Pressed into Action
A wealth of prints (and a few other things) at Washington Printmakers, and more prints by Jun Lee and Rose Jaffe. Also: the Washington Monument, better unseen
Jake Muirhead, “Lion” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)
THE ENTRIES COME FROM 22 STATES AND D.C., but the grand prize of the Washington Printmakers Gallery's annual Peggy Doole National Small Works Exhibition was awarded to a local artist, Kanika Sircar. Her intricate artist's book arrays text, some of it from Roland Barthes, across six paper-on-porcelain panels. The piece's elegance is typical of this impressive show, but its form is distinctive and memorable.
The 35 entries were selected by Margaret Winslow, chief curator at the Delaware Art Museum. The prints, photos, and sculptures reveal no overarching theme, but many of them are concerned with nature or architecture. Among the latter are Neal Cox's reduction linocut, immaculately detailed, of a battered beach house on stilts; Carol Thompson's photograph of a ramshackle model building apparently made of cardboard; Melissa Wilson's photo of a Georgetown door starkly etched into copper with salt water; and Lois Sellers and Brandon Williams's interior scenes, both almost Futurist in their pileup of visual information and sense of multiple vantage points. Although its subject is not manmade, there's an architectural quality to David Klein's "Root2 detail," part of a gnarled tree depicted with a striking mix of fancy and precision.
Other compelling nature images range from Anna Beidler's near-abstract "Woodland Diptych," two green-heavy, complexly layered forms on handmade paper; to Joanna Kidd's playful "Stop Crow," a stone lithograph of a silhouetted black bird that skitters across the word "stop," which meanders sideways down the composition. (The text is as terse as Sircar's is loquacious.) Overwhelming darkness charges Cheryl Hochberg's "A Desert Tortoise and the Big Dipper," in which the title subjects are barely visible. Not blackness but the act of printmaking itself is the vortex from which Jake Muirhead's exquisite "Lion" emerges. Hand-colored with earthy brown, the multi-technique print is simultaneously inchoate and exact, as if to delineate the way a skilled artist can impose order on an unruly world.
Jun Lee, “Our Time in the Meadow” (courtesy of Jun Lee)
THE ANIMALS IN JUN LEE'S PRINTS MAY APPEAR WHIMSICAL, but there's also a fierceness to them. This is partly due to the densely constructed compositions of the Korea-born D.C. area artist's pictures, currently on exhibit in Artists & Makers's "Hide & Seek." Additionally, Lee's intricate linework endows her subjects -- among them chickens, bears, and foxes, sometimes watching over human children -- with exceptional dynamism. The renderings aren't naturalistic, but they have a real-world presence. This befits Lee's principal theme, which is "competition in our daily lives."
The show includes some lithographs, including one of a cat who's cradling a chick, that suggest children's book illustrations. Also on display are a delicate collage of four rounds of handmade paper, a sort of filmy bouquet; and a series of elegant formed-paper animal heads, wall-mounted and covered with floral patterns. But the most powerful items are large-format woodcuts, some of them reduction prints expertly embellished with color.
The short life of a pet chick is a childhood trauma Lee often mentions, so it's a sort of triumph when, in her prints, baby chickens survive to become imposing roosters. (One is titled "My Champion.") The chick in "Calling Out My Sunshine," who appears safely cosseted in a field of sunflowers, also seems destined for an auspicious life.
Lee's colors are bright, but employed in a manner that's as supremely disciplined as the compositions. She complements the animals's tightly coiled forms with a single hue or a few close colors, such as the yellow and tan that are all that's required to complete the picture of a bear. Lee is no minimalist, but she never indulges anything extraneous to her prints's effect.
Installation view of Rose Jaffe’s “In Light We Move” (Latela Curatorial)
MASS AND TRANSPARENCY JUXTAPOSE VIVIDLY in Rose Jaffe's monoprints, which convey action, growth, and sunlight. Dancers undulate and flowers blossom in the pictures of "In Light We Move," the D.C. artist's show at Latela Curatorial's hallway gallery at the Silva apartment building. Jaffe's silhouetted subjects resemble Matisse cutouts, but are printed in translucent inks and often overlap, nudging the simple shapes into tangled interplay. The figures even prance out of the garden and into the artist's mind: "In My Head" neatly stuffs a red hoofer inside an outlined orange cranium.
Known as a muralist, Jaffe is used to working in various styles and on a large scale. The works at the Silva are smaller, but retain the boldness and directness of the artist's wall-filling creations. Jaffe plays with magnitude by rendering people and plants in various sizes, so that some elements conjure a sense of being bigger than they really are. A small green figure stands on the arm of a much larger purple woman, for example, so that the latter looks like a giant. A gentle giant, surely, since the jostling images never suggest conflict.
Also striking are the use of color and texture. Bright hues and interesting patterns -- produced by printing such materials as fabric and bubble wrap -- add complexity to the elementary shapes. Jaffe's streamlined forms are archetypal, but their details are winningly idiosyncratic.
Felix Alvarado, “Bars I” (Foundry Gallery)
THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT DOMINATES THE D.C. SKYLINE, but it's most intriguing when it's least visible. Or at least that's the case in Foundry Gallery's "Framing the Monument: A Photography Exhibit," which offers views of the landmark by 24 area photographers. Most of the pictures are conventional, but some are compellingly offbeat.
These include Chris Suspect's comic shot of a rock climber who seems at risk of impaling himself on the spire; and DeVante Capers's long-exposure study in which the world rushes past the obelisk, seemingly the only motionless thing in a hurtling universe. The monument is so distant that it looks like just another everyday stake, pylon, or telephone pole in pictures by Rob Fredley, Brian Howell, and Mark Leatherman. Alternately, a mere chunk of the building's base dwarfs a person in Felix Alvarado's frame-within-a-frame closeup.
The structure appears to be nestled within branches in Nasr Dallaa's striking photo, rendered in high-contrast color. The most absent monument is visible, just barely, in Joe Goldberg's picture of a snowy day in which beige stone nearly vanishes into a white sky. In one tantalizing moment, the iconic tower is reduced to little more than a rumor.
Peggy Doole National Small Works Exhibition
Through Aug. 31 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.
Jun Lee: Hide & Seek
Through Aug. 27 at Artists & Makers, 11810 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. artistsandmakersstudios.com. 240-437-9573.
Rose Jaffe: In Light We Move
Through Aug. 31 at the Silva Gallery x Latela Curatorial, 1630 Columbia Rd. NW. latelacuratorial.com.
Framing the Monument: A Photography Exhibit
Through Aug. 31 at Foundry Gallery, 2118 8th St. NW. foundrygallery.org. 202- 232-0203.