Remembering Maine
Janis Goodman’s journeys to Maine; Tao Ya-Lun visits ghost-lands; Waverly Street artists push their boundaries; stone and wood at Studio Russo; senses of place and tricky ceramics at Glen Echo
Janis Goodman, “Summer Glow Over Cove” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)
TWO SEPARATE SHOWS OFFER MORE THAN TWINNED VIEWS of Deer Island, Maine, local artist Janis Goodman’s summer home for 25 years. At the American University Museum, “Where Water Keeps Time: Graphite Drawings by Janis Goodman” depicts the rustic area entirely in gray, black, and -- sometimes most powerfully -- the absence of tone altogether. At Gallery Neptune & Brown, “Coastal Reverie” adds oil and watercolor paint as well as colored pencil.
In recent years, Goodman has most often shown luminous, cloud-filled skyscapes that flirt with abstraction even though their style is rooted in neoclassical painting. There’s one of those in the Neptune & Brown selection, but most of the pictures in both shows depict recognizable phenomena. The sky painting is, as usual, a tondo. Some of the drawings are also round, although sometimes with an element outside the circle, such as the many birds (and a lone seal) in several pictures at AU. The effect is graphically dynamic, and calls attention to the limitations of artistic representation -- real life overflows the neat borders of any vignette.
Goodman’s work can be quite detailed, but she’s an expert judge of what should be excluded from a composition. The AU pieces banish color, of course, and often place thickets of pencil lines on white fields. One of the loveliest pictures in this array, which was curated by Laura Coyle, is “Afternoon Reflection,” a view of rippling water below a distant stand of black trees. Every pencil stroke is deployed to frame the unmarked areas that are the essence of the picture, yet would be simply blank space without the gray gestures that define them.
Less unified but no less compelling, the Neptune & Brown show includes oil paintings that amplify the artist’s pencil closeups of ripples and eddies with color and textural effects. It also includes some gray-heavy graphite drawings in the same mode as the AU ones, and pictures that overlay watercolor tints atop pencil renderings. Most are rectangular, but a few are contained within Goodman’s trademark circles. The shape evokes the planet she stands on, and the orb that illuminates her summertime refuge in the silky-gray “Moon Over Cove.” It also suggests the eye, the human facility that distills disconnected instants of light, sky, and water into an enduring vision.
Tao Ya-Lun, still from “Ubiquitous No. 9” (IA&A at Hillyer)
IN A SENSE, “UBIQUITOUS GHOSTS” IS THE BIGGEST EXHIBITION ever mounted at IA&A at Hillyer. Comprising three works by Taiwanese new-media artist Tao Ya-Lun, the show reaches beyond the walls of IA&A’s converted carriage house -- first to Ukraine, and then into vast, near-empty spaces that can be entered only via virtual-reality goggles. “Ghosts” was curated by Mia Yinxing Liu, who teaches at Johns Hopkins and served as Tao’s interpreter during his appearance at the gallery.
Shaped by post-existentialist European thinkers, Tao’s art ponders displacement and systems of power. This is illustrated directly by “The Drifter,” a video in which the artist visits Ukraine as a surrogate for a 21-year-old Ukrainian war-avoider who emigrated first to Taiwan and then to Poland. (The video is available on YouTube.)
Tao walks the streets of Lviv, and even eats dinner with the exile’s family, all while wearing a VR rig that allows the absent man to experience the visit from a distance, but with immediacy. Both personally and technologically, Tao is detached from Ukraine, despite his physical presence here. But as a Taiwanese, he must have some sense of life under the threat of a powerful neighboring superpower.
The other two pieces, “Ubiquitous No. 9” and “Ubiquitous No. 10” place the goggle-wearing participant in unpopulated public spaces, enormous yet ethereal. The first one centers on Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919-20 “Monument to the Third International,” never built in real life but palpable and towering in this unreality. The second transports the virtual visitor through an abandoned -- yet still functioning -- amusement park and into a huge empty room. The viewer may feel like a specter in these imposing spaces, but it’s the spaces themselves that are ghostly. Simulations are secondary to actual existence -- for now, at least.
Andrew Wohl, “Red Expansion Chamber” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
THE “YOUR” IN THE TITLE OF WAVERLY STREET GALLERY’s “Beyond Your Boundaries” refers not to viewers but to the 14 contributors themselves. Pondering everything from the natural to the industrial to the political, the artists attempt to cross the borders that have defined their work.
The nature imagery takes many forms, often three-dimensional. Jeff Bulman photographs expertly composed closeups of vividly hued flowers, while Pat Silbert’s impressionistic landscape -- of France, aptly -- juggles yellow and purple. Bobbi Kittner’s semi-abstract paintings employ patchwork compositions and forms that emulate vines and flowers. Wanjin Kim gently pushes beyond the surface of two large nature-scape paintings by overlaying them with vines rendered in green-patinaed copper.
