Into the Woods
Nature takes many paths at Amy Kaslow Gallery. Also: invocations of time, space, and struggle at Touchstone, Pars Place, and Cultivate Studios
Martina Dalla Stella, Richiamare l’anima (Recall the Soul) (Amy Kaslow Gallery)
THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT AMY KASLOW GALLERY is thematically linked, but also something of a greatest-hits collection. The 13-contributor “Woodlands” includes work by artists who have shown at the venue previously, including Jaroslav Leonets, who expressionistically paints peaceful rustic scenes of pre-war Ukraine, and London’s Jane Kell, who usually makes half-abstract landscapes but whose two paintings in this selection include an unexpected closeup of a “Night Garden.” Its slashes of green and splashes of pink and orange are highlighted by their glistening ebony background. The picture’s format complements the tightly framed photos of gallery proprietor Amy Kaslow, whose large-format pictures examine bark, lichens, and moss and burrow into individual flowers.
Craft is integral to the gallery’s mission, and this show includes nest-like hanging baskets made of vitiver root by Madagascar’s Marie Alexandrine Rasoanantenaina and overhead bird mobiles fashioned from leftover wood by Colombia’s Juan Carlos Arango and Angela Matiz. Santa Fe artist Don Kennell and his team also fabricate birds, but from partly painted scrap metal that sometimes includes text. (”Courage” is spelled out on one creature.)
These metallic birds dovetail with local artist Kirsty Little’s wall-mounted abstract flowers, which she constructs from painted wire and such playfully anomalous found objects as a tea strainer. Renee Balfour’s wall sculptures are made of a natural material, wood, but are abstractions that merely hint at natural forms.
Other pieces also fit together neatly. The blocky shapes of local painter Bernard Dellario’s oil-and-gouache landscapes recall Leonets’s style, as do the cut-and-paste forms of Indiana artist Meg Lagodzki, whose pictures portray forests or, more intimately, ferns. Dellario’s loosely applied pigment has an affinity with the watery oils of Martina Dalla Stella, who in one picture foregrounds a tree that’s rendered entirely with swirling strands of drippy blue paint.
Aside from reverence for nature, what many of these artworks share is a sense of immersion, whether through literal depths or simulated ones. This is true whether the material is organic or industrial, lush or spare. Thus local artist Brandon McDonald uses just pen and ink and occasional washes to beckon the viewer into pastoral realms along the Potomac River or the C&O Canal. The hiking trails that serve as passages for the eye can also be seen as pathways into not just his pictures, but into all these depictions of forests and their inhabitants. To view woodlands is to, spiritually if not actually, enter them.
Installation view of Janathel Shaw’s “Hear Our Voices” (Touchstone Gallery)
THE INSPIRATIONS FOR JANATHEL SHAW AND SUFIE BERGER’S Touchstone Gallery shows may have been neglected and even abused, but the two local artists are intent that they not be forgotten. Shaw’s “Hear Our Voices” and Berger’s “Genesis of Meaning” are entirely separate, yet they share a similar disposition. Where Shaw reflects on the legacy of American racism, Berger pays tribute to “my ancestors,” women artists she depicts mostly as shadows.
Shaw is best known as a ceramicist whose sculptures eloquently convey violence and remembrance. One of her motifs is a torso that’s punctured by an intimation of death, whether a skull that protrudes from a belly or a bullet that partly penetrates a chest. Both those disturbing signifiers are included in this array, which features seven ceramic creations, mostly busts, as well as drawings, prints, and paintings. All are intentionally rough and raw, their cragginess clearly meant to represent centuries of historical upheaval.
The nucleus of Shaw’s exhibition is “Rooted,” an installation that centers on a jagged upright form that might be a tree trunk or a human one. (The blood-like red pigment that drips from the top suggests the latter.) This piece is surrounded by piled-up bark in which ceramic fragments, as dark as the principal object, are partly buried. These suggest discarded body parts, and the six human feet that march toward the spire are plainly disembodied. Maybe the severed pieces are attempting to reunite into a single body, overcoming the evident brutality that severed them. Or perhaps the mysterious ritual being conducted is merely a commemoration. Either way, the effect is potent and memorable.
