SO YOU WANT to see the pope. Maybe you're a lapsed Catholic with a childhood attachment to the concept of papal authority. Maybe he reminds you of your granddad. Maybe you're a celebrity chaser. Maybe you think he's man's earthly connection to God. Whatever the reason, you're excited for a chance to gawk at Benedict XVI.
Well, you're in luck. Take a look at the schedule below and you'll learn not only where to see the pontiff on his way to and from various important places, but also where to get a bite to eat afterwards.
Continue Reading "Popewatch: Where to Catch a Glimpse of Benedict XVI" »
THE BEST TIME to check out art — if you're a resident of the District or its environs — is assuredly over the holidays. The day after that last holiday party, make it a point to spend some quality art-viewing time free from the teeming masses that usually crowd the area's museums and galleries. Here's an agenda of some exhibitions you shouldn't miss during the holiday lull.
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: Homer, Eakins, and Bellows — American Paintings 1870-1925. Easily the most crowded of area art institutions any other time of the year, the National Gallery is surely the first stop on the agenda of any resident hoping for spend some quality time with classic art works. From the permanent collection comes this show of American masters, which closes Dec. 31. Winslow Homer's 1877 painting Autumn, at right, is exactly the sort of work that demands close reading that the NGA rarely affords: The autumnal theme seems like a just-plausible excuse for the artist to break out with the abstract energy of the fall leaves in the piece.
» National Gallery of Art, Constitution Avenue and 4th Street NW; 202-737-4215; closed Jan. 1. (Archives-Navy Mem'l)
RENWICK GALLERY: Wendell Castle's Ghost Clock. This writer cannot recall ever seeing this piece, even during the off season, without another gawker or two in the room. That's fine, though — the eerie sculpture tends to hush its audience. The piece is, of course, not an object draped in cloth, but rather carved from bleached and laminated mahogany. Fans of trompe l'oeil chicanery won't find a better example from the genre in the city.
» Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street NW, 202-633-2850 (Farragut West)
Continue Reading "While Crowds Are Away, Catch These Art Displays" »
Express contributor Kriston Capps assesses "Sass" at the Transformer Gallery.
A SHOW'S TITLE usually signals a theme, a concept, some organizing principle or umbrella structure governing the artists' work on display. Rarely will a title tell you exactly what's lacking in the work on the walls. But "Sass" — a group show of women artists on display at Transformer Gallery — is anything but sassy.
Danniel Swatosh, for example, plays on cliches in her photographic collages, but she lacks the subtle touch or the fidelity with puns that this writer, at least, associates with sass. Hers are blatant, almost bragging images. A train going into a tunnel that's being spread by two hands suggests frank, unvarnished intercourse. And so on — each of the images is a similarly coded sex act. There's nothing in the collages that signals irony or commentary, however. And the source of the images is lost in the context of Swatosh's collages. The print quality of the images is dreadful, to boot.
Los Angeles-based painter Natalia Fabia is a jarring selection for the show. Her work belongs to the soi-disant Low Brow movement, a cartoonishly exaggerated portraiture, primarily based on the West Coast, that incorporates both twee and goth iconography. (Her oil-and-collage "Series of Steps" is pictured at right.) Fabia's work carries with it a host of arguments related to the movement that don't figure into the show. Her art isn't feminist work — which is arguably the subtext of a show of art by women about women and identity — so it doesn't really contribute to the whole. But even taking the theme merely as a guide, her paintings are a not particularly distinguished example of an exhausted style.
BY THE BEGINNING of next year, the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran will be no more. In its stead will be the Washington Project for the Arts, an organization that will in most respects be the same group. But for an infinitesimal fraction of time, neither will exist.
"Some split second of time between midnight and 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, there won't be any WPA anything," said George Hemphill, a local art dealer and WPA\Corcoran advisory board member.
Director Kim Ward said that the new WPA will be housed in a different location, leaving its home at the Corcoran. The new place? A 1,000-square-foot first floor area of a Dupont Circle rowhouse, but the organization has not yet publicly disclosed its new address. Ward said that the "rent was provided at the rate that a nonprofit arts group could afford."
Continue Reading "Sight Scene: In Dupont Move, WPA to Delete Its 'C'" »
Express contributor Kriston Capps steps out of the galleries and examines some moving images displayed outdoors.
GIVEN THAT THE TITLE of Jane Jerardi's latest work is "Chance," you might not expect so much repetition throughout the piece — but in fact, she's given to performing the same set of gestures over and over. In the latest video and dance project by the artist, sponsored by Transformer Gallery, Jerardi is preoccupied with the sort of everyday, happenstance movements that serve as background noise to our physical lives.
