HARD EDGES OR POROUS BORDERS -- or sometimes both -- characterize the most striking pieces in "Small Talk," a 10-artist show at Stable. Genie Ghim smartly distills the U.S. and D.C. flags almost entirely to red, white, and blue circles, although her abstracted D.C. banner does include the three familiar red stars. Brazil-rooted local artist Johab Silva's sleek vertical panels partly enclose swathes of greens and browns within silver-painted slats, suggesting nature contained by technology. The impressionistic representational painting of Taylor Sizemore (whose solo Strathmore Mansion show closes Nov. 7) continues onto the pictures's raised frames, bidding for boundlessness.
Ghim and Sizemore are among a group of 2024 American University Studio Art MFA graduates who organized this exhibition. Also in this cohort are Lindsay Mueller, whose rough-edged paintings feature thickly built-up surfaces that emulate their overgrown-forest subjects. Her impastoed style is not unlike that of Charles Mason III, but the Baltimore painter's canvases are purely abstract and dominated by twisted fabric that melds with the heavy pigment.
Three pieces by Johab Silva in “Small Talk” (photo by Taylor Sizemore)
The other new AU MFA is Marie B. Gauthiez, whose collaged, partly realist painting-drawings are assembled from individual sections into tentative wholes, also with ragged boundaries. Gauthiez's theme is personal identity, also the concern of Francisco Donoso, an Ecuador-born DACA recipient who lives in New York City. His collages are divided into checkerboard patterns that largely obscure the photographs of faces beneath the grid. One of his pieces pits multiple readings of "United States of America" (in the engraved lettering of paper currency) against a braided band that says "Ecuador."
Marie B. Gauthiez, “Persimmon Street” (photo by Taylor Sizemore)
Identity is fragmented more abstractly in the work of Charles Jean-Pierre, a Haitian-American D.C. artist who teaches at AU, and often shows locally. Among his entries is one of his trademark silhouetted figures constructed from fragments of colorful prints.
Starkly monochromatic, yet very different in effect, are drawings by Baltimore's Erin Fostel and a photograph by New York's Ian Kline. The latter captures a uniformed security guard in a domestic setting, linked with other people in some sort of enigmatic rite. Fostel's elegant near-photorealist charcoal-and-graphite renderings feature rich textures and architectural details. Her rectangular illustrations are punctuated by portals, and thus --like so many of these artworks -- draw the eye toward their interiors while simultaneously accentuating their perimeters.
Kyujin Lee, “Flight of Fancy” (Courtesy of Adah Rose Gallery)
STORYTELLING IS KEY to the Nicholson Project's current show, as is proclaimed by its wordy title: "Scorched Petals to Pages: Investigating Narratives at the Intersection of Image Making and Literature." But the chronicles undergo a few disorienting twists in the work of the three contributors: Washington's Kyujin Lee and Madyha J. Leghari and Baltimore's Thiang Uk.
Curated by Thomas F. James, the show represents three very different approaches to narrative. The Myanmar-born Uk makes raw expressionist paintings inspired by centuries-old Chinese poetry and art. Another ancient style of verse, in her case from her native Pakistan, underlies Leghari's video. Lee hails originally from South Korea, but populates her small, blue-heavy paintings with characters from European fairy tales, notably Pinocchio and the Little Mermaid.
Uk transforms a 13th-century Chinese painting about oppression, known as "The Emaciated Horse," into commentary on Myanmar's current authoritarian government. Nine of his paintings, most of them red with apparent anger, are small, but one is huge. The change of scale is as shocking as the sight of the gaunt animal.
Lee's scenarios are semi-autobiographical but guided by chance: She begins by painting abstractly, and only gradually turns the gestures into figurative images. Leghari also partly relinquishes control, but to the viewer rather than fate: Her video is interactive, governed by four buttons that participants can use to select the path of the subject, an exiled woman, through a collaged natural landscape. Leghari selected the watery landscape and created such striking images as a pair of flower-covered hands, but ultimately the story is the observer's to tell.
Small Talk
Through Nov. 9 at Stable, 336 Randolph Pl. NE. stablearts.org. 202-953-9559.
Kyujin Lee, Madyha J. Leghari, Thiang Uk: Scorched Petals to Pages: Investigating Narratives at the Intersection of Image Making and Literature
Through Nov. 16 at the Nicholson Project, 2310 Nicholson St. SE. thenicholsonproject.org.