Looking At, Beyond, or Within

Ordinary or fanciful from Lauren Scavo-Fulk and Eric Celarier; cosmic or internal from Lia Halloran and Imo Nse Imeh; untraditional quilting from Sheila Crider

Lauren Scavo-Fulk, “Stones” (Park View Gallery)

THE WAY LAUREN SCAVO-FULK OBSERVES THINGS owes much to photography, yet she doesn't consider her charcoal-graphite drawings to be neutral depictions. The elegant black-and-white pictures on exhibit at Glen Echo's Park View Gallery are as deadpan as the show's title, "Contemporary Landscapes." But the Pittsburgh-area artist hopes "to call to mind the illusion of objectivity that is often assumed in photographic images," according to her statement.

Scavo-Fulk makes precise, detailed renderings of such everyday things as ripples in a pond, a field of stones, the ramped rear entrance to a blank commercial/industrial building, and a pair of wheeled cylindrical trashcans from which stuffed black plastic bags protrude. Although she sometimes examines sites in the middle distance, she often draws closeups that might well have been located through a camera viewfinder. She also frames her rectangular pictures within white expanses, recalling the Polaroid photo format. It's hard to imagine that such drawings would have been produced before the arrival of point-and-shoot cameras for nonprofessionals.

Often strong lines draw the eye across the image, whether upwards or from side to side. Scavo-Fulk even occasionally lets a natural object penetrate the border, thrusting messily outside the drawing. In "Forest Stream," spindly trees reach beyond the picture's top perimeter, while their forms also stretch the opposite way, as distorted shadows on the water. This is, of course, something a photograph can't do.

The artist's closeup pictures tend to depict manmade objects, while bucolic scenes often -- though not always -- get a wider perspective. The effect is to make humanity's presence appear fragmentary, and perhaps temporary. This apparent conflict is gently but vividly expressed by "Lake Erie Ladder," in which a metal ladder plunges into water that's enclosed by a concrete slab. This can be read as mankind's direction of nature, or as nature's ability to subvert such attempts at control. In this seemingly objective rendering, an ordinary thing leads into the unseen.

A month after his April print show at Artists & Makers, Eric Celarier has mounted a more diverse array of his work at Glen Echo's Stone Tower Gallery. "Evolving Worlds" presents sculptures, video, and a projected animated drawing, as well as prints, in playful emulation of a natural history museum exhibition. (The local artist grew up within walking distance of the Smithsonian's Mall museums.) The show even has a burbling score, fashioned by area musician-composer Anne Burson and evoking natural sounds without actually sampling them.

Celarier's themes are nature and technology, which he expresses mostly by constructing fantastical creatures from mechanical and electronic detritus. A high-tech dragonfly that hangs from the ceiling exemplifies the artist's method: making things that seem airy and delicate out of heavy junk. His prints -- produced with the Japanese inked-fish process called gyotaku -- do something similar: combining colorful impressions of industrial items to suggest metallic gardens.

Especially when they incorporate such elements as rusted saws, Celarier's ungainly creatures can appear alarming. Yet his assemblages sometimes strike an optimistic note. They may not represent a viable theory of evolution, but they are strangely beautiful.

Lia Halloran, from "Warped Side" (courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles)

BLACK HOLES AREN'T BLACK IN LIA HALLORAN'S PAINTINGS. The paintings in "Warped Side," the California artist's show at the National Academy of Sciences, are predominantly blue and thus, on first look, have an aquatic vibe. But Halloran's pictures were originally made for The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves, a book co-written with astrophysicist Kip Thorne, a Caltech professor, NAS member and Nobel Prize winner. About 30 of the 650 paintings, which depict the phenomena listed in the book's title, are on display.

The pictures exhibited here were executed on clear plastic, whose non-absorbent nature leads the pigment to pool and shimmer. Even if the paintings are not read as watery, their liquid quality makes them appear kinetic. This is ideal for renderings in which celestial forms seem to spin, throb, and emanate. An animated video of some of the illustrations makes them dance, but they effectively convey motion even when the gestures don't literally move.

While the scale of Halloran's works is often cosmic, the show includes personal touches. Amid the pictures are poems by Thorne, whose response to the universe is lyrical as well as scientific. Halloran's spouse, Felicia, is portrayed as a space traveler, and a scene of a tree-lined street features a walker who might be Thorne. People who watch the skies must do so from a place on Earth, awed from an everyday vantage point.

There's a swirling quality to some of the drawing-paintings in Imo Nse Imeh's "Monuments to Our Skies," also at NAS. Black men's faces, rendered in charcoal, are embedded within colorful spatters of watery acrylic paint. But the liquid gestures don't represent the same thing they do in Halloran's work.

The "Bioforms" pictures were made in 2023-24 for covers of the Yale Journal of Biological Psychiatry, and visualize complex identities and the collective healing from historical trauma. The splashes could represent external pressures or inner struggles, or both. The show's other entries are from a separate series, "Divinity," which reimagines "Icarus as an African boy."

A U.S.-born Nigerian-American, Imeh teaches at Massachusetts's Westfield State University. According to exhibition text, there are "elements of self-portraiture" in his work. Some of the artworks clearly speak to a larger community, as is most explicit in "Ascension," in which multiple faces are linked by a curved line and ribbons of poured color. Yet Imeh is most likely to depict the Black experience as something that's been internalized. The multi-layered "Epilogue" depicts a man whose chest is transparent so that his heart is visible, and whose face is by a cascade of blood-red paint. The link between a single soul and the wider world is palpable.

Sheila Crider, "Passe (par) Tout" (IA&A at Hillyer)

WHILE QUILTING UNDERLIES SHEILA CRIDER'S "WAY FINDING," there's nothing traditional about the pieces in this IA&A at Hillyer exhibition. A longtime Washingtonian who's now based in Baltimore, Crider sometimes relies on chance, but her style is purposeful despite its haphazard elements. Her mottled "ghost stories," for example, begin randomly with material used to blot excess pigment from paintings. But this show's two-panel "Ghosts of Gaza" is powerfully suggestive, with glimmers of cityscape and red drips that hint at blood.

Taking a cue from Sam Gilliam, Crider sometimes drapes her artworks, using the inherent fluidity of fabric to turn collage-paintings into a sort of sculpture. A few quilted works simply hang away from the wall, accentuating their tactile qualities. Other pieces twist in midair, casting complex shadows and evoking everything from banners to dancers to cocoons. However they're interpreted, the dangling pieces are dynamic and mutable, and thus boundless. It's apt that the show's title ends in "-ing," since the methods Crider employs yield art objects whose creation appears ongoing.

Lauren Scavo-Fulk: Contemporary Landscapes

Eric Celarier: Evolving Worlds

Through June 1 at Stone Tower Gallery and Park View Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. 301-634-2274.

Lia Halloran: Warped Side

Imo Nse Imeh: Monuments to Our Skies

Through June 1 and July 1, respectively, at the National Academy of Sciences; 2101 Constitution Ave. NW. www.cpnas.org/exhibitions. 202-334-2415. Currently, entrance is only by appointment or with a guided tour.

Sheila Crider: Way Finding

Through June 1 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.