Our Town

Solid buildings and ethereal people at Multiple Exposures; burned books and solitary figures at IA&A; nature in motion and under threat at Waverly Street

Van Pulley, “Kennedy Center” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

GRAND EDIFICES, OFTEN RECOGNIZABLE, FRAME EVERYDAY MOMENTS in "Capital Perspectives," an exhibition of 20 photographs by 12 members of Multiple Exposures Gallery. Sometimes the subjects are the structures themselves, as in Tom Sliter's "Cupola" or Van Pulley's "Dramatic Arts," both architectural interiors. (The latter photo gazes out a building's massive window at ... another building.) More often, however, there are people in the compositions, although they're usually dwarfed by their monumental surroundings and barely warmed by light.

Juried by Noe Todorovich, executive director of Exposed DC, the show is split equally between black-and-white and color pictures. But occasional splashes of red or orange just accentuate the generally muted palettes, as in Tim Hyde's "Snow Sisters," in which five cloaked figures navigate a near-whiteout in central Washington. For a frozen instant, the white-dusted pedestrians resemble historical statues of the sort common in nearby parks.

Several of the contributors render people as dark silhouettes, like the two conversationalists seated in an eatery in Pulley's "Face-to-Face." The other shadowy beings include a couple, one with a bicycle, in Alan Sislen's "Tidal Basin Reflections," and the two-museum goers of Soomin Ham's "While You Are Watching," who peer out another huge window from another notable recent D.C. building. In Fred Zafran's "Triangle," a solitary man is secondary to the title subject, a shaft of light. Mists nearly swallow such small figures as the lone nighttime Mall walker in Sandy LeBrun-Evans's "Lincoln Watch" and the workers swathed in steam in Eric Johnson's "Maine Avenue Fish Market."

Water and a lone person feature as well in one of the lighter-hearted pictures, Sarah Hood Salomon's image of a woman, wearing work clothes and clutching a briefcase, who hops past lawn sprinklers outside the U.S. Capitol. Equally witty is Sislen's study of the usually imposing Washington Monument, reduced to being just one of the guys amid a thicket of Smithsonian spires and turrets. The photo is, playfully, the show's only depiction of a crowd.

Alexander D’Agostino, “Queer Shroud: Index of Fire” ( Courtesy of the Artist)

BURNED BOOKS ARE BOTH THE SUBJECT AND ONE OF THE INGREDIENTS of Alexander D'Agostino's "An Index of Fire." The Baltimorean, who describes himself as "an artist working with queer histories and images," is interested in the magical -- or supposedly magical -- use of everyday substances. His IA&A at Hillyer show consists of four sets of photo-based images, printed as cyanotypes on cotton panels that are then chemically toned and bleached using tea and ashes from books that D'Agostino torched. A lineup of books sits below one piece, and nestled near the gallery's corners are four bottles that contain another sorcerous ingredient: ashes from the singed volumes.

The artworks convey both damage and resilience, illustrating the perpetual threat to art and knowledge and, nonetheless, their endurance. Small burn-holes dot the images, and the fabric edges are tattered and stringy, and thus cast foreboding shadows. The page-sized fabric rectangles are layered, and beneath the mostly black-and-white ones are other panels, partly visible, that include brighter hues. The effect is not simply to contrast the aged and charred palette of the top sheets with something more colorful. It also suggests the ongoing vitality of the works that, periodically, some person or movement decided to incinerate.

Xenia Gray, “Threads of Faith” (Courtesy of the Artist)

HUMAN CONNECTION SEEMS TO BE THE THEME of several of the paintings in Xenia Gray's "The Great Silence," but her artworks can also be read as representing multiples of solitude. The Russian-born Northern Virginia artist, also showing at IA&A, makes enigmatic pictures in which dark-haired women stand together, or perhaps apart, on near-blank backgrounds. The figures are rendered with pencil lines and then filled in with watery acrylic pigments in somber colors. The paint is so thinly applied that the texture of the underlying canvas is visible in the peach-brown skin tones, calling attention to both the material and the painter's artifice.

As a glistening contrast to the near-monochromatic hues, a curving gold line appears in several paintings, once as a halo around a woman's head and twice as a thread that passes through a series of hands. The similarity of the women, and of their uniform-like clothing, suggests that they are iterations of the same person. Rather than being engaged in a communal activity, they might be she, pursuing a solitary process over time. It could be that the string doesn't link individuals to each other, but instead leads a single woman on a spiritual quest, according to the artist's statement, "to bridge the gap between the tangible and the unseen."

Kanika Sircar, “Smoke A” (Waverly Street Gallery)

TWO VERY DIFFERENT SEASCAPES are among the standouts of Waverly Street Gallery's group "Holiday Show." Matthew Nance's elaborate, tactile painting of sky and surf pits whirling clouds against breaking waves, while Mark Schneidermann's pastel of Shanghai's waterfront is keyed to the cool watery reflections of hot urban lights. Both pictures are kinetic, if not so dynamic as Keith Kozloff's photographs, in which abstracted forms appear to zoom through a forest.

Other highlights partly reprise recent solo exhibitions by Pat Silbert and Kanika Sircar. Silbert (whose October show was reviewed in DisCerning Eye) makes meditative, sometimes gilded nature paintings in which smaller images are nestled with the primary picture.

Sircar is a ceramicist whose elegant vessels are embellished with tints, lines, circles, and often words. Her interest in text is sometimes expressed in "books" whose pages are connected tiles covered with patterns as well as verse and other writings. Included here are several of the artist's smoke jars, previously shown in September. The bell-shaped stoneware flasks invoke chimneys and furnaces, while their surfaces feature cloud imagery and lines from the Rig Veda and Charles Bukowski. Sircar's message is solemn -- to her, smoke represents both climate change and deceit -- but her technique is exuberant.

Capital Perspectives

Through Jan. 5 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com; 703-683-2205.

Alexander D'Agostino: An Index of Fire

Xenia Gray: The Great Silence

Through Dec. 29 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Holiday Show

Through Jan. 4 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. (301) 951-9441.