Rare Earths
Barbara Bitondo & Kristine DeNinno shape and sew. Also: Nicole Maloof Twomey’s autoimmune autobiography; Bryan Jernigan’s line work; Alexander D’Agostino’s spells; virtuality blooms outside Artechouse
Barbara Bitondo, “Ethereal Threads” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
PAPER TAKES ON QUALITIES OF EARTH AND EVEN STONE in “Into the Layered Field,” which pairs the highly compatible work of Barbara Bitondo and Kristine DeNinno. The artists are local printmakers who incorporate sewing techniques into their abstract creations, but Bitondo takes a more sculptural approach. Her pieces are often curved or folded, while DeNinno evokes three-dimensional forms with compositions that are tightly outlined and sometimes bisected by white voids. As its title suggests, “Sands of Her Time II” takes the shape of an hourglass, but one that’s split in half by a bar of unprinted paper.
Some of DeNinno’s vertical banners, like ones she showed last year at Washington Printmakers Gallery, nestle vertical panels inside larger shapes. Employing different patterns and colors, the insets both contrast and complement their environments. DeNinno’s curtain-like works appear to reveal as well as conceal, showing interior and exterior all at once.
DeNinno’s pieces tend to be larger and more colorful than Bitondo’s, which are mostly in the shades of things buried or burned. (An exception is “Medium of Disappearance,” which sports intense blue blotches.) Aspects of clothing appear in her shaped prints, several of which are held together by a single button. But the constructions also resemble scrolls, waves, and canyons, and may hide images inside their crooks. While the colors evoke rock-solid objects, the forms are fragile, as if likely to erode over weeks rather than millennia. The mutability is, of course, Bitondo’s choice, yet it still feels poignant.
“Self Portrait: 24 years and 112 days, 3,055 Autosoft 90 Infusion Sets and counting” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
MUCH OF NICOLE MALOOF TWOMEY’S ART IS CANDY-COLORED, an irony that is entirely intentional. The local artist was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at 4, and has used more than estimated 3,000 diabetes infusion sets in her lifetime. Three thousand is just one of the numbers referenced in Twomey’s Stone Tower Gallery show, “180-300,” whose title refers to the additional health decisions that must be made daily by someone with the autoimmune disease.
Those infusion sets are an essential ingredient in Twomey’s symbolically autobiographical art. She melts and shapes the plastic discs into various forms: all-over, single-color, painting-like wall sculptures such as “Sneaking Lemon Drops,” or the oversized pseudo-sweets stuffed into “The Forbidden Candy Jar.” Eeriest is “Self Portrait: 24 years and 112 days, 3,055 Autosoft 90 Infusion Sets and counting,” a roughly human-shaped heap of hundreds of plastic discs on the floor. Most of the pieces are clear, but at the bottom are scarlet ones, evoking red blood cells. Danger lurks deep in the body.
The show includes actual paintings, including some whose dense fields of colorful blobs could be read as purely abstract in another context. A more literal picture, also partly sculptural, is a tightly spaced landscape of round, spiraling, and heart-shaped confections. It’s a vision of candy-counter bliss that, for some, is a deadly serious warning.
Bryan Jernigan, “The Sound of Line 1 & 2” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
PAINTINGS ARE ALL COLOR AND LINE, but they resonate as something more than formal exercises. The local artist takes inspiration from geography, both rural and urban, for the mixed-media pictures in “Sound of Line,” his Park View Gallery show. But the wiry pencil, pastel, or charcoal marks that underlie the color blocks also suggest architecture, especially when Jernigan draws arch-like shapes. The sketchy lines also pack metaphorical meaning: In his statement, the artist teases several possibilities, including the links of “a city built on networking.”
The smudgy and sometimes drippy colors of these paintings, all titled “Sound of Line “ plus a number, are usually subdued and often dark. But the compositions include panes of bold orange, bright aqua, and other exuberant hues. Some of the geometric forms are solid and hard-edged, while others are tentative and seemingly unfinished. The juxtaposition recalls Cubism and Futurism, which attempted to represent various states in the same picture plane. In one dimension, Jernigan’s artworks are finished; in another, they’re still in process.
Two of Jernigan’s pictures, by the way, are among the most appealing entries in “2026 Yellow Barn Studio Instructors Exhibition,” the show group downstairs from Park View at Popcorn Gallery.
Alexander D’Agostino, “Fairy Kings Grimoire, page 40” (Transformer)
WHEN PLANNING HIS SHOWS, Alexander D’Agostino considers the history of the venues as well as customary concerns, which include magic and queerness. For his 2023 exhibition at the Torpedo Factory, the Baltimore artist investigated the building’s earlier use as a federal records center. Now his Transformer show, “Something Wicked,” invokes the gallery’s previous use as a shop for a supposed psychic.
D’Agostino’s style of occultism is less commercially oriented. He’s an artistic search fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he’s studied the role of witchcraft in such plays as MacBeth -- the well-known source of this show’s title -- and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The latter’s Oberon, king of the fairies, is among the players in D’Agostino’s collaged grimoires, books of spells that also incorporate vintage gay-porn images. Working with weathered old texts seems to have influenced the treatment of the artist’s self-made books, which are painstakingly battered, stained, and water-damaged.
These faux-antique volumes sit alongside inkjet-print collages and other artifacts in a show that’s essentially an installation. Pink curtains cloak the gallery’s storefront, and much of the floor is devoted to a mystical portal that features, curiously, six-pointed stars rather than the usual pentagrams. That’s one of the good things about dabbling in sorcery in a post-magical age: You can throw whatever ingredients you like into the witches’s cauldron.
CHERRY BLOSSOM SEASON HAS BEEN CELEBRATED annually at Artechouse since it 2017 opening. With its tech-art showcase temporarily closed for renovations, Artechouse developed “Peak Bloom: Dome Experience” for Hi-Lawn at Union Market, the food hall’s rooftop venue. The video sequence offers a 22-minute array of spiraling blooms and other forms, including butterflies and confetti-like colored dabs.
Previous blossom-themed Artechouse shows have been impressively ambitious, and sometimes tinged with dystopian discontent. “Peak Bloom” is simpler, as it must be. Hi-Lawn’s dome doesn’t have the space, or the technology, of Artechouse. But the presentation is lively, colorful, and immersive. Set to an impressionist electro-piano score punctuated by occasional techno thumps, the projected shapes whirl upward, as if pirouetting through and beyond the dome. Viewers can slump in pink beanbag chairs and watch the virtual flowers, already tantalizingly out of reach, spin ever further away.
Barbara Bitondo & Kristine DeNinno: Into the Layered Field
Through May 2 at Portico Gallery at Studio 3807, 3807 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. portico3807.com. 202-487-8458.
Nicole Maloof Twomey: 180-300
Through April 26 at Stone Tower Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.
Bryan Jernigan: The Sound of Line
Through April 25 at Park View Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/parkviewgallery. 301-634-2274.
Alexander D’Agostino: Something Wicked
Through April 25 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. transformerdc.org. 202-483-1102.
Peak Bloom: Dome Experience
Through April 26 at Hi-Lawn at Union Market, 1309 5th St, NE. hilawndc.com/thedomedc-peakbloom