Women on the Verve
A DCAC group show celebrates women in motion or repose. Also: photos of Ethiopian women and revisited landscapes, a study of oppressed workers, and paintings of park life
Kamilah House, “Woman Unconditionally’ (detail) (D.C. Arts Center)
THE TITLE OF "[IR]REVERENT" SEEMS TO OFFERS A BINARY CHOICE, but actually subversion and celebration dovetail throughout this D.C. Arts Center show. The six contributors, all women from the D.C. region, make works that "confront and dismantle the social, political, and cultural constructs that attempt to constrain womanhood," says curator Dr. Lauren Davidson's statement. The results aren't explicitly political, but they're spirited and self-assured.
One means of doing this is to assemble images from diverse parts. Sarah Emily Balough and Kamilah House are both collagists, although House's "Peace for a Global Nomad" uses cut-together paper as a complex setting for a painted figure. Maria Soboleva's paintings of slumbering women sprawl across multiple cyanotype prints, clustered together jaggedly. Esha Sadr defines the body by its absence in rumpled assemblages of cast-off clothing, embellished with silk flowers and gold leaf. The latter mirrors the gold touches in Soboleva's pictures, which are enlivened by small 3D objects.
Asia Anderson honors the connections of Black mothers, sisters, daughters in paintings that are basically realistic, but vibrantly rough around the edges. Her subjects nestle together, drawing strength from each others's presence. The women in Jessica Cherry's paint-touched black-and-white drawings are solitary, but with tangled environments inside them. One figure in her triptych is filled with lines that suggest both veins and vines.
Most surprising are Balough's renderings of women in action, cut together from hundreds of scraps of paper and energized by graffiti-like squiggles of spray-painted red, yellow, or electric green. The figures might appear to be dancing, and their ornamented bodies and faces suggest traditional African art. In fact, the artists's women -- half of them with detached heads -- illustrate rage and present "female aggression ... not as irrational or petty, but as vital, expressive, and worthy of space," according to the show's catalogue. Viewers may be forgiven for seeing Balough's creations as too playful to convey fury, but their vitality and expressiveness is not in question.
The subjects of Redeat Wondemu's photographs of Ethiopian women look both contemporary and classic, just like the pictures themselves. The local photographer's "See Us: The Modern Muse" -- also at DCAC and curated by Davidson -- reveals mastery of black-and-white film photography and a gift for portraiture. Made during the Eritrean-born artist's annual visits to Addis Ababa, Wondemu's photos are stately we well as sympathetic. Viewers may be able to sense that Wondemu discusses her sitters's lives at length before she clicks the shutter button.
The regal faces are the centerpieces, but they're set off by draped backdrops, strikingly patterned clothing and, in "Kale II," a clutched bouquet. Framed dynamically within craggy-edged squares and rectangles, these 10 pictures present a near-infinite range of rich grays and deep blacks. Gazing into the images conquers a sense of great depth and even a feeling of traveling across time and space.
Stacy Smith Evans, “Revisited” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)
THE LANDSCAPES IN STACY SMITH EVANS'S "REVISITED" were photographed digitally at various times of year, but most of them have a late-fall vibe. Trees are often bare, or nearly so, and leaves and grasses tend toward shades of gold and copper that border on metallic. Some of the scenes featured in the Multiple Exposures Gallery show are swathed in off-white mists, while cliffs, rocks, and gravel provide notes of silvery gray. In these pictures, mineral trumps vegetable and the occasional animal (just a few geese on the Potomac in one image whose title says it depicts springtime).
Shot by the Virginia photographer in the greater Washington area, the 12 pictures are all horizontal and in color, although the hues are generally muted. Despite being neatly foregrounded in the steely toned "Into the Mist." greens are not prominent. The skies are usually gray and never fully blue, although some are streaked or suffused with orange. Half the photos include bodies of water, usually mirroring their surroundings, and most of the other pictures appear damp with haze. The moisture seems as enveloping as the light is penetrating.
The wide shots are just as exquisitely composed as the more tightly focused photos, but the latter are more distinctive. That is due, in part, to their more limited palettes. The metal-tinged colors suggest the chemical processes of pre-digital photography, and recall pictures made a century or more ago. The photos in "Revisited" document return visits to familiar places, but also evoke a journey into the photographic past.
Jacqueline Arias, “Portal” (VisArts)
IF A SMALL GALLERY IN ROCKVILLE is an odd place to mount a memorial to the West Indies workers who constructed the Panama Canal, that doesn't make Jacqueline Arias's "A Lived Experience" any less compelling. The show's organizing principle is rope, evoking not just maritime labor but also tethers and the fibers of history and memory.
The Costa Rica-born and Arizona-based artist's installation is "both an archive and altar," according to her statement. It centers on a woven mound of thin rope strands that surround a small video monitor. The screen presents an AI-animated montage that includes a map of the canal area and pictures of a hand seen through water, as if literally submerged or symbolically half-remembered. The flickering images are accompanied by a roar that could be the sound of machinery or the ocean or both. It's the enveloping sound as much as the historical theme that unifies the experience.
On the walls around the video screen are stereoscopic photo-collages of early-20th-century workers and testimonies that recall explosions and serious injuries. Also featured are coiled and knotted arrangements of rope, three of them with touches of red foam that imply blood, although the titles refer to "bile." The effect is to suggest that the rope is an extension of the bodies that built the canal, each strand not just a tool but also a visual metaphor for human sinew. The laborers are gone but their effort remains, coiled into knots of remembrance.
Sally Kauffman, “Hoopers” (The Athenaeum)
AN IMPRESSIONIST WITH AN AFFINITY FOR CROWD SCENES, Sally Kauffman may be best known for her paintings of the 2017 Women's March on the Mall -- sprawling, diverse masses unified by an uncountable multitude of pink knit hats. Her "Pleasure Park" is set a few miles north, in Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park. The Athenaeum show depicts the bi-level recreation space during busy summer days, ideal for reading, sunbathing, juggling, hula-hooping, or martial arts.
The D.C. artist's brand of soft, smudgy realism recalls French painting from the second half of the 19th century, but her statement reveals that she draws inspiration principally from Italy. She specifies the influence of that country's Baroque frescoes and neo-Rococo work, but there are nods to earlier periods. Several of the pictures in this array are tondos, seemingly modeled in form -- although not style -- on Renaissance paintings.
Based on digital collages made from her own photographs, Kauffman's pictures capture figures in flux. They're solid and ephemeral at the same, as if to acknowledge the transience of the moment. Also fleeting is the sunlight, which is swallowed here and there by the shadows cast by trees. There's no political design to her current subjects's actions, but there is a sort of drama. It's the theater of light and dark, stillness and motion. Kauffman's loose brushstrokes apply pigment permanently, but their slipperiness hints that everything can change in an instant.
[Ir]Reverent
Redeat Wondemu: See Us: The Modern Muse
"[Ir]Reverent" through Sept. 15 and Wondemu though Oct. 10 at D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW. dcartscenter.org. 202- 462-7833.
Stacey Smith Evans: Revisited
Through Sept. 14 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.
Jaqueline Arias: A Lived Experience
Through Sept. 28 at Common Ground Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. www.visartscenter.org. 301-315-8200.
Sally Kauffman: Pleasure Park
Through Sept. 21 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.