TITLE: Three Sheds for Three Sites, Shed I: Home Shed
(One is at the Museum and Performs the Functions of Home, One is at the Salvage Material Re-Use Center and Performs the Functions of the Museum, One is at the Home of the Artist and performs the Functions of A Collection)

DATE: 2015

MATERIALS: Mixed Media & Audience Participation

DIMENSIONS: Dimensions Variable

The Materials Studies series aggregates scientific, environmental, and historic research of the artist’s home as a labour-intensive performance, artifacts of which are exhibited as part of the exhibition "Commons Collaboration: Marian April Glebes with The Loading Dock," the inaugural Community Commons exhibition in the Patricia and Mark Joseph Center for Education at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This series will accumulate over the course of the exhibition, and begins an ongoing project.

TITLE:  Three Sheds for Three Sites, Shed III: Collection Shed

(One is at the Museum and Performs the Functions of Home, One is at the Salvage Material Re-Use Center and Performs the Functions of the Museum, One is at the Home of the Artist and performs the Functions of A Collection)

DATE: 2015

MATERIALS: Mixed Media & Audience Participation

DIMENSIONS: Dimensions Variable

For the series "Model Homes," materials were selected to examine the performative public/private nature of domestic space and values. The majority of the series "Model Homes" was created by compression casting. The casts are not held together by a binding agent, they are monolithic and rely on the properties of each material to maintain their form. The 2 drywall forms were constructed, not cast. The materials for "Model Homes" were collected over an extended period of time by the artist from suburban lawns. (Dandelions were collected over a 3 year period. Lint collected over 6 month period. Grass, 2 months, for example.) Once enough material was collected, it was inserted into the mold. The force to cast the material was applied using a mechanical pressure system designed by the artist. The glass house is sand-cast glass, annealed over 4 days from a liquid glass temperature of 1100 degrees. The pedestals were built by the artist using MDF. The vitrines are plexiglass.

The Baltimore Mobile Community Brick Factory produces handmade bricks from local Maryland clay using historic waterstruck wooden mold methods. We invite the people of Baltimore to join us in making the bricks and personalizing them by inscribing stories and ideas about home, place, history and personal experience. The bricks made by the Baltimore Mobile Community Brick Factory, after firing, become a part of a series of public art installations. This exhibition at Baltimore Clayworks is the first installation of the wood-fired bricks. The Baltimore Mobile Community Brick Factory is Marian April Glebes in collaboration with Josh Copus and you.

Brickmaking occurred during the Spring and Summer of 2016.

The Baltimore Mobile Community Brick Factory is made possible, in part, by a 2015 Rubys Artist Project Grant, an initiative conceived with start-up funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and is a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.

The Baltimore Mobile Community Brick Factory Bricks

Baltimore Clayworks, Project Space

October 14, 2016 - November 13, 2016

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This installation at Baltimore Clayworks included over 650 bricks from the first woodfiring of the bricks we made as the Baltimore Mobile Community Brick Factory. The floor configuration was installed in the project space and occupied 160 square feet. Visitors we invited to walk on the bricks to read the inscriptions.

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Glebes's Exhibition entitled "In Defense of Native Soil" was installed at University of Maryland Baltimore County's Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in the spring of 2009. The work used the seemingly benign dandelion to address issues of the suburban environment, our received and circumscribed routines, the use of the art object as a tool for social change, and the control of the uncontrollable.

Misplaced Altruisms/Vanity of Aid

Glebes's work is created from the remnants of elaborate processes that are futile and ridiculous, metaphoric, and temporary. Her insect repairs are grotesque mortuarial attempts to preserve or mend, meticulous gestures executed on found carcasses, symbolic of an impulse to restore order in a fragile environment and to fill a void created by patheticness in form. This adornment or patching of battered insect bodies is misplaced altruism, which quells the vanities in aid or pity by indulging the most absurd and effete of generosities: squandered restoration and functionless beauty. Glebes's insects are victims of glass windows, selected for mending and decorative preservation for their pitiable state - their brokenness is evaluated by their failure and resulting decay. The repairs and prosthetics imposed on these insects sanction sympathy for the manicured via the restorative maintenance of post-mortem fragility that definalizes the terminal.

"Make Yourself Useful" was conceived and executed for the inaugural exhibition of The Feminist Art Project in Baltimore entitled "Gutsy: Taking the Fear Factor Out of Feminism" in 2014. This work was revisited in 2016 at Sindikit at Area 405 in Baltimore in response to the election of Donald Trump.

Glebes's solo exhibition "Dream A Highway" at Hood College, Frederick MD, included "Throne" and "Untitled (Monitored)" in 2014.

The Untitled Emergency Survival Tactics are an ongoing series of sculptural installations and gestures built of metaphoric, whimsical, or ridiculous solutions to questions of the urban environment, infrastructure, dependency, and the character and power of the artist.

campcamp was created by Marian Glebes in collaboration with Fred Scharmen and C. Ryan Patterson for the 2011 Transmodern Festival. campcamp used the campsite as a conceptual and organizational device for a large two-night activation of the courtyard lot of Current Gallery.

National Park(ing) was installed for Artscape 2012 in the parking garage across from the Charles Theatre. Four landscapes were temporarily installed on the street, inviting visitors inside to a climbing mountain, visitor center, library, and lounge area. This project was executed in collaboration with C. Ryan Patterson, Fred Scharmen, and Rachel Valsing.