Earth Tones

Nature takes many guises in Kay Jackson's art. Also: Dominican prints, Combs and Cole McInturff's nuclear alarm, and Ylitalo's ghostly vestiges

Kay Jackson, "Clean Air Opus I" (Addison/Ripley Fine Art)

NATURE IS LITERALLY ICONIC IN THE ART OF KAY JACKSON, whose mixed-media pictures sometimes emulate the techniques of Slavic icon painters. But that's just one of the modes demonstrated in "Thirty Five Years of Environmental Art," the D.C. artist's Addison/Ripley Fine Art retrospective.

Jackson often makes things appear more delicate than they are in actuality, but that doesn't mean she prettifies them. Her paintings of industrial scenes are suitably ominous, their seeming ephemerality the result of toxic mists and plumes as well as gentle technique. Her "Clean Air Opus I" is a montage in which the mountainscape in the middle appears pristine, but the bucolic vista is surrounded by such sources of pollution as cars, buses, and factories.

Sometimes the artist's soft touch represents a barely imaginable profusion, as in her "Malthusian" series. These city crowd scenes blur around the edges to indicate motion, in the manner of the Futurists, but also to highlight burgeoning urban populations. Jackson can also liquefy an image purely for painterly effect, as in her "On Fire" pictures of hydrants whose hard metal forms are nearly obliterated by vivid criss-cross strokes.

The artist is unapologetically didactic when she deems it necessary. "Bon Appetit," a little wall sculpture, contains nine hanging gold cards and the warning that "we ingest one credit card's worth of plastic every week." The blue-heavy, near-abstract "Map Fall, Opus VIII" depicts clouds in a style reminiscent of Phillips Collection mainstay Augustus Vincent Tack. Submerged in the vapor, however, is the information that producing one pound of beef requires 1,860 gallons of water.

While most of Jackson's paintings are realistically detailed, at least at their centers, her small icons of endangered species are simple outlines rendered in gold leaf and enriched by textured patterns and ornate historic frames. Squares of gold leaf also bracket an industrial scene, as if to purify it, while fragments of gold and copper leaf strafe Earth in "Cosmic Wind," an intricately layered mashup of a forest and outer space.

Like the Orthodox paintings that inspired them, Jackson's icons are objects for veneration. But the creatures they depict aren't characters from myth -- at least not yet. Perhaps Jackson's elegant alerts will even lead to the survival of an endangered species or two.

Ariane Nicollier, "Everything Falls" (IDB Staff Association Art Gallery)

IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, PRINTMAKING "has been systematically marginalized," says the statement of Ezequiel Taveras, curator of "Identity & Body: Dominican Printmakers + Writers." Any detrimental effects of that slight are not evident from this impressive IDB Staff Association Art Gallery exhibition, perhaps because most of the contributors live outside their homeland. The call initially went out to Dominican printmakers in New York (home to Taveras, who has a print in the show). It ultimately embraced participants from multiple countries in the Americas and Europe.

The exhibition, which includes the work of more than 40 artists, was also conceived as a tribute to Dominican women writers. Each of the prints (all from 2023) is linked to an extract from a female author's work, and many of the pictures depict women. Other motifs include such things associated with Caribbean islands as water, lush vegetation, and machetes. "My eyes have opened to my history of slaves and sugar cane," muses Sussy Santana in one of the literary excerpts.

History is palpable yet mysterious in several of these prints, many of which stark woodcuts, sometimes with subtle touches of color. Witnesses to unexplained events appear in José Morbán's "Yola Isla," in which a crowd mills on a dock by the sea, and Yamile Suero's "Vanished," where people surround a long table that's empty except for a bird carcass, suggesting a ritual sacrifice.

Other offerings are more folkloric, and sometimes suggest human-centered creation myths. In Nelson Ceballos's "My Body, My Temple," a tongue emerges from a silhouetted face and transforms into a snake that ascends into the sky to be surrounded by a corona of stars. In Alex Fernández's "Tingó," miniature people, plants, and buildings emerge from a woman's abundant black locks. The print hangs next to one by Alex Guerrero in which a woman is framed by equally voluminous hair, but with the focus on her face, striped with colors. Both the strength and vulnerability of the human body are conveyed by Luz Severino's "Red," an etching of a torso overlaid with actual strings in various colors, suggesting arteries and sinews.

