Fierce Sonia at The Art League Gallery

During her tenure as a figure model for The Art League School, Fierce Sonia quietly acquired a top-notch visual arts education. Motivated by the artwork she saw, she became eager to create her own work. She cabled her camera to her TV and released the shutter with an infrared remote. Sonia used herself as her own model, learning more about composition and technique based on what she saw on the screen.

Her figurative photography has evolved to a new and exciting place. The focus is on process. In Sonia’s latest series “Paper Dolls,” the same images reoccur with confident changes to the surface. Her work is no longer straight photography. With the integration of painting and collage into her images, Sonia’s work has reached a new level.

The black and white images of herself are often printed on paper that has been painted white, which creates a rich texture. Each piece is created in a unique way. Previous prints may be collaged to create depth. Multiple runs of the same print may be made on the same piece. More painting, layering might be necessary to create the desired effect. These alterations to the surface blur the identity of the original image, and make the series of work about the medium and the process, and not about the subject matter.

Sonia’s work has been exhibited and won accolades nationally. She is a professional art model and muse for artists and photographers and has worked with nationally and internationally known artists.

“Paper Dolls” will be at The Art League Gallery in Old Town Alexandria from April 8 – May 3, 2010. The Opening Reception and Meet the Artist function is Thursday, April 8, 6:30-8:00 pm. Joe Chiocca, Old Town’s favorite band, will play during the Opening Reception and reunite with special guest singer Kim Kenny. Free and open to the public.

Wanna go to an opening tonight?

Come see Sidney Lawrence’s art at Baked & Wired coffeehouse (1052 Thomas Jefferson St., Georgetown (at the canal, below Barnes & Noble)).

Opening Party: Monday, March 15, 6 – 8 p.m. Exhibition continues through April 30.

Wanna go to an opening this week?

"Coming Home: A Collection of Works by Rosetta DeBerardinis" opens at The Corner Store, 900 South Carolina Avenue, S.E. @ 9th Street near the Eastern Market.

Reception: Friday, March 19th from 6 to 8 pm.

"Coming Home: A Collection of Works by Rosetta DeBerardinis" marks the artist's return to the D.C. market upon the completion of a three-year artistic residency at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Maryland. The work demonstrates her expansion from color field painting to abstract expressionism to urbanscapes, monoprints, sculpture and to drawings while retaining her signature energy and strong use of color.

DeBerardinis has exhibited at commercial galleries and art venues throughout the Washington metro area, Richmond, Dallas, New York City, Houston, New Jersey, Delaware, Michigan and internationally in Croatia, Madrid, Beijing, India and France. She has shown at the Dallas Women's Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Woman's National Democratic Club, The African-American Museum in Dallas, the City Museum of Varazdin in Croatia and the Yaroslavl Art Museum in Russia. Her work and words have been published in Washington Spaces magazine, the Virginia-Pilot Ledger Star, SoBo Voice, Radar Redux magazine and u-tube, Thinking About Art:The One Word Project, the Hill Rag, Voice of the Hill and in catalogues with comments by art aficionados like Doreen Bolger, Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. A recent work is part of the Art on Call public art project in the Trinidad neighborhood in the District of Columbia.

During the residency, DeBardinis began to meld her ceramics with objects found on the streets of Baltimore and drove the finished sculptures back to DC for exhibition at Zenith Gallery last year. Her responses to Charm City's rawness and grit are reflected in much of her studio work. While there, she temporarily abandoned painting 9 ft. canvases to create work suitable for tiny Baltimore row houses. After downsizing in response to the architectual limits of the city, she began to exhibit surfaces as small as 2 1/2 inches, or the size of trading cards. She found compressing her energy into tiny space took practice and amazing focus and welcomed the challenge.

The former Washington, D.C. and Bethesda art tour guide, Liquitex Artist of the Month and frequent contributor to DC Art News is busy reinventing herself. An artist with academic credits and/or degrees from the following institutions: Vassar College, The University of Baltimore School of Law, Rice University, London School for Social Research and the Fashion Institute of Technology. It is appropriate that Rosetta DeBerardinis begin her artistic revival on Capitol Hill where she resided for more than a decade and maintains close ties with former neighbors and friends.

Don't miss this show!

“Birds in the Park” coming to DC

“Birds in the Park” is a touring public project, which involves the one-day installation of thirty to sixty porcelain birdlike forms on the ground.

Central Park, New York
At first, people usually take them for oddly still pigeons. They are, in a sense, carrier pigeons, as the forms carry images, text, and other documents, which have been printed with cobalt blue and fired into the surface. The message they bear is an exploration of the beautiful and the horrible side by side. The creator, artist Christy Heng explains:

Originating with the shock and dismay I felt as the US government began the war with Iraq, and expanding to consider the phenomenon of war in general, the questions posed by the birds are about the humanness of us all. How we are connected, and also the unthinkable ways in which that bond is disregarded.

