In spite of the rain

Last night's opening and the art walk was packed! We actually ran through two batches of Sangria (each is 6 gallons). This is always the key marker of attendance, at least for us.

And as previously discussed, the previous Friday's openings at the Dupont Circle galleries was also packed.

Next Friday is the Georgetown Canal Square galleries' openings; let's see how that goes.

DCist First Friday Walkthrough

By Cyndi Spain
DCist Arts Editor

DCist headed out on Friday with F. Lennox Campello of DC Art News to check out the new exhibits in the Dupont Circle area galleries. We were particularly impressed by Peter Charles' new work at Irvine Contemporary Art.

A professor at Georgetown University, Charles is from the D.C. area and received his arts training at Yale and Rhode Island School of Design. His new show includes miniature houses outfitted with their own LCD televisions.

We were surprised to find out that each screen shows live television, chosen and controlled by the owner of the artwork via remote. Like those on the larger scale, the televisions dominate the houses they inhabit and can be seen from outside the home by the all-too familiar and enticing blue glow.

The exhibit of abstractions by Andrea Way at the Marsha Mateyka Gallery was also well worth the visit. This show is Way's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Her meticulous work - created through an intense process of dropping colored inks into blobs of water on a level surface or by dripping colored water onto the paper - is evidence of
her patience and attention to Zen practice.

We were also pleased to see the exhibit of Molly Springfield's art at JET Artworks, located at Elizabeth Roberts' old space at 2108 R Street. Springfield, a superbly talented painter, last wowed area visual art lovers a couple of years ago with a spectacular show at the Arts Club.

Her work combines the technical wizardry of trompe l'oeil ("fool the eye") painting and drawing with intelligent compositions based on collected objects, notes, and word imagery. We really enjoyed the way the exhibit continued from one floor to the next through the text written directly onto the wall.

First Friday Walk Through

Last Friday, DCist Arts Editor Cyndi Spain and I visited a few of the Dupont Circle area galleries, which were having their usual First Friday extended hours.

We started our visits at Washington Printmakers Gallery where Rosemary Cooley's hangs until March 27, 2005. As with the vast majority of the gallery's cooperative members, Cooley is a master printmaker, with elegant dual-themed prints, usually associated in some form with fish or marine imagery.

Next we walked a few steps on Connecticut Avenue to Conner Contemporary, where Leigh Conner, as usual, greeted us with a bright smile in her even brighter gallery (Leigh paints the gallery with a fresh coat of white before every opening).

Conner is showcasing Joe Ovelman's "Snow Queen" series, which are also framed in white and brightly lit, lending them a sequential, out-of-sequence film look as the images of a drag queen's antics (Ovelman) in the snow in a New York park, develop before our eyes.

In the back room, Conner has also arranged Ovelman's earlier "17 Strangers," where the photographer has caused himself to be photographed from the back of his head view, as he gives oral pleasure to 17 strangers that he met in a park.

LC: "So Joe, we noticed that all the men that you are giving a blow job to are wearing the same coat."

JO: [Somewhat agitated, but barely whispering] "Yes?"

LC: "Is that important? I mean, what is the relationship or story behind that jacket?"

JO: [Very quietly] "It's very important."

Ovelman is a very young, very shy, and very brave photographer, with a clear vision of where he wants to take his work, and as usual Conner Contemporary proves why they're not only one of the best galleries in the area, but certainly one of the most courageous as well.

We followed the crowds that were now beginning to form and gathered at Irvine Contemporary Art where Prof. Irvine has assembled one of the first great surprises of the night: A really memorable exhibition showcasing the marriage of technology and intelligent thought to create really interesting work (by the way, check out this really good photo of the gallery by Fur Cafe).

On exhibit at Irvine Contemporary Art are the interactive sculptures of Peter Charles, who is a is Professor of Art at Georgetown University.

When I was a kid, my family was one of the first families in my neighborhood with a TV, and every night, around 8PM people from around the neighborhood, would gather in our living room to watch TV. Additionally, there were always a few neighborhood street ruffians who would watch the TV from the outside, through our windows.

