Immortal Wounds
Cameron Spratley shoots up Von Ammon Co. Also: group shows at the Katzen, Pazo Fine Art, Gallery Neptune & Brown, and Adah Rose Gallery
Installation view of Cameron Spratley's "Angels with Filthy Souls" (Von Ammon Co.)
AMERICAN CULTURE IS A NIGHTMARE in the current show at Von Ammon Co., which may not come as a surprise. American nightmares are a speciality of the Georgetown gallery. What's different about Cameron Spratley's suite of photo-collage-paintings, "Angels with Filthy Souls," is that they seem to look back to the American Civil War, rather than at contemporary conflicts. Most of the Chicago artist's intentionally cartoonish pictures depict caricatures of a soldier in the gray uniform of the Confederate forces.
Spratley grew up in Manassas, Va., site of two notable Civil War battles, and where a high school was named for Stonewall Jackson until 2020. The school (which Spratley didn't attend) paid further tribute to the vanquished south by calling its sports team the Raiders (as in Mosby's, presumably). The artist was spurred by that history, but he borrowed his goofy, red-nosed Rebel mascot from an Ohio school.
The school-age inspiration helps explain some of the other elements in the pictures, such as a hyper-macho action figure and Marvel's Incredible Hulk. (Both are Black, as is the artist.) One of the pieces also incorporates an image of a painting of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. This could be a comment on the Old South's insistence that Confederate soldiers were martyrs, or just another of Spratley's fever visions of a violent world. His "Rebel" pictures are punctuated by decals of simulated bullet holes that blast past the frames and into the gallery walls. And the central feature of "Desdemona," one of the two collage-paintings that doesn't depict the Confederate, is a photo of a pair of slit wrists -- largely healed, but one dripping with unrealistic blood added with paint or ink.
Spratley's subject, then, seems to be less the Civil War and its glorifiers than a cult of violence that encompasses everything from American gun mania to Catholic celebrations of mortifying the flesh. His Rebels may look silly, but their context is grave.
Jarrett Arnold, “How to disappear completely (again)” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
DEATH-STRUCK YET FULL OF LIFE, Jarrett Arnold's collage-paintings constitute the bulk of "DC Shines," an exhibition sponsored by the webzine Art Lantern. Curators Elizabeth Ashe and Nancy Nesvet have chosen three other artists whose work is as different from Arnold's as it is from each other's: abstract symbolist painter Claudia Aziza Gibson-Hunter, sound-and-light sculptor Steve Wanna, and portraitist The Artist Oliver James.
James's four pictures are the most direct. They're photo-derived high-contrast black-and-white depictions of noted Black women writers, including Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Their faces are overlaid with text from their work, and the words fade from black to barely legible gray. James's portraits are straightforward commemorations in the style of posters.
Wanna's contributions are a towering machine with four spidery legs and a long triangular metal box. The former dangles a chain that produces mechanical noise as it slowly rotates; the latter's interior is mirrored and illuminated by LEDs that regularly change colors. Both exemplify self-contained and -perpetuating cycles, although the light piece does so more engagingly.
The colorful motifs of Gibson-Hunter's large banners don't literally move, but they feel almost as kinetic as Wanna's devices. Circles bobble and massed triangles swim across the surface like schools of fish. The artist, who also names Zora Neale Hurston as an inspiration, employs Adinkra symbols from Ghana in the multi-layered pictures, rendered with colored pencil and multiple layers of thin acrylic paint. The artworks are from a series titled "Flight School," and express both the escape from oppression and the buoyancy of the natural world.
Stark skeletons, bared teeth and exposed sinews characterize Arnold's expressionist collage-paintings, some of which incorporate 3D items. As the artist builds up his pictures, often with found materials, he depicts his own body in a process of deconstruction. Arnold is showing a dozen canvases and sketchbooks, all of which depict the body in states of distress. Yet there's a sense of becoming as well as decomposing in this intuitive work. The activity of creation overwhelms the sense of decay.
Alex Ebstein, “Stargazer” (detail) (Pazo Fine Art)
PAINTING TURNS SUBTLY SCULPTURAL IN "BENIGN AGGRESSORS," the four-artist show at Pazo Fine Art's D.C. location. Anne Clare Rogers, one of two Baltimoreans, is the only participant who offers free-standing pieces. But Washington's Maggie King Johns makes wall-mounted relief sculptures of plaster painted in baby's-room pastels. And Enise Carr and Alex Ebstein -- from D.C. and Baltimore, respectively -- overlay some of their pictures with netting or twine, and Ebstein also appends small accents in the form of beads or glazed-ceramic shapes.
