The Color and the Shape

Group shows at Adah Rose Gallery, Morton Fine Art, Gallery B, and the Athenaeum

Anne C. Smith, “Night Shift” (Adah Rose Gallery)

A STRONG SENSE OF STRUCTURE IS THE VISUAL LINK between Nathan Loda and Anne C. Smith, who are showing together at Adah Rose Gallery's new Rockville location. The two also share an educational background, having pursued MFAs at George Mason University at the same time, but their styles barely overlap. Smith makes abstract collages of her own screenprints, while Loda is an oil painter with a realistic style that occasionally flirts with fabulism.

The show's title, "Night Shift," derives from Smith's work. The phrase is in part a reference to the D.C. artist's technique of "allowing my screenprinted edges to shift and flex through the use of paper stencils," says her statement. Her collages are usually divided into quadrants whose regular rectangular shapes contrast the soft gestures within them. These cloud-like formations are executed with both printing and watercolor; the latter is applied to wet paper so the pigment diffuses organically.

Smith is also showing hard-edged screenprints in which a rectangular box floats within the larger frame of the full paper sheet. The overall composition is striped by bars of color, which turn lighter within the inset. Both the entire field and the interior box are bisected by a sort of horizon line, which hints at landscape. Smith's collages and prints are purely abstract, yet evoke aspects of sky.

Nathan Loda, “Forest Chapel” (Adah Rose Gallery)

If Smith's nestled-box prints summon thoughts of Josef Albers's "Homage to the Square" series, that might be because the opposite wall holds Loda's "Albers on Hudson." The latter painting turns an Albers "Square" into a cube placed before a sylvan scene depicted in the style of the 19th-century Hudson River School, a major influence on Loda's style and outlook. The painter, a Northern Virginia native who now lives in upstate New York, has often portrayed toys. In these canvases, some of the playthings are art-historical, and include works by Thomas Cole and Mark Rothko as well as Albers.

The principal inspiration for Loda's recent paintings, however, appears to be architectural. Patches of light define ethereal arches at the center of woodland scenes, as if stands of trees could serve as buttresses for edifices that are completely insubstantial. Loda's style verges on photorealism, but he doesn't prize the hard surfaces and sharp glimmers exalted by that movement. Light conjures structure, but remains intangible.

These paintings symbolically merge Italy's elegant historic architecture with the rural environs of Loda's current home. Some of the architectural features are random, like a vault defined by hanging branches, while others are fanciful, sculpted only by celestial sunlight. But all of the pictures in this sequence present forests as accidental cathedrals.

Prina Shah, “The Power of Blue” (Morton Fine Art)

CURVES ARE NEARLY AS IMPORTANT AS THE TITLE COLOR in Morton Fine Art's "Meditation on Blue," a 10-artist show. The roundabout compositions evoke natural forms, provide a sense of motion, and prompt meditative states of mind. It's fitting that a painting titled "The Power of Blue," in which Prina Shah arrays white text in concentric circles on a field that cycles from ebony to azure to aqua, suggests a streamlined mandala.

Texture is also significant to many of these works, which incorporate layered, folded, or tattered paper and fabric. One of Hiromitsu Kuroo's bleached 3D abstractions is both divided and unified by a central row of blue-painted, leaf-like triangles, and Jaz Graf's "Veil of the World I" conjures aqueous depths with mottled blue on layers of cotton, paper, and linen. To make "Circadian 04," Natalie Cheung cut a cyanotype photogram into a series of swirls, leaving empty white space to set off the color and rotational form.

Blue is central but challenged by other hues in works by Katherine Tzu Lan Mann, Kesha Bruce, and Liz Tran. Mann's "Ewer" is a painting-collage whose filmy, intricate details are akin to stained glass. Feathers of cut paper in orange and various blues frame photos of brown faces in Bruce's collages, whose gold-blotted backdrops resemble early morning skies. Tran's three mixed-media pieces use cartoonish blossoms as the pictorial framework for a rainbow of drippy colors. The coolness of blue is here just a complement to hot hues.

Kate Norris, “Isolation” (Gallery B)

LONGTIME COLLEAGUES WHO APPROPRIATE THE SAME BASIC MATERIAL, Kate Norris and Jennifer McBrien nonetheless make very different art. The Baltimore-area artists's connection is invoked by the title of their Gallery B show, "Unraveling Narratives: A Dialogue in Toile." Both use French-style fabric or wallpaper printed with old-fashioned, mostly bucolic scenes, which they transform in distinct ways.

McBrien doesn't so much alter the existing toile as augment it. She embroiders additional figures, often nude women with bird heads, onto the existing designs. (These creatures recall Hieronymus Bosch's hybrid monsters and Peter Greenaway's The Falls, in which some survivors of a "violent unexplained event" are turning into birds.) The results can appear both whimsical and alarming. The latter response seems appropriate, since environmental issues inspired the artist's switch from painting to textile manipulation. If the toile motifs represent the comfortably quaint, McBrien's additions indicate that something has gone wrong.

Images of birds and flowers, cut from toile-like wallpaper, are common in Norris's work. But that's not immediately obvious, because the pictorial snippets are intricately collaged into larger compositions, often stark renderings of human anatomy. The individual bits are recognizable, but subsidiary to the entire effect. Among the striking assemblages are a quartet of nude women, nearly life-sized and constructed mostly of flowers, and a cutaway of a pregnant woman titled "My Body My Choice." Demonstrating her ability to transform existing illustrations into new artworks is also a way for Norris to assert her autonomy.

Katty Huertas, “The Outskirts” (The Athenaeum)

THE "LATINX" EXPERIENCE IS CONVEYED BY PLACES AND THINGS, but also patterns, in the Athenaeum's seven-artist survey. "A Gentle Unroot: A Latinx Perspective" presents landscape as significant, yet often secondary. In Katty Huertas's quietly surrealistic paintings, the human presence often dwarfs its surroundings, whether in the form of a giant woman who gazes down at a cow or a mammoth hand that reaches from the sky to pluck an apple from a tree.

A naturalistic perspective is represented by Pedro Ledesma III's street photographs of Cuba. Ric Garcia's ethno-pop-art paintings of Cuban consumer products are also realistic, but with a winkingly symbolic bent. Coiled amid his renderings of a beer bottle and a cigar package is a rosary, as if to indicate that all these objects are sacred.

Paloma Vianey paints Mexican street scenes on canvases that are partly contained within a half-zipped jacket, a distinctive format also seen in her work at recent group shows at the Goethe-Institut and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The painted image continues on the jacket, giving the illusion of gazing through the fabric -- and suggesting that location and inhabitant are inseparably bundled together.

Humans also merge with environments in Rosa Vera's boldly graphic collage-paintings, in which silhouetted figures may be stuffed with flowers. The show's abstractionists are Ana Rendich, whose style is coolly geometric, and Francisco Juncadella, whose isn't. His agitated and heavily impastoed paintings are by far the show's least gentle entries.

Night Shift

Through Jan. 12 at Adah Rose Gallery, 12115 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. adahrosegallery.com. 301-922-0162.

Meditation on Blue

Through Jan. 16 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com 202- 628-2787. Open by appointment.

Kate Norris & Jennifer McBrien: Unraveling Narratives: A Dialogue in Toile

Through Jan. 12 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. #E, Bethesda. bethesda.org/bethesda/gallery-b-exhibitions. 301-215-7990.

A Gentle Unroot: A Latinx Perspective

Through Jan. 12 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703- 548-0035.