Jerardi, along with dancers Brian Buck and Ginger Wagg, take the commonplace as their repertoire. A casual shoulder brush, a soft collapse against the back of a park bench, a nervous fluttering of hands, a lean — these actions are more innocuous gestures than intentional movement. They suggest the sounds that people make between words, the ahs and ums that don't have any meaning in the strict sense of the word but nevertheless give crucial context to words, sentences, pauses and even body language.
Typically our idle, nervous gestures would be the stuff of cringe comedy if presented on film. But Jerardi incorporates these moves into a broader dance scheme to suggest chance encounters. The artist, who directed and dances in the video, teamed up with videographers Fernando Ortega and Michael Wichita to shoot at fountains, park benches, a park and an empty ballroom; the filmmakers use modest pans and shoot scenes from a variety of angles. Roxann Morgan's costuming is visually engaging, featuring bright and bold colors in simple sleeveless vests and blouses paired with skirts and pants.
Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Jane Jerardi's Last 'Chance'" »
Earlier this month, Sight Scene scribe Kriston Capps previewed a host of new local art exhibitions opening up for the fall season. Today, he focuses in on one of them.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHUCK CLOSE and Adamson Editions on 14th Street NW has surely been lucrative for both. It's of immense benefit to art watchers who call D.C. home: Twice in the last two years, viewers have seen new works by Close, one of the most visible artists of his generation.
As a painter and as a photographer working in nontraditional formats, Close is perhaps the first artist that comes to mind in association with photorealism. The artist emerged in the 1970s as a major painting presence, but his painting career seemed struck short when, in 1988, he suffered a spinal artery collapse that left him a quadriplegic. He nevertheless continued to paint, clutching brush in his teeth and with the aid of assistants, and he also turned to photography, the medium he had been emulating with his brush.
In his latest show, Close's hyper-detailed works come in two forms. Massive-scale daguerrotypes — depicting artists Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson as well as one of his favorite models, Kate Moss, pictured here, and himself — turn out upon close inspection to be something other than photographs. Close has always played up the unreliability of the image, exploiting the fact that the viewer — the viewer's brain, to be specific— is as responsible for the composition of an image as the artist. Viewing one of Close's images will often test the image every bit as well as an optical illusion designed to do exactly that. The daguerrotypic images at Adamson seem especially deceptive, given that they're closer to curtains than photographs.
Continue Reading "Sight Scene: A Closer Look at Chuck Close" »
Last week, Sight Scene scribe Kriston Capps previewed a slate of gallery openings in the heart of the 14th Street arts corridor. In his second installment, he looks at what's new elsewhere on 14th Street and around town.
THERE'S MORE TO THE 14TH STREET arts scene than the 1515 building as profiled last week. In fact, there's something new right around the corner on P Street NW at Transformer gallery. "SASS" is a show of all-female emerging artists from D.C. and elsewhere. Representing home court are performance artist Holly Bass and Lisa Marie Thalhammer, who works in ink, paint and collage; Amanda Douglas, Natalia Fabia and Danniel Swatosh round out the show. The timing couldn't be better: Next week, "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" opens at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. 
This show ought to dovetail with that one nicely, especially given the feminist themes in Thalhammer's work.
» PROJECT 4: Over on U Street NW, the photography of Cedric Delsaux may be light fare compared with some of the other showings, particularly in photography, that opened this weekend. Delsaux uses traditional and digital techniques to juxtapose fantasy and reality. For example, the "Star Wars on Earth" series finds Delsaux Photoshopping Star Wars figurines into Parisian suburbs. ("R2D2 & C3PO" is pictured at right.) He's not the first to take a gimmick and run with it, of course — in photography, that's a fine tradition that William Wegman perfected. Some people might puzzle over Delsaux's concept; the question is whether they will be outnumbered by George Lucas' worshiping nerds.
Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Fall Returns to Galleries Everywhere" »
OUT ON 14TH STREET NW, where art watchers vacation, the aspens are already turning. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."
OK — so Scooter Libby wasn't writing about D.C., when he penned those now-famous lines, but this writer can't help but think of them when the turn in the weather returns the box fan to the closet and brings the humidifier out of retirement. (Also, D.C. just happens to be incredibly more verdant than this writer's native lands in central Texas.) But there is an area in the city where the change in the season causes everything to shift at once, owing to shared roots: The arts corridor on 14th Street NW. Today, we preview Saturday night gallery openings at the 1515 14th St. NW art building; in an upcoming installment, we'll feature shows from the D.C. area at large.