One of the strongest entries actually forgoes such embellishments. Carr's "Cascade II" is a woodblock monoprint whose layered abstract gestures include bright gold splashes that give the composition an Asian feel. But the artist's dark "Triptych" incorporates pipe cleaners and sits below a lattice of thin netting.
The base levels of Ebstein's pieces are considerably thicker than canvas or paper: They're made of yoga mats, cut together and sometimes painted. The flat, hard-edged shapes contrast three-dimensional additions that resemble blossoms or teardrops. Flowers are also among the things suggested by Johns's recessed forms, some of which are pressed into tiles arranged as if they're remnants of a lost civilization.
The least symmetrical artworks by Rogers, whose spindly creations combine wood and metal disconcertingly. In the eerie "Three legs," the natural becomes industrial -- or the opposite. Perhaps that's the aggressive aspect of all four artists's work: These pieces refuse to stay on one level, or commit to one configuration.
Stephen Estrada, “View from the Pier: Descent” (Gallery Neptune Brown)
THE BLUES ARE NOT AN EMOTIONAL STATE in Gallery Neptune & Brown's summer group show, "Blue & Beyond." They're just the organizing principle for an exhibition of work by 20 artists already known to regular visitors to the gallery. Their entries are as disparate as two blue-heavy 1969 RB Kitaj book-cover designs; Foon Sham's eccentric, chimney-like sculpture of wood blocks dyed blue and green, and photographer Frank Stewart's moody portrait of jazzman Ahmad Jamal in a dark blue shirt, his piano reflected in his dark glasses.
Water and sky are among the bluest everyday things, and feature in landscapes by Raya Bodnarchuk, Stephen Estrada, and Janis Goodman. The last two gaze down at water, depicting both dazzling surfaces and intriguing depths. The blue is barely there in Jowita Wyszomirska's landscape-inspired abstraction, mostly in thunder-cloud tones of gray and black. Also abstract, but suggesting skies, are Kate Shepherd's all-blue and tidily geometric "evening" scene; and Barbara Takenaga's blue, black, and white evocation of shooting stars;
The show's only new work is by Paul Inglis, who achieves surprisingly lively variations on an elementary matrix: an all-over grid of evenly spaced vertical and horizontal lines. The artist's strategy is to render most of the lines in single color, but to define simple shapes within the framework by switching to another hue. Thus forms, usually triangles but sometimes rectangles, emerge in such strong contrasts as green and red or pink and blue. These shifts are enough to suggest complex structures, as Inglis notes by titling one of the pictures "Cathedral." He constructs an edifice with nothing more than repeated boxes of two shades of green and one of, yes, blue.
Rosa Vera, "Lotus Fields 4" (Adah Rose Gallery)
THE LATEST OF ADAH ROSE GALLERY'S "CARTE BLANCHE" summer shows is not as jam-packed as most of its predecessors, but it does make room for work by 26 artists, more than half of them not gallery regulars. Unsurprisingly, several of the pieces could have infiltrated "Blue & Beyond" without causing a stir.
Watery blues characterize June Linowitz's winter landscape on fabric with a bunched frame; Rosa Vera's softly rendered view of a lotus pond, set off by blazes of orange; and Jacqui Crocetta's closeup of pebbles and bubbles, hard and soft rounds in visual rhyme. Blue dominates one of Gabe Brown's intricate abstractions, which juxtapose natural and geometric shapes.
Blue doesn't always prevail. Water is a central motif of Monica Jahan Bose's prints, but the one on exhibit here is dominated by flame-like red. And the sky is pink rather than azure in Jayme McLellan's photograph of a towering rock formation in the tan-and-brown American desert.
If the show lacks a unifying hue, it is often organized into side-by-side pairs, such William Masters and Mary Higgins's drawings of lone trees. But some artists have developed styles that are too prickly, whether in form or content, to cozy up to others's. There are no logical partners for Caroline Mayorga's small portrait of herself as the Virgin Mary or Kirsty Little's abstract clump of wires, spiky as individual strands but seemingly soft in totality.
The gallery rarely shows photographs, and there are only two in this array. But McLellan's landscape doesn't fit with Iwan Bagus's enigmatic offering, a staged picture in which a flask and stopper float above miniatures of hospital furniture and a pool of blood-like liquid. Whether this is allegory or autobiography, the image is immaculately produced and impossible to ignore.
Cameron Spratley: Angels with Filthy Souls
Through July 31 at Von Ammon Co, 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.
DC Shines
Through July 31 at the Rotunda, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. artlantern.net.
Benign Aggressors
Through Aug. 2 at Pazo Fine Art, 1932 9th St. NW (entrance at 1917 9 1/2 St. NW). pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.
Blue & Beyond
Through Aug. 2 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.
Carte Blanche
Through July 31 at Adah Rose Gallery, 12115 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. adahrosegallery.com. 301-922-0162.