The bound and the boundless
Displacement by David Page
We Continue to rotate by Sara Dittrich
Jan 30 - MAR 13, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, January 30, 6-9pm
Closing reception: Saturday, March 14, 6-8pm
The Bound and the Boundless presents two solo exhibitions of recent work by Baltimore-based artists David Page and Sara Dittrich. For this presentation, the gallery divides into two distinct but related phases. The first phase is Displacement, a performance-activated sculpture by David Page that stages a restrained human figure. The second phase, We Continue to Rotate, is an interactive installation by Sara Dittrich featuring a projected cloudscape that examines the relationship between the body and time.
In We Continue to Rotate by Sara Dittrich, a seat at a small table invites viewers to place their hand on a heart pulse sensor. The sensor then controls the rate of the projection of a timelapse video of clouds passing by in the sky. The work moves between the conscious and the unconscious, linking the pulse to nebulous forms extending miles overhead. Within We Continue to Rotate, Dittrich provides a place for viewers to sit and meditate on the multitudes of loops and cyclical movements that surround us, from blood pumping through veins to Earth’s rotation around the sun. Looking towards the sky, the work asks a fundamental question: How do we fit within Earth’s rhythms? It reflects on the deep interconnection between the human body and the planet’s waters, contemplating how our circulatory system releases carbon dioxide, which plants and oceans absorb, giving back oxygen that sustains us. This continuous exchange reveals a shared, living cycle that binds body, land, and sea.
In Displacement by David Page, a water displacement system suspends a human figure, restrained in an elaborate leather and fabric harness. The harness echoes restraint technologies developed for use within the prison industrial complex, referencing the systematic dehumanization of individuals through institutional control of the body. The work draws on humanity’s deep evolutionary and cultural relationship to water as a force of migration and growth that shaped Homo erectus into Homo sapiens, enabling expanded cognition and the development of culture, alongside the arbitrary boundaries we now enforce. Page says of the work: “I contemplated our relationship with water, at once an elemental resource, a commodity, 60% of our physical bodies… We settle close to water because it nourishes us, or far from it because it might kill us… We fret over its scarcity and are terrified of its excess.” Increasingly wasted as collateral damage of the artificial intelligence boom, water is never neutral: it sustains, endangers, and dictates the terms of human life.
The works presented in The Bound and the Boundless investigate how water surrounds and informs human existence. Water operates as a natural boundary in the form of rivers and oceans, while also constituting clouds, vast formations that define a seemingly boundless sky. The exhibition draws on these conditions to explore how water’s dual nature mirrors human capacities for peace and harmony as well as violence and control. The scale of this inquiry ranges from crimes perpetrated against migrants traversing imagined borders to the quiet, ongoing work of the pulse.
Artist Bios
David Page is an artist who tries to explain intersecting notions around threat, risk, power imbalances, punishment and everyday brutality. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Page earned a National Diploma in Fine Arts from the Cape Tecnikon in 1986 and received an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2002. He was awarded the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for Visual Arts in 2019, received the Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award in 1996, 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2014, won the Trawick Prize in 2004 and received the University of Maryland’s Art for Peace Award in 2001, which included the commission of a small sculptural object which was presented to Nelson Mandela upon his visit to the university. Mr. Page teaches at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University and the American University, where he is Sculptor in Residence. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, jewelry designer Lauren Schott and Hank the dog.
Sara Dittrich is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist. Her artworks include sculpture, prints, video, and interactive installations with biometric sensors, and data-driven performance. Often informed by residencies and travel, such projects have included time-lapse imaging of landscapes, local skies and tidal patterns, and the somatic effects of time and a place on the body. Residencies and research programs have included Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Sculpture Space, and Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague). She is the recipient of a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (Provincetown, MA), Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Mary Sawyers Baker Artist Award. Dittrich’s work has been exhibited with the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH), and DiverseWorks (Houston, TX). Her performances and screenings have been presented by CultureHub, Revolutions per Minute Film Festival, and Maryland Art Place.