Even more sculptural are Jan Long’s ceramic gourds, painted in homage to Acoma Pueblo Indian motifs, and Jasmin Smith’s “Tiger Tails,” standing poles with collaged surfaces and protruding leaves, flowers, and striped tails. Rachel Carren’s four miniature shields chart the changing seasons in part with vine-like patterns in gold, and Kanika Sircar’s elegant “Night Skies” collages memorialize a longstanding interest in Mars.
The non-nature paintings are impressively diverse. Mark Kramer, an architect, jauntily renders French villages with angular forms and rambunctious colors. Eric Westbrook’s assured portraits are traditional yet distinctive. Jack Burbridge’s loose, lively “copy” of Peter Breughel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death” was energized by the artist’s opposition to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign. Of Jack Hornady’s four paintings, the simplest is also the most striking: “Glass of Milk” is just what its title describes, but what distinguishes it is a vertical glimmer of light on the glass, a phenomenon both ordinary and enchanted.
Another painter, Andrew Wohl, deviates the furthest from expectations by presenting a motorcycle exhaust pipe, cleaned of grime and painted a vivid red. Rather than resemble a Duchampian readymade, the scarlet twist looks like the show’s most luxuriant flower.
Jomo Tariku, “Nayala chair” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
TWO SLEEKLY STYLIZED DARK-WOOD CHAIRS sit at the center of “Wood and Stone, The Ancestral Permanence,” currently at Studio Russo. They’re the work of Ethiopian-American artist Jomo Tariku, whose “Nyala chair” has been featured in several Hollywood films. But most of the items on display are the work of Jon-Joseph Russo, the gallery’s namesake and proprietor.
Tariku, who lives in Northern Virginia, works in the European modernist tradition, yet his designs evoke African fauna. (Derived from South African languages, “Nyala” is a name for a species of antelope.) The chairs look machined, but are actually hand-crafted. They’re made organically, which suits their natural-world inspirations.
Russo’s work includes granite and marble furniture and some paintings, several of which depict stone sculptures. The furnishings combine functional and fanciful elements, as in the case of a coffee table with two small square niches meant to hold live plants. The artist models his pieces on classical Italian objects as small as a sarcophagus and as large as a palazzo, and can cut marble so thin it attains a papery translucence. His extraordinarily delicate tables with interior lights are solid yet ephemeral, like Japanese lanterns somehow hewn from stone.
Benjamin McVicker, “Meeting Future Strangers” (photo by Mark Jenkins)
A MEDIUM-SIZED SHOW WITH A SWEEPING TITLE, “Power of Place: Arts and the Semi-Quincentennial” shoehorns the work of nearly 20 artists into Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. Juried by Bethesda gallerist Amy Kaslow, the exhibition encompasses prints, paintings, photographs, sculpture, and ceramics, most of which depict everyday inhabitable places. The selection’s subthemes are immigration and displacement, explored by some of the most interesting entries.
In a pair of photos, Ann Stoddard contemplates the border wall at Nogales, Ariz. Bristling with barbed wire, the slatted structure appears ominous, yet with a precise array of shadows that make it look a bit like an art installation. Signs and banners attest to the Chinese presence in an American city -- San Francisco, apparently -- in painter David Leonard’s crisp, evocative “Bilingual Sidewalk.” For Benjamin McVicker, representing “the impossible complexities of fitting in” can’t be shown realistically. His wooden sculpture, “Meeting Future Strangers,” is finely made but eccentrically shaped, suggesting an unnavigable staircase. The place it represents is a state of mind.
Nearby at Stone Tower Gallery, “Confluence and Connections” presents work by Bettina Ammann, Meg Dickerson, and Barbara Stauffer, former colleagues in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Post-Baccalaureate Ceramics Artisanry program. The last of the three artists could be seen as the most conventional, since she makes bowls. But she also crafts more distinctive pieces whose forms and finishes are alluringly complex: large stoneware flowers whose metallic-toned exteriors enclose hot-colored recesses.
Ammann toys with expectations by using porcelain to make things that appear to be soft: gridded wall pieces whose strands seem to fold like fabric, and bulbous pink shapes that suggest flesh. More evocative of architecture, Dickerson’s fabrications emulate concrete, and incorporate such building materials as wood and nails. Incongruously but effectively, she gives the surfaces a weathered aspect, as if the newly made pieces are old and worn. Like her cohorts, Dickerson crafts illusions in the form of objects.
Janis Goodman: Coastal Reverie
Through Aug. 1 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.
Janis Goodman: Where Water Keeps Time: Graphite Drawings by Janis Goodman
Through Aug. 9 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum
Tao Ya-Lun: Ubiquitous Ghosts
Through Aug. 2 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.
Beyond Your Boundaries
Through Aug. 1 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. 301-951-9441.
Jomo Tariku & Jon-Joseph Russo: Wood and Stone, The Ancestral Permanence
Through July 31 at , 1101 5th St. NW. studiorussollc.dom. 202-430-6988.
Power of Place: Arts and the Semi-Quincentennial
Bettina Ammann, Meg Dickerson, and Barbara Stauffer: Confluence and Connections
Through Aug. 2 at Popcorn and Stone Tower Galleries, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.