» CURATOR'S OFFICE: This fall marks a homecoming for Jiha Moon, one of D.C.'s favorite daughters. Before moving to Atlanta, Moon snagged viewers with an intricate painting style that blends Eastern drawing and woodcut compositional traditions with Western mid-century abstraction. (Blubber Blobber, 2005, is at right.) She has something of the globalized, grid sensibility foregrounded by artists Benjamin Edwards and Julie Mehretu, though she borrows more from atmospheres and traffic, shying away from the commercial/found imagery that those painters draw from. "Line Tripping," the artist's show at Curator's Office, features new works on Hanji paper. The show is accompanied by an essay by John Ravenal, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
» ADAMSON EDITIONS: The printmaster's gallery opens its fall with new work by Chuck Close. His stuff we know: The gallery opened its 2006 season with Close's daguerrotypes. This year, the medium is new. As if trying to one-up his use of holograms last year, Close will be exhibiting Jacquard tapestries. Svetlana at Brightest Young Things explains that Close's photographic images "are translated into large-scale jacquard tapestries using a customized 'digital' loom: using 17,800 warp threads and repeating groups of eight colors." Don't forget about the traditional pigment prints (more familiar terrain for the photography gallery).
E. Brady Robinson's "Shift" at the Gallery at Flashpoint
SOME OBSERVERS SAY that the nation's captial is on its way to becoming the sort of city where art sells all year, not just during the official art season, i.e., fall and spring. Some dealers swear they already do sell art all year round, while others — good dealers at that — will testify that they won't see four people in the store throughout all of August. Of course, the art market is showing stress from the subprime market implosion, and that's bound to affect local dealers, so it's hard to say how best to track these kinds of assessments.
For better or worse, the city does operate on the seasonal calendar. And for better — much better — the art season starts tonight.
Over this weekend and next, galleries will be opening up their fall exhibitions. Most of these shows will be solo exhibits, but one new place in the District is starting with a group show: Carroll Square Gallery, located at 975 F St. NW, is opening "Botanica" tomorrow, a show featuring works by Mary Early, Dean Kessmann, Jeff Spaulding, and William Willis, among others. The show is sponsored by a collaboration between building developers Akridge and Seaton & Benkowski Partners, and Hemphill Fine Arts. If nothing else, the show boosts and impressive list of names.
Civilian Art Projects is displaying the blissed-out photography of Noelle Tan, who pictures the sublime through whited-out photographs of the everyday. 
Tan hasn't reached the level of overexposure evident in her photographs, but she's certainly seen her share of shows in the city, including a split bill with Kate Hardy at Project 4 Gallery in winter 2006. The show is being sponsored by a Creative Capital grant. Also on display are paintings by Erick Jackson, who also plays in The Apes. Jackson's "Unsung Heroes of the Dynamic Field 1 (2006)" is at right.
E. Brady Robinson was chosen by Chan Chao for a single-artist show at the Gallery at Flashpoint. In "Shift," pictured at top, Robinson documents motion and structures with photographs from urban environments that will look familiar to fans of Jörg Sasse. But Robinson isn't constructing geometric patterns using digital alteration (like Sasse); rather, she's exploring the democratic nature of photography, using cheaper, mobile, and telephonic equipment to capture split-second moments in the social world that were previously much harder to depict.
Images courtesy Flashpoint and Civilian Arts
THE PHOTOGRAPH ABOVE looks almost as if it could be a painting. There's an eerie reflection of a New Orleans home, surrounded by the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, which invaded the low-lying city after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast two years ago this month.
And take a closer look: There's a dog that's sitting in a chair on the right side of the photo, one of the thousands of animals that were stranded in the city following the storm.
The work of The Post's Carol Guzy, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who shot the image above, is featured at a limited-time exhibition, "Lest We Forget: Three Perspectives on Hurricane Katrina" at Discovery Too in Bethesda, along with the work of artists Scotlund Haisley and Bill Manley. Proceeds from the sale of artwork will benefit the Washington Animal Rescue League, which rescued more than 1,000 animals from the hurricane-ravaged city.
Guzy's photography is particularly stirring for animal lovers, since it illustrates the grim realities the animals of New Orleans — and their rescuers — faced following Katrina. Her work, along with Haisley's and Manley's, is featured in this "Art of the Storm" gallery on washingtonpost.com.
» Discovery Galleries, 7247 Woodmont Ave., Bethesda; 301-913-9101; through Aug. 29; artists' reception on Saturday, 7-11 p.m.; Gallery hours: Mon-Thurs 10 a.m.-9:30 p.m., Fri-Sat 10 a.m-11 p.m., Sun noon-8 p.m. (Bethesda)
Photo by Carol Guzy
Addison Road