We're a country that values individuality so much that we don't have time for each individual. The Labyrinth exhibit at Baltimore's Amaranthine Museum gives one man's answer to how the world works. But despite being less than a mile from the renowned Baltimore Museum of Art, this one-man show lies buried in a forgotten crevice of the city.
On Clipper Road lies a hulking ruin of a semi-abandoned warehouse. Next to the warehouse is a new in-ground swimming pool surrounded by Greek columns. And across the street at 2010 is the Amaranthine Museum, although `museum' is a misnomer for the one-man gallery housed in this raw industrial loft. As soon as we enter, a curator thrusts into the only path not blocked off by roughly woven curtains nailed to the walls.
Puke pinks and snot greens, wooden bobbles and broken statuary litter every corner of the impromptu corridor. The curator tells us this work represents the "modern" era. As we walk through The Labyrinth, we are told, we'll be going back in time.
A scrap of paper is nailed to the wall ten yards or so further down the hall. "1940s," it says. Regardless of the decade this artwork is meant to represent, it is still all done in the same pinks and turquoises. Most of the exhibit is made up of acrylic painting on massive particleboard slabs. Interspersed are wooden constructions, most of them featuring poles with spheres connected to the end. These constructions are mostly the size of table centerpieces, though one is as large as a toddler's bed. There are only a few canvases, and these are usually ripped and bound, the frayed edges of the cloth tied back to reveal the wall behind the work.
The most aesthetically pleasing pieces are the handful of framed windows of about one foot by one foot, which contain melted colored glass or mirror fragments. These pieces have deeper colors and interesting, asymmetrical compositions. In a particularly beautiful one, drops of burgundy bleed into clear glass. Also fascinating are the large flat wooden constructions, made up of pieces of intricate frame and flat particleboard nailed together to form richly textured surfaces for painstaking studies of masterworks.
Each construction has studies from a particular master or school: there is a Van Gogh construction, and Michelangelo is apparently a particular favorite of the artist. Bits and pieces from a Who's Who of Western art zigzag across the surfaces regardless of texture. Dozens of these pieces line two walls of the gallery. It is here that we turn a corner and stumble into a lively, white-bearded man. Smiling, he apologizes and tells us that he's blind. Then he tells us that he's the artist.
Les Harris worked on the massive body of work that is The Labyrinth from the mid-seventies until the mid-nineties. He's done studies and reinterpretations of everything from the art of the ancient Egyptians on, and arranged them in "chronological" order.
Harris has been obsessed with expression and perception throughout his 78 years, whether as a student during his G.I. Bill days at the Maryland Institute College of Art, as an art teacher raising his three children, or as a host to visitors curious about The Labyrinth.
He guides visitors through his gallery, pointing out the specifics of his work from memory, and spinning his massive pieces to show details hidden by shadows and walls. Standing near the only untorn, large-scale canvas, a visitor points out his favorite bits. Harris scrambles over, eager to show the visitor more. He is inches away from the canvas, but he still can't see. He stretches his arms across the piece, rubbing it with extended fingers and flat palms, until he can feel the globs of paint that guide him.
Harris can't see his own paintings anymore, but he still needs to be a part of them. A decade ago, he began to lose his sight to macular degeneration. He first noticed that peripherals where easier to see than anything head-on. Then, he started to lose his sense of color. Sunsets became turquoise, and pumpkins became pink.
Offbeat and psychedelic, the gallery is obviously a labor of love. The pieces are cheaply constructed settings for flat, relatively amateur copies of better painters and better paintings. The space is arranged thoughtlessly, forcing the viewer to stand within a couple feet of large paintings, and look down from afar on small constructions. Stumbling into the gallery off of MD-83, there is a feeling reminiscent of Alice meeting the Mad Hatter.
After all, as Harris ambles through The Labyrinth, chattering and picking his way through the crumbled statues and angled particleboard, it's easy to dismiss him. But maybe the man is a visionary. After all, his eyes didn't start telling him the world is made up of shades of snot green and puke pink until 1997, but he's done his work in those colors since the seventies.
The Labyrinth is worth seeing for the experience of seeing it, if not for the art that is displayed. Harris' gallery gives the visitor a fascinating, if at times disturbing, peek into an individual's earnest quest to make sense of the world, one era at a time.
