Dan Steinhilber, Providing Gusts Of Fresh Thinking

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 17, 2006; Page N03

BALTIMORE -- Packing peanuts, leaf blowers and vacuum cleaners animate Steinhilber's installation.

Washington sculptor Dan Steinhilber, getting noticed farther afield, makes art out of industrial materials such as trash bags, leaf blowers, robotic vacuums and foam packing peanuts. But it's nature that is most powerfully evoked in his new installations at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which make up the inaugural show in curator Darsie Alexander's new "Front Room" series.

On one side of a large gallery, four leaf blowers, with elephant-like plastic "trunks," hang from the ceiling and blow snow drifts of white peanuts across the gallery floor. A herd of Roomba robotic vacuums, about the size and shape of bathroom scales, glide through the shifting drifts, pushing the peanuts here and there as though scavenging for grubs among them. Sometimes they get completely buried in a pellet pile, making the whole white mound appear to come alive.

In a far corner of the same gallery, three industrial blowers, made of heavy-duty safety-orange plastic, lie dormant in front of a waist-high pile of peanuts. Every few minutes they come alive for a short while, stirring the foam pellets into a furious blizzard, like a wind-spout in the Sahara or a cyclone at the North Pole, before they subside again.

The Old Masters rendered nature's workings with a few brushloads of oil paint; Steinhilber evokes them after a trip to Home Depot.

A handful of low-end robots, half a dozen electric motors with some fans attached and a few garbage cans' worth of packing pellets and voila: nature white in gust and flurry.

The Post's Michael O'Sullivan had this to say about the installation:

With the switch, earlier this month, to year-round free admission at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum -- a change subsidized by the City of Baltimore, Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties and the T. Rowe Price Associates Foundation Inc. -- our northern neighbor's two largest art museums join the ranks of Washington's free cultural institutions.

But there are more reasons than the waiver of the ticket price to visit them. Two new exhibitions (one at each location) are alone worth the drive, even without the financial incentive. Both, oddly enough, are an intriguing mix of low and high technology.

The first inaugurates a new space, called "Front Room," in the BMA's contemporary wing, and features an installation of three related works by Washington artist Dan Steinhilber, whose intriguing repurposing of such everyday objects as clothes hangers, plastic trash bags and soda bottles has already been spotlighted at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The show's centerpiece is a room whose corners have been piled high with plastic-foam packing peanuts. At one end, a series of leaf blowers suspended from the ceiling periodically turns on and off, alternately agitating the peanuts -- along with the hardware itself, as the machines twist and turn in random fashion -- and then letting them subside into an ever-changing mountainous white landscape. Half a dozen or so Roomba robotic vacuums simultaneously patrol the grounds, scurrying to and fro and burrowing beneath the shifting, dune-like forms, in a pointless exercise that is both humorous and creepy.

At the other end of the room, an array of large, industrial-orange floor fans aimed at a separate pile of peanuts clicks on and off at intervals of several seconds. Here, the effect is slightly different, as the concentrated blasts of wind -- and then silence -- from the fans' motors create the effect of a giant snow globe that has been violently agitated, and then allowed to settle.

Despite the show's obvious humor (children and adults alike will be delighted by the sense of controlled mayhem), Steinhilber's emphasis on violence is not accidental. While far from being overtly political, the artist clearly is playing up the sense of menace here in ways that his previous work has not. That feeling is underscored in a video work in an adjoining room, in which Steinhilber has documented himself walking from corner to corner of his modest-size District apartment, camcorder in one hand and leaf blower in the other, as he wades through an even-deeper sea of foam pellets.

It's funny, at first. But the way the waves of swirling foam batter and envelop the evidence of the artist's tranquil domestic life -- a coffee maker, his toilet, his son's toy train tracks -- is insistently unsettling. Similarly, the labored mechanical "breathing" of a nearby floor piece -- in which another leaf blower switches on and off inside an intestine-like length of black plastic that houses even more packing peanuts -- suggests something living, and gasping for air.

Steinhilber's three untitled works -- his best so far -- are a good reason to visit the BMA, but they're not the only contemporary draw. The museum also has installed, on its grounds outside, a number of works by Maryland artists. Called "siteMaryland: Governor's Arts Initiative 2006," the project, the first in a planned series of site-specific exhibitions that will change venues annually, is a great idea, and one that injects a healthy dose of engagement with the museum's staid architecture. Unfortunately, a recent follow-up visit to the museum showed a couple of the outdoor works showing signs of wear and tear.