Vintage Violence

Shelby Shadwell’s immaculate drawings explore inner and outer; Te-Mao Lee seeks a future Taiwan underwater; “Civic Tongue” artists find signs of chaos

Shelby Shadwell, “Emregency Blanket 5” (courtesy of the artist)

DRAWN IN THE SAME STYLE AND AT THE SAME SCALE, the two sets of black-and-white drawings that compose Shelby Shadwell’s “Emergency Blankets/Visceral” are visually akin. Yet the subjects of the Wyoming-based artist’s IA&A at Hillyer show are essentially opposed. The six pictures all range in size from large to huge, but half of them depict surfaces, while the others are, in a sense, interior views.

The sweep of Shadwell’s drawings is doubly paradoxical: The pictures are immense yet intimate, and complex while rendered with just charcoal and pastel.

Painstakingly rendered on polyester canvas, the drawings are expertly modeled and shaded to achieve a near-photorealist quality. The images of silvery heat-reflective blankets capture the ambiguous quality of the mylar material: seemingly soft as cotton, but with myriad creases that reveal its crispness. Shadwell makes the most of the blankets’s shiny surfaces, accenting the pictures with brilliant highlights, often produced by fastidious erasing. Some light source hits “Emergency Blanket 5” along one edge so that the subject appears to glow from within like a foldable lantern. The subject of the drawing is mundane, but the luminous effect is celestial.

The other three drawings portray the remains of deer and elk killed and butchered by hunters. These pictures of piles of intestines and other internal organs, one with bits of fur, represent inevitable mortality but also brutality many would deem unnecessary. The closeup illustrations subvert traditional “Western” art’s sentimental notions of vast vistas, noble creatures, and gallant cowboys. While the guts glisten in a manner not unlike the blankets, they are anything but high-tech, picturesque, or pristine. The “Visceral” pictures are as fleshy and grubby as the “Emergency Blankets” ones are synthetic and clean.

TAIWAN’S TE-MAO LEE DOESN’T JUST CONJURE A WORLD; he actually explores it. His “In-Between beings,” also at IA&A, consists primarily of five videos, two of which document the conceptual artist underwater in full diving gear, presumably off the coast of his homeland. The exhibition statement isn’t explicit about the location, perhaps because it’s not supposed to be a place that any contemporary human reach: The project imagines Taiwan 2,000 years from now, although it was inspired by the fact that the area where Lee lives was beneath the sea millennia ago.

The videos range from poetic to playful. A lyrical one is titled “45 Minutes,” after the amount of time divers can spend submerged at 20 meters before dangerous amounts of nitrogen accumulate in their blood. Two videos enlist computer “learning” to different effects: Inadequately programmed AI goofily identifies birds as fish and rocks as broccoli, while a more philosophical large-language-model responds to underwater footage with such questions as, “Is sentience just a complex illusion?”

The gallery, which also contains a small terrarium and two piles of glass shards, is lapped by aquatic sounds. The watery whispers, alongside the expanses of bubbly blue and slo-mo motions of the divers, do convey a sense of being in-between. Rather than portend the future, though, they evoke a sensation of timelessness -- even if that can last for only 45 minutes.

Andrea Limauro, “Guns, Gods * Freedom” (courtesy of the artist)

THE CITY IS AN EMPIRE OF SIGNS in “Civic Tongue,” an edgy group show at Washington Studio School. The gallery’s statement describes the participants as “street artists,” but just two of them are extending the reach of graffiti. Rubble and explosions are depicted as often as signage, and much of the art is wordless.

Technically, the work of one of the graffiti practitioners, Tim Conlon, is part of a small separate show. But his tagged model boxcars dovetail with muralist Skyler Kelly’s offerings, which include graffiti-inspired screenprints and a “Drug Free Zone” sign that’s largely obscured by spray-painted squiggles. Conlon’s miniatures also have an affinity with Andrea Limauro’s surrealist American-highway landscapes. The Italy-rooted local painter boosts the menace of such slogans as “Guns, God & Freedom” -- emblazoned on a roadside billboard -- by punctuating the scenery with fires, lightning, and an exploding gas station.

Michael Crossett’s photo-collages of D.C. sites and artifacts are less ominous, although his palette and themes have gotten darker over the years. One of these pieces, “Bullets,” overlays a target over the mashup of images (which include a longtime Crossett motif that has become an antique: a paper Metro farecard). The artist also brandishes the words “resist exist” on a police-tape-like strand raised emphatically above the collage’s surface.

While muralist Hannah Attalah paints an Escher-like architectural fantasy that incorporates some federal-city landmarks, there’s no D.C. local color in Louis-Antoine Gilbert’s paintings of urban ruins. These could depict many places, but at this point are most likely to be seen as Gaza. Death by Narwhals (aka Tom Kim) also evokes the Middle East with a drawing-painting in which a person hangs up laundry as what appears to be a military drone enters the frame above the figure. No words can be read on the distant aircraft, but its threatening import is easily read.

Shelby Shadwell: Emergency Blankets/Visceral

Te-Mao Lee: In-Between beings

Through Sept. 28 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Civic Tongue

Through Sept. 29 at Washington Studio School, 2129 S St. NW. washingtonstudioschool.org. 202-234-3030.