Charles has constructed these clever small, house-like sculptures, and inside each one is a real mini-TV screen, actually working and with an antenna, so that the finished sculpture smartly marries the technology of the mini TVs with the creativity of the sculpture, and the interactivity of the user (each sculpture comes with a remote). It is a very good exhibition and an intelligent show. Also, Prof. Irvine told me that he intends to switch from a four week show format to a six week show format in the near future.

While at Irvine we ran into Kristen Hileman, the talented Assistant Curator for Contemporary Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, who introduced us to the fair Rachel Coker, who is the assistant to Hirshhorn Chief Curator Kerry Brougher, who wasn't there. It is great to see our local museum curators visiting our galleries.

Bravo Hileman and Coker!

Walked to R Street, and by now the crowds are definitely larger as we make our way into Marsha Mateyka's narrow doorway to see the new works by District powerhouse artist Andrea Way.

In her fourth solo exhibition at the Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Andrea Way returns to working on paper in the intricate detailed beautiful abstractions for which she has made herself a name as one of our area's best abstract painters.

But unlike her past work, Way is now creating, deliberate, controlled work, as opposed to the beautiful and luminous paintings that became her trademark in the 90s. In these new works, a controlled artist emerges, and the results are almost Moorish, Arabesque mosaics of colors and lines and works that easily fit into the most modern of postmodern collections as well as on the wall of the Alhambra at its height. I was totally enamored and seduced by her new works, and this show ranks as one of the best I've seen so far this year.

From the sublime to the BLOGsphere, and we ran into J.T. Kirkland and Bren; Kirkland told me not to miss Molly Springfied's debut at JET Artworks (Duh!). Props to Kirkland for visiting the shows, as he routinely does; if you're going to write about Washington art, you got to go see Washington art!

The next surprise of the night came at Alex Gallery.

On exhibition at the main gallery is a set (from a private collection) of small (around 8x10 or 11x14 inches) paintings by Jackson Pollock from 1950 and 1951. These paintings are a Pollock I never knew; an unlikely and unusual "small" Pollock, working in canvasses so small and intimate that his large signature (oddly enough signed in gaudy silver or gold pen) often takes half or a third of the bottom of the paintings, causing a bit of distractive damage to the actual paintings.

And these small Pollocks are like miniatures of the massive Pollocks that we all love or hate. But they are all painted with the paint so diluted and thin, almost like 90% turpentine and 10% paint... so "thin" in fact, that if Saint Clement ever saw them, it could have been the springboard for his famous "painting should be thin" nonsense that gave birth to the Washington Color School.

And guess what else is hidden amongst these tiny Pollocks? A drip painting that offers us a representational Pollock, using his formulaic drip paint method, to deliver a small painting of a tree.

But the surprises don't end there! Go to the back of the gallery, and we discover a Keith Haring from the period when Haring was an art school student. It is a painting of a bird, as one sees in most Florida and Annapolis galleries; and yet, there's a certain visual smell of Haring already there.

And for probably the first and only time in the Universe, Haring shares the back gallery with several small Norman Rockwell watercolors and sketches. It is yet another proof of the veracity and tenacity of Chaos theory.

And old Norman manages to deliver a few surprises of his own.

Only Nixon could go to China and only Rockwell could document in his artwork the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as we all discovered in the huge mega hit Rockwell retrospective that swept the nation a few years ago. But I have never seen a nude by Rockwell.

And in the Rockwell exhibit back there, we discovered a small watercolor sketch, where several women (all nude) do the Can Can a-la-Rockettes, and as the Brits say, are showing their "bits." Bawdy Old Norm!

We then headed to see Molly Springfield's long awaited debut at JET Artworks, where we met Erin (who is the "E" in "JET" - her husband and her business partner are the "J" and the "T").

And Molly Springfield did not disappoint! In fact, this is painting like no few painters can deliver or have painted before; the closest that I can up with is Richter, but there's no Richter that looks like a Springfield; she's creating new illusionism by taking trompe l'oeil to a new road.

How to explain?

Let's start by saying that a couple of years ago I reviewed Springfield when she exhibited at the Arts Club. This is a different, more profound Springfield.

Springfield new work is supposed to be all about "notes."

