never treated his finished pieces as anything sacred.

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