The artworks are elegantly composed and executed, and sometimes that's more than enough. Mildor Chevalier elegantly superimposes a silver-white gate-like form on a deep black field. Pepe Coronado floats a black blot atop a dotted gold blotch smeared on a backdrop, enabling layered complexity from two colors and just a few gestures. Less centered but equally compelling is Ariane Nicollier's "Everything Falls," an array of small dark-blue objects on a yellow ground. The items include some detached body parts, notably a finger, severed without any apparent brutality but still slightly alarming. In "Body + Identity," cutting is both an artistic technique and a hint of a violent legacy.

Chris Combs & Ceci Cole McInturff, Unforeseen” (detail) (VisArts)

IN THEIR COLLABORATIONS, CHRIS COMBS AND CECI COLE MCINTURFF juxtapose technology and nature. Tech dominates -- forebodingly -- in the local duo's VisArts collaboration, "Unforeseen." The shadow-cloaked piece was inspired by the federal Waste Isolation Pilot Project, which stores radioactive nuclear detritus deep under southeastern New Mexico.

That site was supposed to bear a huge warning label -- the so-called "Sandia message," named for the Sandia National Laboratory -- that begins, "This is not a place of honor." But 26 years after the facility opened, the cautionary text has yet to be deployed. So Combs and Cole McInturff made 15 banners, each with a fragment of the Sandia message, and hung them on the walls of the Common Ground Gallery. The placards surround a partial globe that is lighted only by reflections from snippets of black-and-white video beamed by four projectors. While most of the globe is cleanly machined, its bottom is ominously jagged. These imperfections mirror those of the twisted bark, branches, and hooves suspended above the broken orb. The dangling objects represent "figures from a distant future," according to a gallery statement.

The story told by the installation is both explicit and furtive. Viewers who don't read the VisArts handout probably won't get the Sandia-message reference, but they'll certainly understand that Combs and Cole McInturff are depicting a potential environmental disaster. How does the world end? Not with a bang but a flicker.

Saaraliisa Ylitalo, “Ghost Kiss” (detail) (Stone Tower Gallery)

DELICATE OBJECTS GAIN POWER FROM BOTH MYSTERY AND REPETITION in Saaraliisa Ylitalo's Stone Tower Gallery show, "Whispers and Ghost Kisses." Working mostly with paper, fabric, and pigment, the local artist crafts banners and small basket- and flower-like objects. These may represent intimations of her late husband's presence -- "ghost kisses" that Ylitalo finds "gentle and joyous," according to her statement.

The artist has lived in many countries, and viewers of this show may not be surprised to learn that Ylitalo spent five years in Kyoto, a bastion of Japanese traditional arts. That's reflected in her use of shibori, a Japanese tie-dying technique, and traditional mulberry-fiber paper. The artist's Kyoto days probably also influenced her occasional touches of gold leaf. (In Japanese Buddhism, gold symbolizes enlightenment.)

Although the artist makes multiples of the same form, each is hand-crafted and thus subtly different. These distinctions may always not be discernible, but they seem essential. Thus "Ghost Kiss," which comprises dozens of indigo-dyed mulberry-paper blossoms, some of them marked by gold. The piece is displayed atop 16 white rectangular pedestals, all identical except that each is a slightly different height. Such deviations are minor, but they open tiny passages among the near-identical wisps -- just enough space, perhaps, for a whisper.

Kay Jackson: Thirty Five Years of Environmental Art

Through July 26 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.

Identity & Body: Dominican Printmakers + Writers

Through July 17 at IDB Staff Association Art Gallery, 1300 New York Ave. NW (13th St. entrance). idbstaffassociationartgallery.org. 202-623-3635.

Chris Combs & Ceci Cole McInturff: Unforeseen

Through July 20 at Common Ground Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. www.visartscenter.org. 301-315-8200.

Saaraliisa Ylitalo: Whispers and Ghost Kisses

Through July 20 at Stone Tower Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.