Words passed on paper between furtive hands in High School; perhaps a love note, or a cheat crib for Algebra. We never know, because Springfield has cleverly hitched her formidable painting skills to the latest war wagon in the painting dialogue: the marriage of abstraction with realism.

But Springfield brings this dialogue to a sensual whisper. These are hyperealistic paintings that deny us the ultimate voyeurism: to be able to read the notes. In fact, the folded papers can, at the right aspect, become muted abstractions, suddenly popping into maddening realism, but never yielding their ultimate secrets.

Much like their creator, they are delicate, waif-like works, softly speaking visual words into our senses, denying categorization, and also offering an intelligent beauty that restores that maligned adjective to its proper context when describing art. This is without a doubt one of the best painting shows of the year.

Bravo Springfield!

Warning Cyndi that we were about to enter a time warp, in the sense that once Marc Zuver got a hold of us, it may be hours before we escaped his loquacious and warm personality, we entered Fondo del Sol, but the hard-working Zuver wasn't there (he's in New York).

So we walked downstairs to the Studio Gallery, and found that the talented Michael Janis has joined that artists' cooperative and has a few pieces on display. They are very good work, already showing the imprimatura of the Washington Glass School. Janis is definitely a sculptor to keep your eyes on.

Cyndi had to leave, and as 8PM was approaching, I headed for a quick visit to Kathleen Ewing and then to Gallery 10 for a quick peek at the latest work of Mary Virginia Langston.

Overall, the crowds were quite large, and I came away quite impressed by new discoveries offered to me by two masters and two new emerging would-be masters.

The best thing for art is more art.

The Friday Openings

No lame excuses tonight... time to go see an art show!

Second Fridays belong to Bethesda, where the Bethesda Art Walk takes place, now with two separate free guided tours.

These are the Bethesda art venues that participate. Most of the artists are present, openings are catered and it is all free - 6-9pm.

Elsewhere, if you want to stay in the District, then Zenith has an opening honoring the 25th anniversary of neon art (congrats Margery!). From 6-8pm.

Across the street, Touchstone also has an opening of Sonya A. Lawyer's photographs from 6-8:30pm.

We will host the Bethesda International Photography Competition, juried and curated by Connie Imboden and featuring the work of 27 photographers from around the nation and the world.

Imboden will do a gallery talk at 7pm and then award the competition's cash and exhibition prizes.

See ya there!

The Thursday Reviews

The Washington Post has nothing.

The Washington City Paper has Louis Jacobson on Max Hirshfeld at Hemphill Fine Arts and Jeffry Cudlin is back with an excellent take of "The Drawings of Ed Ruscha" at the National Gallery of Art.

The Georgetowner has a new critic (Robin Kohlman Fried) who looks at Seth Rosenberg at District Fine Arts, Andrea Way at Marsha Mateyka and Max Hirshfeld at Hemphill.

Thinking About Art has Joe Ovelman at Conner and yesterday Kirkland had Andrea Way at Mateyka.

Art Bloggers Making News

Philly art bloggers Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof making news in their hometown.

Read their BLOG here.

Hypertemporality: A Discussion of Internet Art

On Tuesday, March 15th, 2005, the University of Richmond Museums will host a panel discussion titled "Hypertemporality: A Discussion of Internet Art" to accompany their hypertemporality exhibition.

The panel discussion will be webcast live, then archived for later viewing. The address to watch the webcast is here.

The panelists will be Whitney Museum of American Art curator Christiane Paul and hypertemporality artists Peter Baldes and Alexander Stewart.

Heading North

I'm driving back to DC on Thursday night... more later. Loads of great openings this coming Friday in Bethesda (see DCist).

If you are a photography fan, then you'll enjoy the 27 photographers selected by Connie Imboden, who curated the 2005 Bethesda International Photography Competition. Imboden selected about 40 photographs from over 1,000 submitted for her review.

The opening reception starts at 6PM at Fraser Bethesda, and Imboden will discuss the selected works and award the prizes at 7PM. Join us this coming Friday!

Opening Tomorrow

Wanna go to an opening tomorrow? Over/Under presented by Carolina Sardi and curated by Rody Douzoglou. Opening Reception: Thursday, March 10 at Gallery at Flashpoint, 916 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20001. Nearest metro: Gallery Place/Metro Center. Tel: 202.315.1310.

