Me

In the video "Me," artist Ahree Lee began taking daily digital snapshots of her own face in 2001 and did so on a daily basis all through 2004.

In 2004, Lee compiled all of her daily images into a montage set to a musical score, where each second of screen time represents about one week's worth of pictures.

See it here.

International Landscape Show at the Art League

A lot of art critics, because of their perplexing arrogance, would never open their eyes to an All-Landscape show such as the Art League’s annual International Landscape Show has been year after year for as long as I have lived in this area.

And yet the eternal optimist in me, often wonders what would happen were they to set foot in the salon-style packed house that is the Art League’s annual show; hoping that perhaps a little of their elitist armor could be breached, and they would see, what I see.

For the last 13 years or so, I have been visiting this show, and have seen it become international in focus, and have also seen it grow in both size and quality, but the one things that has never changed in my perception of it, is how artists continue to bring forth new visions of what is landscape, or re-invent the perceptions of what others have done before them.

The 2006 version of the International Landscape Show at the Art League was selected by Mark Leithauser, the Senior Curator and Chief of Design at the National Gallery of Art, who selected 178 works of art from 708 entered. The exhibition was sponsored by Donald and Nancy deLanski with the deLaski Family Award, which was given this year to Kim Steinberg. Other award winners were Thomas Dembeck, who won the Risser Award, Christine Lassey, who won the Potomac Valley Watercolorists Award and Nancy Reinke, who won the Washington Society of Landscape Painters Award.

So what did I like?

I was quite taken by Edgar Boshart’s very blue photograph "Sur Surreal", which caught my eye from the moment I set foot in the gallery. As defined in our collective minds by Ansel Adams, this photo is very far from what we conceive in our collective minds as Big Sur, and yet it is such a great new vision of that amazing California area that we accept it as a new and distinct contemporary vision of Big Sur.

I also liked Christine Cardellino’s tiny diptych titled “Landscape with Red Shadows,” and Michelle Cook’s even tinier watercolor “Snowy,” which I feel, in spite of its size, is one of the best watercolors in the show, reflecting the medium’s ability to make great visual record regardless of size.

Andrea Gettings' etching “Como” was also one of my top choices, as was perennial favorite Susan Herron’s “Tilghman Island,” a powerful acrylic painting by one of the best landscape artists in the Mid Atlantic.

Turkish-born painter (and Alexandria resident) Isil Ozisik proudly flexes his artistic muscles and has masterfully reproduced his native city in a wet-on-wet watercolor titled “My City Istanbul,” which is a lesson to watercolor artists who want to know to what extent that most difficult watercolor technique can be used by a master watercolorist not only to deliver technical tricks but also to capture the soul and historical footprint of an ancient and proud city.

I have previously called Jackie Saunders one of the best figurative artists around, and that title comes after years of seeing her amazing watercolors and ink drawings of the nude mode, hundreds, if not thousands of them; I mean, this artist has the nude figure figured out from all angles, and through years of doing them, has perfected her approach and yet has kept it fresh and exciting. And what is Saunders doing in a landscape show? I love it when I am surprised by an artist whom I thought I had figured out. And Saunders surprised me with "Lido Beach, Sarasota," a watercolor of that beach.

I happened to run into Saunders at the Art League while I was there and I quizzed her on the subject matter of the watercolor, which was a really fresh and loose and fun watercolor of beach people. She informed me that for years, when she goes to the beach with her family on vacation, she paints the beaches and its browning people.

Typical uh? The artist goes to the beach and paints the beach, because the beach is there. The watercolor is one of the best in the show, by the way.

Finally, I also liked Pamela Viola’s “North Shore Inlet,” a mixed media piece full of movement and a gorgeous watercolor and gouache by J. Smith titled “Chalmette Oaks,” which was unfortunately vastly overpriced.

The show runs through September 4, 2006.

Linkmania

I'm not really sure what the cause is (perhaps it was the TV story last week), but suddenly today, according to Technorati, DC Art News has links to it from over 500 blogs around the world, making it the 3,370th highest ranked blog on the planet, not bad considering that Technorati is currently tracking 51.8 million blogs.

Woohoo! First time that DC Art News has broken into the 4-digit ranking neighborhood. Not sure how long this will last, as these "rankings" tends to float up and down quite prodigiously.

Still a long way from PostSecret's amazing 11,659 blogs that link to Frank Warren's wondrous blog, but if I may toot my own horn, methinks (at least for the day), way ahead of any other DC area based arts blog.

