The current show at Fells Point’s intimate Guest Spot space is, and is not, a typical art show. It was curated (by Guest Spot director/landlord Rod Malin and collaborator Heather Loughran) in part as a wry commentary on art as brand and brand as art. Not all of the work from the four artists involved—Julie Benoit, Eric Doeringer, Jenny Drumgoole, and Kim Llerena—neatly addresses that theme, but the best of it does, and in intriguing ways.

One of the most visually arresting pieces comes from New York-based artist Eric Doeringer. The large color photograph “Untitled (Cowboy)” focuses on a man in a cowboy hat and vest, his head bowed as he reaches down to adjust his leather chaps. Another presumable cowboy leans over a fence behind him, holding a lariat. The entire scene is suffused with not only the golden glow of an archetypal Western clime, but also the slightly enlarged grain of a blown-up photograph. It’s the sort of image familiar from advertising, and that’s because that’s what it is—an image appropriated from the long-running rugged-cowboy campaigns that peddle Marlboro cigarettes. Not only is Doeringer appropriating advertising imagery, he’s appropriating another artist’s appropriation of such imagery: The piece is subtitled “after Richard Prince,” the artist who first began exhibiting his photographs of advertisements in the 1970s, most famously images of Marlboro men.

Likewise, Doeringer’s other pieces in Staging Over Manipulation go “after” other famous works by well-known artists. A small shelf displays three softcover books—Real Estate Opportunities, Records, and Some Los Angeles Apartments—each filled with images of their title subjects (various Los Angeles properties for sale, assorted old vinyl LPs and their covers, apartment buildings both grand and modest), each modeled after similar books with the same titles created by Ed Ruscha in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Doeringer’s “I Got Up” and “I Went” are both “after” On Kawara pieces: sending a daily postcard stamped with the time the artist woke up each morning and tracing the artist’s daily route on a map each day for a year, respectively. The racks of postcards have a pleasingly tactile, mosaic-like quality as displayed at Guest Spot, but it’s the slim binder containing just 12 days’ worth of Doeringer’s year-long “I Went” documentation, red pen lines marking his exact routes on photocopied maps of Manhattan or Amsterdam, that transcends a winking feel for something closer to sincere homage. Doeringer is revisiting the ideas of other artists, but his dedication to his work is no less deep.

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