Patterns, Places, and People
Adi Segal's battered geometries, Kate Fleming's smudgy recollections, and Rachelle Wunderink's camouflaged traumas, all at IA&A at Hillyer
Adi Segal, “Zygi’s Blanket” (IA&A at Hillyer)
THE SUBJECTS OF CLASSICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL ART -- religion, mythology, history -- all spoke to a shared culture. These days, of course, personal identity is a more common artistic theme. But that can be expressed in vastly different ways, as is illustrated by the three shows currently at IA&A at Hillyer. All are, in a sense, autobiographical. That is about all they share.
The triangular figures, gridded compositions, and worn colors of Adi Segal's elegant minimalist artworks refer to her background without revealing it. Her show is titled "Where Are You Really From? An Inquiry into Generational Identity," posing a question she explores but doesn't answer.
Segal identifies herself simply as "a first-generation American of parents from disparate worlds." Her reach appears to extend well beyond those worlds, whatever they are. One of her motifs is an eight-pointed star, which she links to symbols used in American quilting, Slavic and Lakota lore, and the cult of Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess. Her work, although painstakingly handmade, also suggests the repeated matrices and tiny variations of machine-made and computer-generated objects.
The muted colors and worn textures of some pieces evoke age and loss. One lovely eight-tipped star is an excavated screenprint, its light-blue center scraped and pitted like a well-used scrap of denim. The effect blends the manufactured and the natural, like a beautiful stone wall eroded by centuries of wind and rain. Not Ishtar-old, perhaps, but venerable.
Other items use similar patterns and shapes, but are less damaged. The interlocking squares and triangles in a 3-D lattice are made crisply of rye straw, tied together to cast complicating shadows. “Zygi’s Blanket” is dozens of squares of folded white vellum, assembled neatly but with a few paper triangles that protrude with carefully modulated messiness. These stray bits may represent chaos or decay, or they may serve as visual entrances to the otherwise pristine assemblage. In artworks that arrange such universal forms as triangles and stars, scratched surfaces and stray folds manifest an individual touch.
Kate Fleming, installation of “August” (IA&A at Hillyer)
A SORT OF "ARLINGTON GRAFFITI" RENDERED MOSTLY IN OIL PAINT, Kate Fleming's "August" revisits a teenager's summer in the suburban Virginia county just west of Washington. The period is unclear, since the Arlington native's principal subject is a nearly timeless one: 7-11 convenience stores.
Fleming previously visited all 50 states to document the bland commercial roadscape of strip malls, gas stations, and such. She traveled with her partner, photographer Tom Woodruff, and her work is influenced by street photography. Her own pictures, however, are loosely realistic paintings, mostly small. They suggest a marriage of Manet canvases and Warhol Polaroids.
"August" focuses much more tightly than her coast-to-coast endeavor. Fleming set out to paint all the 7-11s in Arlington, of which there are apparently 27. (At least that's the largest number recorded in the pictures's titles.) The stores are, of course, quite similar. But the artist depicts different aspects of the structures, and views them from various angles. Essentially, each 7-11 is the same place, and the many pictures add up to a single portrait, both fragmented and archetypal.
Installed in IA&A's largest gallery, the paintings revolve around a plastic lawn chair that's tipped sideways on a pedestal planted with artificial grass. Less conspicuous are a wax simulation of a half-melted popsicle, seemingly forgotten in a corner, and a model of Slurpee cup cast for the ages in concrete. Again, the pieces suggest the whole. Memories endure, but in impressions that are more like blocks of smeary color than the precise images produced by cameras.
Rachelle Wunderink, “Synthesis” (IA&A at Hillyer)
ACCOUNTS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT ARE OFTEN GARBLED -- not by their tellers, but by the societal institutions that attempt to defuse and deflect them. Rachelle Wunderink's "Your Comfort, My Silence," expresses this in several ways. Two walls of the site-specific installation's gallery are papered with myriad copies of an account of an attack, the words partly redacted. Three video screens present overlapping images of a woman whose remarks are multiplied into a babble of voices, urgent yet unintelligible.
The Canadian artist, a queer feminist, specializes in "deeply autobiographical" work that "focuses on how women move through the world," according to her statement. This installation also highlights how past upheavals and injuries linger, even when the details are ignored or submerged. "Your Comfort, My Silence" is as much poignant as it is outraged. It's a mood piece, and the feelings it summons are both hazy and acute.
Adi Segal: Where Are You Really From? An Inquiry into Generational Identity
Kate Fleming: August
Rachelle Wunderink: Your Comfort, My Silence
Through Feb. 2 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org; 202-338-0680.