Leaves Of Grass: Jessie Lehson brings the outside in with "25 Square Feet of Suburbia."

By Blake de Pastino

In the gallery scene, at least, the lust for youth goes on unchecked. Other quarters of our culture may be hard at work alienating audiences under 35 by courting tweens and twentysomethings with naked abandon. But in the art world, stalking the young like quarry is not only acceptable, it's expected. The art market thickens its blood on the careers of young artists, and the more meteoric their careers, the better.

It's hard to decide how praiseworthy it is that this predatory sense is completely lacking from Maryland Art Place's current show, Beauty and the Mundane, whose curators and featured artists all come from the "emerging" set. On the one hand, it's heartening to see work by young artists displayed neither as a lofty academic exercise--as in thesis shows, where art is literally made for credit--nor as a promise of the next big thing, which is not what you'd expect from an institution as civic as MAP anyway.

On the other hand, though, there's something to be said for temerarious arrogance in young art, and for shows that announce it with all the dumb brazenness of a frat party. Beauty and the Mundane appears to aspire to at least some kind of irreverence, but it wants for the gumption to back it up. In fact, in its effort to impress upon us how important this show is for local up-and-comers, it actually comes across as dour and dutiful. "Beauty and the Mundane couples young, emerging curators with their artistic counterparts from the Baltimore/DC area," the exhibition sheet bloodlessly reports, "aiming to bolster the burgeoning relationship of the two cities' respective art communities by including new and younger audiences." There is the sense here of eating your vegetables.

Much to their credit, the show's young tyros themselves have no interest in discussing age or experience, but the talking points they have decided on aren't much more compelling. As its title announces, the exhibition aims to unveil the beauty of everyday themes, materials, and scenes--to "explore transcendence within the commonplace," in the curators' words--an ambition that, while grand, has arguably been the guiding force of all art everywhere for all time. The success of the artists here hinges on their ability to spin something new from this threadbare theme.

Washington figure painter Vida Russell, for one, feints at the issue with her series of nine small portraits. They're all highly mannered and very stylish, depicting young men and women who sport bright clothes and peevish expressions in front of a background of thick, white impasto. They're supposed to transmit to us some sense of self-removal, of unease within one's own skin, but they just come off as angsty, placing them a lot closer to, say, fashion illustration than figure study.

Close on her heels is Maryland Institute College of Art alum Graham Skeate, whose installations instruct us on the hilarious import of middle-class life. Or is it the important hilarity? In one high-concept outing, the artist has penciled an outline of a door onto the gallery wall and "locked" it with hasps fastened with combination locks; next to it stands a mailbox with colored cable creeping out of it up to the ceiling. In another piece, an entire set of white plastic patio furniture has been bolted to the wall, so that the weekend loungers using it would have to sit perpendicular to the gallery floor. Both pieces are accompanied by long-winded wall text that is supposed to supply some fanciful kind of backstory. It's all intentionally abstruse and tiresome to read, and in the end it's meaningless: In their statement, the curators explain that the text is "a false addendum" to the work, "an illustration of fiction," which is a revelation just callow enough to make you stop and count the coins in your pocket to make sure you're not missing any change.

Things turn a corner, however, with the work of Washington photographer Lely Constantinople. By and large she is concerned with urban landscapes in decay, and she manages to make a lot from the offal she finds. Her small paired Polaroids of a dime store and a supermarket are as much about the instant-oatmeal architecture as they are about the tiny, hopeful people who stride around in the foreground. Her studies of signage--like one titled "Joe's Shoe Shine," which is probably what the semiliterate, hand-painted signs in the photo are trying to say--are respectful meditations. And her portraits of unsmiling strangers, like the wrinkly man in the perfectly pressed suit of "34th St., New York, NY," are reminders that ordinary people are kind of beautiful--among the show's most apt moments.

If there's a mark that makes a young artist seem first among equals, though, it's work that's so broadly conceived that you can't tell whether it's ambitious or obsessive. That's what Jessie Lehson brings to Beauty and the Mundane, and it's what gives this show the conceptual heft it lacks elsewhere. Cribbing lessons from the Earth Artists of the 1970s, as well as the new urban chroniclers who are her contemporaries, Lehson collects samples from the physical environment and processes them into sweeping, fully envisioned sermons about memory, loss, and context. For her "25 Square Feet of Suburbia," Lehson photographed a small parcel of Columbia lawn, tenderly raked its leaves, snipped it clean of every blade of grass and sprig of clover, and then milled the greenery into notebook-sized sheets of paper. The leaves, grassy pulp, and paper are all installed here in identical squares, along with photos of the lawn before and after it was stripped of its life. It's all done with as much affection as intellect, and it overcomes one of installation art's most notorious failings: It demonstrates expert craftsmanship, as well as brains.

In fact, Lehson comes closest to stealing this show because she strikes that rare balance between pomo theorizing and hearty art-school fundamentals. While each of her pieces comes with a conceptual preface, she still holds fast to vital matters of size, texture, and color values. And they come together best in the show's most monumental gesture, "Dirt Floor II." Its materials literally couldn't be more basic: dirt, collected from Ellicott City, Washington, Baltimore, and Arlington, Va. But Lehson has sifted each batch into painstakingly perfect quadrants on the floor, filtering out impurities, organic matter, and pockets of air to transform the soil into a powder that is impossibly fine and uniform in color. The result is more than 200 square feet of brilliant earthiness. One quarter of the giant rectangle is deep coffee in color, looking loamy and fertile; another is gray and desiccated; another still (the Baltimore part) approaches a black that resembles wet ashes; and the last radiates with a cinnamon hue, so bright that it nearly appears to lift the plane of soil off the floor. It looks like what Mark Rothko might have done if he'd hung out with Robert Smithson, or what Wolfgang Laib could do with pollen and saffron, if he dropped his New Age hokiness. There's a feeling here of young art caught at a decisive moment--of an artist taking strides from her forebears, while also stealing the march from them. It's the sense of freshness that art continually craves.