And it's all still just about the Greater DC area visual art scene.

If you don't get it, you don't get it.

All Members Show at Multiple Exposures Gallery

Last week I found my way to Multiple Exposures Gallery on the second floor of the Torpedo Factory, to see their All-Member Show, juried this month by Matt Mendelsohn.

I was immediately attracted to a photograph by Peggy Fleming titled "Pam Taylor," which shows a view of (I assume) Pam’s toes floating from the edge of her tub, securing in my mind the vision of Frida Kahlo’s “What the Water has Given Me.” As a card-carrying Kahlophile since 1977, it was a winner for me.

Danny Conant’s pigment print "Tower in the Clouds" and "Trees and Water," as well as Grace Taylor’s "Japan" and Barbara Southworth’s “Downstream” complete the usual well-balanced and superb show that is part of the exhibition tradition that has made Multiple Exposures (formerly Factory Photoworks, which I liked better as a gallery name) one of the best stops for high quality fine arts photography in the Mid Atlantic.

The show runs through August.

Arts Commission Display Racks

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities has two large display racks that they "display" outside their office building on 8th Street NW. They get a great deal of foot traffic as people go to lunch and walk to work. People are always checking the rack out and grabbing any brochures or postcards about upcoming arts activities.

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities will gladly display any brochures or promotional materials that you have for upcoming projects. If you are interested, please deliver the materials to the DC Arts Commission offices at 410 8th Street NW, 5th floor, Washington DC, 20004 to the attention of Jose Dominguez. Deadline for drop off of materials is September 8th.

Visions from Russia at Target Gallery

A few days ago I visited the Target Gallery in Old Town Alexandria to see the current "Visions from Russia" exhibition, and while there I chatted briefly with the gallery’s new director Mary Cook: welcome to the job Mary!

The exhibition itself includes work by Iskander Ulumbekov, Vladimir Zorin, Yuri Bondarenko, and Evgeni Vereschagin.

Over the last few years I have been lucky to have been exposed to the work of many gifted Russian and former Soviet Empire artists through Georgetown’s Alla Rogers Gallery, which focuses a lot of their exhibitions upon artists from that part of the world, and it never ceases to amaze me how these diverse lands offer so many gifted artists and refreshing visions.

There's no doubt that the rigid approach to teaching employed by former Communist countries, when applied to art produces technically-gifted artists who truly know how to execute and push their medium to whatever limits technical skill can offer. This is a skill often lacking from most American art schools, not all, but most. And so, most of these artists are superbly technically gifted - there's no question about that.

Having said that, "Visions from Russia" was slightly disappointing to me, as most of the work was so firmly anchored on a traditional view of the subject matter, that it colored the entire exhibition under a sort of a dated sense of painting (which most of the pieces are, except for a few nice bronzes).

And yet there were some standouts in the show.

Two pieces from Iskander Ulumbekov are as far away from traditional Russian painting as they can be, and suddenly offer a bridge to a somewhat surreality of contemporary ironic-ism that makes them stand out in my opinion.

Let me tell you why.

In both “Morning in the Forest” and “Evening in the Forest,” Ulumbekov has produced two very traditional and somewhat 18th century-looking landscape paintings, even to the dark tonality and hue to the paint. Except that he has introduced two most unusual characters into the middle of these paintings: in one there’s an almost Romantic Mickey Mouse (I almost want to call him Sir Michael Rodent, as he seems almost like an English gentleman strolling through his private forest in a Landseer painting) and in the other a cute (and huge) Teddy bear.

It is such a contradiction of visual references, that makes these two pieces stand out from the rest of the works, much like a Ron English painting of the same subject would do in the middle of a Vermeer retrospective.

The exhibition runs through August 27, 2006.

Fine Art Adoptions

NYC Artist Adam Simon has come up with a brilliant idea in the Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN). This idea, and this effort, is precisely what we need more of!

Per the site's main page:

FAAN is an online network, which uses a gift economy to connect artists and potential collectors. All of the artworks on view are available for adoption. This means acquiring an artwork without purchasing it, through an arrangement between the artist and collector. Our goal is to help increase and diversify the population of art owners and to offer artists new means for engaging their audience.

So far, Transformer is the only DC area arts venue "collaborator" that I recognize (and the site is a little fuzzy as to exactly how a collaborator participates, or is made a collaborator, etc.), but I see great things in the future for this effort and idea, and even some potential collaborators in our area!

The artists in the project are so far mostly New York artists, with one notable local exception.