Steely Mammoths
Natural and industrial meld in a sculpture group show. Also: Fred Folsom's neoclassical take on American life and Micheline Klagsbrun's liquefied texts
Nicholas Femia, "Searching" (photo by Mark Jenkins)
"MONUMENTAL WASHINGTON," THE TITLE OF THE WASHINGTON Sculptors Group show at the American University Museum, might seem generic. Yet it's surprisingly apt for an exhibition in which such noted local artists as Barbara Liotta contribute pieces that scale up their customary work.
The sculptor's "Katzen Pegaea" suspends stone chunks on hanging cords, her standard gambit. But the elegant piece retains the delicacy of her style while achieving an imposing magnitude. The assemblage is a monument of sorts, even if it's defined as much by cast shadows and empty space as by its slabs of granite, marble, quartz, and slate. The sculpture is one of several that make deft use of the stark, towering walls of the museum's brutalist pit of a sculpture terrace.
Most of the 20 works selected by curator Laura Roulet are brawny and emphatic, yet often as orderly as Foon Sham's kiln-like "Shield," which is made of neatly fitted wooden blocks. Some of the pieces are inspired by nature, but others highlight a human presence, and may even have a narrative element. Tatyana Shramko's sleek, wheeled humanoid is a symbolic portrait of Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief; Jon-Joseph Russo's "Ghosts of Presidents Past and Present" places an obelisk-proportioned figure inside a Washington Monument-like structure; and Rafael Rodriguez's " 'Alien' in Transit" is a wooden enclosure that conflates a shipping crate with a detention cell. Noël Kassewitz offers a towering pile of sandbags from which emerges a black arm with a clenched fist, a gesture of defiance toward an increasingly flood-prone planet.
Liotta isn't the only participant who defies gravitational force. Bobby Donovan constructs artificial trees of vertical metal spikes on which are impaled burly wooden beams and, further up, cinder blocks. Luc Fiedler's "Gravity Threshold" is two flights of freestanding metal stairs with a doorway to nowhere at the top. Most of the wooden planks that constitute Daniel Shay's "Sentinel" thrust toward the sky, although some bend toward the ground.
While its stalks resemble railroad ties more than vegetation, there is a shrub-like character to Shay's creation. A found tree branch is at the center of Michael Wolf's "Deconstructed," a 3D collage that combines natural and manmade objects, unified into a single entity by a coat of white paint. Steel edifices by Davide Prete and Craig Schaffer resemble highly stylized trees or a flower, respectively. Mounted high and horizontally on the wall, Dalya Luttwak's piece is modeled, as usual, on a vine. But it's silver-painted steel, so it shares an industrial quality with Schaffer and Prete's entries.
Nicholas Femia's "Searching" also employs steel to render forms that evoke nature. Made of rust-colored metal, the piece consists of six curling tendrils that are separate but grouped together to suggest a single organism. The tentacles are segmented like worms, but the way the sculpture appears to emerge from the concrete floor makes it appear like some sort of plant, stretching toward sunlight. As graceful as it is monumental, "Searching" suggests that beauty can germinate even in the most sterile of environments.
Fred Folsom, “Fight at the Shepherd Park Go-Go Bar” (American University Museum/courtesy of the artist)
JUST AS THERE ARE TOUGH-GUY WRITERS, THERE ARE TOUGH-GUY painters. One of them is veteran local realist Fred Folsom, a D.C. native. The exquisitely detailed pictures in his "Women Smoking and Last Call," also at the American University Museum, owe much of their technique to 17th-century Dutch masters. But they also recall the work of Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and other visual poets of 20th-century American urban isolation.
Most of the show's paintings, rendered meticulously with layers of oil-pigment glazes, depict a classic subject: the female nude. But nearly all of Folsom's solitary women smoke or hold cigarettes, and inhabit shadowy domestic interiors that usually appear modest and a few decades out-of-date. The effect is to conjure paradoxical senses of specificity and timelessness. Made between 2004 and 2019, the pictures simultaneously conjure the Dutch Golden Age and the post-World-War-II United States.
The cigs are a perverse tribute to Folsom's mother and sister, both of whom died from the effects of smoking. The smokes may also be an indirect reference to another sort of addiction, since the artist is a recovering alcoholic. He was once a regular at the Shepherd Park Restaurant, an eatery, bar, and strip club near the D.C./Maryland border. This picturesquely downscale establishment became the setting for vast canvases that combine documentation of blue-collar D.C. life with elements of neoclassical history and religious painting.
As in the smaller smoking pictures, female nudes evoke centuries-old art. But the dancers are in the background, behind an overwhelmingly male clientele whose faces include those of Folsom's friends and artistic precursors. Three of these paintings, made between 1983 and 1994, are included in this exhibition, hung separately from the smoking series. In one composition, a nude lurks in gentle blue light, upstaged by four brawling customers highlighted in vivid reds. While some of Folsom's smoking women seem to have attained moments of peace, for his men the only escape from aloneness is drink or war.
Micheline Klagsbrun, “Dream Books” (Studio Gallery)
AMONG THE TOMES SUMMONED BY MICHELINE KLAGSBRUN'S "WRIT ON Water” is libra segundo de Moses, a Spanish title for the book also called Exodus. The volume is an apt inclusion, since many of the local artist's pieces are inspired by her family's flight from the Nazi-controlled regions of Europe. While Klagsbrun's recent shows have featured ships, this one emphasizes texts. Yet the water imagery of her earlier work endures.
Curated by Aneta Georgievska-Shine, the Studio Gallery show includes some ink and colored-pencil drawings on rough paper. But it's dominated by 3D constructions made of paper, ink, string, wire, branches, and bark. Twists of wood that previously represented boats serve here as frames and supports for swirls of smeared, water-shaped paper. These enigmatic objects represent "the instability or memory and identity," according to a gallery note.
Words matter, whether in Hebrew, English, or Spanish, and the titles identify some of these fabrications as a night book, dream diary, prayer book, tree journal, memory book, or almanac. But the overall impression is of colors -- mostly blue, brown, and white -- and textures, not of anything legible. Rather than yield commandments engraved in stone, Klagsbrun's telling of an exodus produces only fragments that are gnarled, fragile, and intriguingly inchoate.
Monumental Washington
Fred Folsom: Women Smoking and Last Call
Both through May 18 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum
Micheline Klagsbrun: Writ on Water
Through May 17 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202- 232-8734.