Frida Kahlo, who’s been seen around town a lot lately, is among the precursors Berger explicitly invokes. But most of her antecedents are black cutouts, Matisse-like in form if not color, and some of them are seemingly supernatural. (Multiple arms are a tipoff.) Dozens of these talismanic figures, silhouetted on bright-hued paper, cluster together on one wall, with a small hand mirror mounted at the center. Berger apparently sees herself in these mythic archetypes, and she invites gallery visitors to do the same.
Installation view of Abol Bahadori’s work (Pars Place)
A BEGUILING BLEND OF DAYDREAM AND GEOMETRY, Abol Bahadori’s architectural fantasies have been widely exhibited locally in recent years. Many of them are featured in “Patterned Nuances,” a Pars Place show that additionally exhibits the 3D paper constructions of Sookkyung Park, also frequently shown in recent years. The exhibition’s third participant is Iran Davar Ardalan, whose computer-generated prints deftly juxtapose traditional Persian design motifs and cyber imagery.
The show is a good introduction to Bahadori’s recent print-paintings, in which platforms, hallways, vaults and other interior details are imposed on brightly colored landscapes. But this selection is a 10-year retrospective of the Tabriz-born local artist’s output, which also encompasses Greco-Roman-style male nudes; near-abstract grid paintings in hot colors; athletic renderings of dancers, divers, and gymnasts; and even two paintings in a surprisingly looser mode.
The artist has worked as graphic designer, a vocation suggested by his photo-derived, computer-devised style. Those origins can constrain his work a bit, but it’s freed by vivid hues and endowed with individuality by intricately layered compositions. Bahadori begins with familiar ingredients and ends in a world all his own.
Computer-graphic techniques are also evident in Ardalan’s artworks, which even include a piece that incorporates columns of 1’s and 0’s. A journalist and AI expert, the Iranian-American artist is a skilled compositor whose collages are seamless and elegant. She can overlay silver electronic circuits on porcelain designs or architectural embellishments and make the combination appear as visually natural as it is conceptually incongruous.
Park’s tinted-paper contributions are wall-mounted, hanging, or free-standing. Many are modeled on the lotus flower, which represents purity and enlightenment in Asian cultures. The largest of the local artist’s fabrications are fluttery columns that appear both delicate and substantial. While Bahadori dreams of imaginary buildings, Park certifies herself as an architect.
Gabriel Soto, “Topographical Spirit” (Cultivate Studio)
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LOGOS, a Greek word that means “word” and much more. Local artist Gabriel Soto refers to it as “the divine ordering principle of creation,” according to Cultivate Studios’s statement on Soto’s show, “Topologies of Spirit.” The 14 intricate collage-drawings, embedded in beeswax on wooden panels, overlay photographs and text with assorted schematic renderings, including a graph, a collapsing X-Y grid, and of course, a topographic chart. The pictures’s colors are mostly muted, but accented by bright hues, usually red.
Born in El Salvador, Soto trained as a figurative artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before becoming a resident artist at Cultivate. In these works, the representational images are often photographs, although there are also some among the drawings, which are sketched on a computer and then transferred to the multi-layered collages. The artist seeks to replace traditional perspective with tactile depth, he told me recently, and combine the various elements into “one single fused object.”
While the images meld into a totality, the artist means to convey opposition as much as unity. He pits religious motifs against scientific drawings, contrasting faith with knowledge. This distinction, however, is submerged by Soto’s visual language. In these pictures, different ways of understanding the world bleed into each other.
Woodlands
Through Oct. 5 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.
Janathel Shaw: Hear Our Voices
Sufie Berger: Genesis of Meaning
Through Oct. 5 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.
Abol Bahadori, Iran Davar Ardalan, and Sookkyung Park: Patterned Nuances
Through Oct. 5 at Pars Place Iranian-American Community Center, 8150 Leesburg Pike, Suite 210, Vienna. iacommunitycenter.org.
Gabriel Soto: Topologies of Spirit
Through Oct. 4 at Cultivate Studios, 4218 Howard Ave., Kensington, third floor (rear). cultivateprojects.net. Open by appointment: ga_so_arte@tutamail.com.