Correction

Kim Ward will be the Interim WPA/C Director when Annie Adj. leaves at the end of this month.

Advise to fellow gallerists

Kriston, over at grammar.police notes in a recent posting that "tell a gallerist in the know that you're a blogger and more often than not she will visibly recoil. God in His Seat in Heaven forbid that you mention you're there to review a show, at which point the scornful glances are likely to make a greater impression than the art on display."

For a gallerist to react like that to a blogger (or for that matter to anyone else trying to get some publicity for an art show, even a High School newspaper editor), is both ignorant and shows lack of understanding of how the media has been revolutionized in the last handful of years.

As Art and other general BLOGs mature and develop, and make mistakes, and get scoops, and generally spread the word and gain readership, I believe that they/us/we stand at the brink of becoming (actually have become) a powerful new voice, adding diversity and volume, to our art scene.

And some gallerists do get it; last Friday as DCist Arts Editor Cyndi Spain and I made our rounds of the Dupont Circle area galleries, for the most part she was warmly received in all but one gallery, where usually anyone can see their own breath anyway.

In one gallery, the director actually pulled out a stack of color copies of the DCist's Arts Agenda from a couple of Tuesday's ago and gratefully thanked Spain for mentioning the gallery and the artist online. "Where can I send you news releases?" she then asked.

I think DCist is getting around 10,000 visitors a day and growing, and sites like this one and grammar.police, and J.T. Kirkland's Thinking About Art and Tyler Green's MAN and Jesse Cohen's Art DC have a loyal readership of hundreds of daily visitors interested in art.

And so, any smart gallerist worth his or her salt should not have to be advised or cajoled into treating a blogger with any less courtesy and interest than any other potential source of publicity, opinion and most important: a digital fooprint.

New Interim WPA/C Director

Congrats to Kim Ward, who has been selected to replace Annie Adj as Interim Executive Director of the WPA/C.

Ward is currently listed as Membership and Finance Director for the WPA/C.

DCist looking for arts contributors

DCist is looking for contributors to augment its coverage of the visual arts. Email Mike Grass if you are interested.

The more voices we get discussing our area's art scene, the better for all of us.

Meanwhile, check out the Tuesday Arts Agenda here.

We hear that there may be a job opening at the WPA/C soon.

Update: I have a second, independent confirmation and I am told that Annie Adj, Executive Director of the WPA/C will be departing at the end of the month for a new job in the Left Coast.

We wish her the best of luck!

Kirkland Looks at Springfield

Thinking About Art has a review of Molly Springfield's debut at JET Artworks.

I'm working on a multi-review of several Dupont Circle galleries at once; it will be published soon. Meanwhile read JT's thoughts on Springfield here.

On the Road Again

I'm driving down to the Tidewater area today and will be there for the rest of the week for a couple of panels and lectures.

Keep coming back; there will be hotel-based late night posting!

And since I'll be passing through Richmond, a cyberspace wave to ANABA's Martin Bromirski, who lately has been trading posts and comments in a BLOGoversy created by his post on painter Alison Fox and her one-woman show at the East Village’s ATM gallery that sold out before opening night, and Martin's opinion that it sold out because of her husband's (gallerist Zach Feuer) hidden influence.

Zach Feuer has courageously come to the defense of his wife, and so far 38 comments (and a second posting) have been traded back and forth as this has developed into a BLOGoversy. Read it here and here.

New Gallery in the District

DC Art News welcomes a new gallery in the District: Shigeko Bork MU Project, which is dedicated to contemporary Asian art.

And the new gallery has a reception for Hiroshi Kobayashi next Tuesday, March 8 from 6-8PM. The new gallery is at 1521 Wisconsin Avenue, NW #2 in Georgetown and can be reached at 202/277-2731. Hours are Tues-Sat from 11-5PM.

Welcome! Get a website soon!

The New Factory Artists

Once a year, the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria puts out a call for artists who wish to be considered for a studio space in Alexandria's most famous and popular artists warren.

