The annual Sondheim Artscape Prize brings recognition to artists working in the region, with the six finalists currently exhibiting at the Baltimore Museum of Art. One of them will be able to cash in on that recognition, because the winner of the $25,000 top prize will be announced at a July 11 ceremony.

These six artists are bursting with ideas, so it's not entirely surprising that the exhibit generally is of more conceptual than visual interest. As in the overall art world today, you'll find an emphasis on mixed medium installations and video art.

Making a bracingly direct connection between art and larger social concerns is a three-artist collective known as Baltimore Development Cooperative. Indeed, the most visually striking piece in the show is its geodesic dome constructed from recycled materials and placed on the museum's front steps; later it will be relocated to a vacant lot-turned urban farm in East Baltimore.

Like the earlier and more pristinely constructed domes built by utopian thinker Buckminster Fuller, this patched together dome speaks to a desire to rethink our gathering places.

Inside the museum, Baltimore Development Cooperative has a looming cityscape mostly constructed of cardboard. It evokes the rowhouses, civic structures and construction cranes that make a city a work in progress. The energy in this group's work conveys a sense of urban possibility.

Exploring the intersection of the man-made and the natural, Ryan Hackett has several mixed medium pieces in which images and sounds are brought together in pointed ways. You'll hear a thumping sound akin to what a stereo speaker makes, for instance, playing in conjunction with the chirping of cicadas.

Grounded in a different sense is Jessie Lehson, whose exhibited pieces include a piece inside the museum, the minimalist art-evocative "Grounding II," in which sifted soil covers the museum carpet in sharp-edged geometric arrangements; and an outdoor piece, "Growth of Decay," in which wildflower seed-embedded dirt bricks will sprout flowers and also erode over time.

Among those using multiple mediums including video, Leslie Furlong has a video, "Tokyo to Osaka," shot from the point of view of a passenger taking a fast train through those urban Japanese landscapes. Furlong also has a "Parking Lot" series of digitally manipulated color photographs in which acres of asphalt surround big box retailers in our own country.

Finding her inspiration in French director Robert Bresson's great 1966 film about a long-suffering donkey, "Au Hasard Balthazar," Karen Yasinsky has both drawings on paper and animated drawings inspired by the film. These are technically well-done, though the colorful drawings seem philosophically at odds with the black-and-white austerity of Bresson's film.

There is some visual appeal in all of the above work, but most of it relies on making thematic connections on a more intellectual level. There's nothing wrong with using your brain, of course, but the exhibit may leave some viewers hungry for eye candy.

Such viewers will be starved when they look at Molly Springfield's installation, which involves making graphite drawings that directly emulate the look of the printed pages of Marcel Proust's novel "In Search of Lost Time." Although she's raising valid theoretical questions about the very notion of artistic originality, it's a long and dull walk along this stretch of gallery wall. There's nothing dull about Proust's sensually ripe novel, so look on it as a chance to reread a few of its pages.

"Sondheim Artscape Prize: 2009 Finalists" runs through Aug. 16 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, at 10 Art Museum Drive in Baltimore. Call 443-573-1700 or go to www.artbma.org.

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