Maps Contemporary Art Space, the tiniest gallery in the metro area, is also one of the best reasons to make a trip over the river
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Artist Mike Shuh was in the corner, hunched over, his face pressed to a scanner. It was a more dignified take on the bum-on-the-Xerox machine fad from the ’80s: After choosing the expression—alert, surprised, beatific—he’d hit the button to produce an impressionistic image of his mug. Once the page popped out, he slid it into a manila envelope for the next person at the front of a rather long queue. This crowd, assembled inside this wee building on Illinois Street in Belleville, was made up of people who had driven across the river from St. Louis on a Thursday night, as curious to see this new bite-size art gallery, Maps Contemporary Art Space, as Shuh’s show, “I See What You’re Saying.”
And the exhibit was intriguing enough to lure people back to see what was on the docket for the next month: In June, a healthy crowd made the trip to see “Sewing the Façade,” Sean Gyshen’s photographic self-portraits, altered with a needle and thread. There were no snacks, no silver bags of astronaut wine, no jazz. People crowded inside the one-room gallery, literally rubbing shoulders, with nothing to distract them from the work itself.
“That’s all you have,” laughs B.j. Vogt, who founded and directs Maps with his brother, Chris. “It’s just the work and the people who are in the space with you.”
Maps is part of a local trend toward small, artist-run spaces (like Boots and White Flag Projects) but also carries the stamp of Vogt’s own deeply interactive work, like “You’re Invited! (1980–2006),” the piece he produced for White Flag’s “Live Action” performance art showcase last October.
“The show was on my birthday,” he says, “so I found all the photos I could of birthday cakes from my childhood and re-created them. Every time a cake came out, people sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ and it happened again and again and again, until finally I started putting them together so people would be eating, say, a combination of a dinosaur and a race car.”
In a similar vein, for Maps’ July exhibit—Rob Playter’s “Ten Memories in Every Pack,” a juxtaposition of party snapshots and staged photographs—Vogt invited the crowd to snap photos at the opening and email them for posting on Maps’ MySpace page. For the coming year, Vogt’s planning on expanding the space, hosting shorter project-based exhibits and intensely interactive shows with artists like Kathy Cooper, the young guerilla artist who appeared on the cover of the Riverfront Times as “Glitterus,” a superhero who dresses in pink and gold and who aims “to spread visual pleasure throughout the world.” Vogt’s also talking to the Schmidt Art Center in Belleville about collaborating, and is busily emailing artists from Paris and Detroit, in hopes of booking shows. Ultimately, though, Vogt’s concerns are still very much locally rooted.
“Kansas City has this very intense art scene, driven by graduates of the Art Institute, who’ve started their own spaces,” Vogt says. “If there are people who will risk opening spaces like that—the same thing can happen here.”
Maps’ next exhibit will feature the work of Bruce Burton and opens October 11, running through November 10.
The gallery is located at 225 N. Illinois in downtown Belleville, Ill., just a few blocks west of Belleville Square.
See info on past—and upcoming—shows at myspace.com/maps_contemporaryartspace.