This year 72 applicants entered the annual jury process, and of those, seven were accepted. The jurors for the 2D work were Jeffrey Allison (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), Walter Kravitz (George Mason University Prof. of Art) and Lee Newman, a superb printmaker and a member of the Fine Arts Faculty at the Holton Arms School.

The 3D jurors were Bruce Hoffman (Director, Snyderman Gallery in Philadelphia), Lenore Miller, (Director of the GWU Galleries), and Winifred Owens-Hart, a Prof. of Art from Howard University.

Joining the wait list for a studio space at the Torpedo Factory in 2005 are Xiao Sheng Bi (Ceramics), Christine Cardellino (Painting), Judith Coady (Printmaking), Rebecca Cross (Ceramics), Janae Michelle (Fiber), Kathy Udell (Photography) and Donald Viehman (Enameling). A representative sample of their work is currently on exhibit at the Target Gallery, on the ground floor of the Torpedo Factory.

Of these seven new Factorists, two immediately stand out: Rebecca Cross, who is already one of the best known multi-talented (not just ceramics) artists in Washington, with a long string of succesful exhibitions at Addison-Ripley Gallery and the Ralls Collection most recently, and her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery; and a newcomer (at least to me), Christine Cardellino.

Rebecca Cross' work needs little introduction; she's a painter who has mastered her skills and conquered a second genre by being one of the region's premier ceramicists for the last 25 years. The three pieces on exhibit are samples of Cross' platters and shaped ceramic objects.

A couldn't find a website for Christine Cardellino (tsk, tsk...), but the work that I saw on display immediately tells me that Cardellino may be the keystone to the "future" of the Torpedo Factory "artist." In her paintings I saw elements of what I would commonly associate with a "more modern" flavor to the king of the fine arts genres.

I mean that in the super positive sense of a painter, clearly at ease with her genre, superbly trained, with a good eye for the sensuality of the paint and its direct associative qualities with the brushwork plus a clever eye for marrying representation and abstraction to deliver fresh new offerings to the dialogue of painting.

Geez... was that art babble or what? My kingdom for an image!

Suffice it to say that I hope Ms. Cardellino gets a studio space at the Factory within the next hundred years; with all due respect to many of the present Factorists whose work I superbly admire, they could still use some new blood.

New Art BLOG

Matt Hollis has a BLOG!

Visit Enough for All often.

For Matt: You better start posting more!

The Shape of (Some) Things to Come

The Art League Gallery is currently (until Monday) having their annual Student/Faculty show, which is a perfect opportunity to look at the work of art students of all levels, ages and backgrounds in one of the area's largest galleries, and certainly one of the more popular art schools.

I decided to focus on the work of the students, at the expense of not discussing the work of superbly talented teachers such as Danni Dawson, Jacqueline Saunders, Scott Hutchison (represented by us) and many others.

Instead, I turned my eye for quite a while to the students, hung salon-style on all three of the The Art League Galleries on the ground floor of the Torpedo Factory.

The first piece that stood out was a small, superbly painted self portrait by Marjorie Forgues (taught by Danni Dawson). I don't know Forgues' formal background, but in this small elegant piece she shows brushwork and technical skills that will revive feelings of envy from painters of all levels of expertise and experience. It is a delicate and yet vigorous application (and understanding) of paint, and light, which makes Ms. Forgues small self portrait jump out from a sea of 2D work.

Two drawings caught my attention next: An untitled pencil drawing of a difficult subject (a seated, clothed bearded man) by Leslie Chekin (taught by Priscilla Treacy) and an elegant female nude charcoal by Linda Wharton titled "Horizontal," from a class taught by Robert Liberace. They both show remarkable understanding of that most diverse of subjects: the human figure.

A small, delicate painting titled "Pear Pairs" by Cathy Messina (taught by Joe Kabriel), a watercolor titled "Evening Colors" by Meg MacKenzie (taught by one of my favorite area watercolorists: Susan Herron) and an amazing chalk drawing by Laura Kipple titled "Claire," (taught by Liberace again), completed my selections as the best from a very good crop of student artwork.

Prices are incredibly low for the most part, starting at $60 for a framed original watercolor!

Monday is the last day of this show... hurry!