The Latest Roundups
Multiple potential pairings at Hemphill Artworks, downbeat "Vibes" at Otis St. Arts Project, and brash colors at Falls Church Arts Gallery
Wayson R. Jones, “Kinshasa” (Hemphill Artworks)
THE MATH IS A BIT MORE COMPLICATED in "Two X" than the Hemphill Artworks group show's title suggests. The selection presents 14 artists (six of them deceased) paired as seven duos. Several of the contributors, however, are represented by multiple works. Also, some of the pieces -- all made between 1960 and 2024 -- speak articulately to ones to which they're not officially linked.
Wayson R. Jones's "Kinshasa," for example, is an abstract 3D painting, rendered in two tones of blue, that's offered in dialogue with an untitled Leon Berkowitz picture whose soft, flat hues flow from blue to red to yellow. But the craggy relief forms in Jones's painting suggest the wave and criss-cross patterns in two white-on-white Robin Rose sculptural pictures. And Rose's icy palette harmonizes with the minimalism of a Ruri Yi painting that neatly arrays 12 lozenges in close shades of white and off-white.
Rose and Yi's muted hues are akin as well to those in three pencil drawings by Kevin MacDonald, whose meticulous accounts of American public spaces reveal them as bleached of both color and life. MacDonald's designated partner is Francis Criss, whose brown-heavy cityscape is bolder and earthier than MacDonald's work. Yet the artists do share an ability to mingle the everyday and the monumental.
Two appealing drawing-paintings by Alma Woodsey Thomas, not in the style for which she's known, combine soft color blotches and wispy upright lines in a manner that hints at sylvan landscapes. Thomas's dance partner is Julie Wolfe, whose mixed-media drawing on canvas features dots, numbers, and doodled cross-hatching. But both artists's soft gestures and powdery colors fit with those in a Norman Lewis painting, whose specified counterpart is Rose. Adding up the artworks of "Two X" is as complicated as it is intriguing.
Ebtisam Abdulaziz, "Blood News" (Otis Street Arts Project)
THERE'S ACTUALLY A PIECE TITLED "GOOD VIBRATIONS" in Otis St. Arts Project's "Vibes." Overall, though, the mood is less than auspicious in this showcase of work by 14 artists who have studios at the Mount Rainer space.
Closest to the entrance is a video of Ebtisam Abdulaziz's performance piece, "Blood News," a fevered response to the 2024 presidential election. Surrounded by pages of the Washington Post in which stories and headlines have been blacked out, the artist rips more newspaper sheets, crumpled and partly painted red.
The red may represent blood in this work or an adjacent one, Becky McFall's "Strain." That found-object sculpture is a hammock made of frayed white rope, dangling a scale that holds a battered red brick. The brick's dust has dyed some lengths of the rope the color of dried gore. Like Abdulaziz, McFall uses simple materials to construct a symbolic crime scene.
Even more direct is Chris Combs's "Scream into the Void," a metal box with a button that, when pressed, emits a piercing but satisfying howl. Such a device could be operated gratifyingly at any moment, but it seems especially timely now.
Other entries are less fraught. Shelley Lowenstein's "Good Vibrations" is a colorful drawing made with inks that pooled on a nonabsorbent polyester surface, giving the impression of perpetual fluidity. Plastic also features in Gloria Vasquez's 3D collage, in which dried flowers are coated in a clear material that at the bottom of the assemblage melts into gobs that complement color drips.
Two words, "empathy" and "euphoria," appear in relief text embedded in the vertically striped ribbons of Kirsty Little's contribution. The message is upbeat, but not characteristic of this largely bummed-out show.
Suzanne Papiewski, "Hampstead Heath" (Falls Church Art Gallery)
STRONG COLOR WAS THE REQUIREMENT for "Vivid!," a 47-artist show at Falls Church Arts Gallery. Juried by Barbara Januszkiewicz, the selection includes a lot of skillful if unsurprising landscapes and abstractions, as well as few pieces that stand out.
Some of the most striking hues were discovered through a camera lens. A travel photographer with an unusually keen eye, Jenny Nordstrom photographed brightly colored doorways and their environs in Mexico and Morocco. Matthew Makara uses long exposures to abstract such phenomena as a red- and yellow-streaked sky in the midst of what he describes as an "electric sunrise."
Multiple modes of representation coexist in engaging work by Iza Thomas and Susanne Kamalieh. The former centers a cat that's reduced to a blue silhouette in a composition that includes realistically rendered birds. The latter overlaps veiny leaves in high-contrast black atop soft pools of peach and turquoise, deftly playing pattern against color.
Most startling is Suzanne Papiewski's abstract "Hampstead Heath," which distills that London park mostly to stabs of pink, black and red, boldly interrupted by a blast of acid green. Translating nature into unnatural colors makes for an unlikely but unforgettable pleasure garden.
Two X
Through Dec. 21 at Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW. hemphillfinearts.com. (202) 234-5601.
Vibes
Through Dec. 15 at Otis Street Art Project, 3706 Otis St., Mount Rainier. otisstreetarts.org.
Vivid!
Through Jan. 5 at Falls Church Arts Gallery, 700-B W. Broad St., Falls Church. FallsChurchArts.org.