More specifically, I’m layering, and in some cases placing side by side, silk-screened images of children playing, love letters, poetry, recipes and prose… with silk-screened newspaper articles and photographs of the lead-up to and beginning of the current Iraq war, as well as other war-related documents, that tend to bring up the question, How can people do that to each other?! Among other things, I'm looking at how the initiation of a war is “sold” to regular people. Also, how discussions about the cold facts of war, weapons capabilities etc. can become detached from the human reality on the other end, creeping into everyday life as something normal, like birds in the park.

This work draws on years of experimentation with silk-screen printing onto clay. I create the silk screens from photographs and documents, and use them to apply the image and text onto wet porcelain. While the clay is still flexible, I form the birds -- each one is different -- and eventually fire them at a very high temperature.

The forms themselves are about a foot and a half each in length. Low to the ground, some are involved in their own search, while many appear to be in conversation with each other.

Although they are made from porcelain, the pieces are actually quite sturdy. They are positioned in such a way that people can wander among them, taking time to look and read.

I set them up in the morning and take them down at night. It’s out of the blue and somewhat fleeting, the better to catch the unsuspecting passerby’s curiosity. An important part of the project is the actual interaction with people, and I as the artist am always present during an installation, to answer questions, listen and converse.

The project began in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where in the spring of 2009 the birds landed in about thirty locations; places like the farmer's market, City Hall, various parks, cafes and libraries. Later, the birds began to fly farther afield, landing along the coast of California, in Central Park, NY, in a sculpture garden in New Orleans, at a University Plaza in Germany, in front of Chartres Cathedral in France, and even migrating so far as the Galapagos islands.

New birds continue to be born, often in response to the places that the birds have been or will be visiting. In addition to personal photography and images and text borrowed from public media, I am collaborating with writer and Vietnam War veteran Tim Origer, English poet Henry Shukman, Venezuelan photographer Maria de Las Casas, and my father Werner Hengst for some of the material that appears on the birds. One landing scheduled for July, 2010 is in Peenemünde, Germany, the site of the V-1 and V-2 rocket development during WWII; my grandfather was working there as a scientist then, and photographs of the lab town before and after its bombing, as well as quotes from Germans during that time, are making their way into some of the silkscreened images on the birds now.

The flight pattern continues to develop, and the project is expected to continue through fall 2010.

Now the birds are coming to DC! the schedule is:
Thursday, March 18th, on the center of the Mall at 9th street.
Friday, March 19th, Dupont Circle.
Sunday, March 21st, Upper Senate Park, by the Capitol.

Besthoff Sculpture Garden, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
For pictures and location information, visit her website here. Past updates about the birds' travels can be found at www.birdsinthepark.blogspot.com.

Wanna go to a Georgetown opening tonite?

"Kinetics" is the latest solo show by the DC area's superbly talented artist Amy Lin. Seldom has an artist received the critical accolades and collector support that Lin has in the past.

The opening reception is tonite, Saturday, March 13, 5-7pm at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20007. The exhibition dates: March 13-April 24, 2010.

See ya there!

Wanna go to an opening tonite in Bethesda?

Head out to Gallery Neptune, where works by Freya Grand are hanging and the gallery has a reception for the artist tonite, Saturday, March 13th, starting at 7 PM.

Kennicott on New Brow art exhibit 'G40: The Summit'

WaPo staff writer Philip Kennicott, who is not a visual arts critic, reviews 'G40: The Summit' in Crystal City.

He writes:

Critics generally organize their lives to avoid mediocrity, in part because there is so much of it, but mainly because it forces them to write with a negativity that alienates readers.

What am I missing here then?

It is clear that Kennicott, who doesn't generally write about the visual arts, finds the work in G40 mediocre, and perhaps even the concept or idea of "underground art" itself is mediocre?

And yet, it seems like he went out of his way to organize his life to take a specific negative aim at this show, in direct contradiction to the above quote.

And I don't really have a problem with that. My issue here is that Style editor after Style editor in the revolving Style editor door that has been the WaPo in the last few years, has told me that the reason that there isn't more visual arts coverage in the WaPo is due mostly to lack of newsprint space.

And I have this friend at the WaPo who is an administrative assistant type person (a secretary), who recently told me about how the Style section and the Weekend section were being directed to coordinate coverage to avoid duplication of coverage of the same stories, shows, movies, exhibitions, etc.

And just yesterday Michael O'Sullivan reviewed the G40 show in the Weekend section.

Thus my issue.

Seem like Kennicott went out of his way, in direct contradiction to his own words, and in direct conflict with the WaPo's policy to avoid duplication of coverage, to write a negative review about a show and an art movement that he considers mediocre.

Why? What am I missing here?

And where's the Style editor telling him: "Sorry Phil, but the Weekend section already wrote about this show."

Unless Kennicott replied: "Sorry Scott Vogel (or whoever is his editor), but I really hate this kind of art and really want to explain why."

But then, I've also got this nagging feeling about how Kennicott is so out of touch with what this genre of art is all about, what it encompasses, how it has reached the megastars of his high brow art world (think Takashi Murakami), that he is looking at this show and this genre of art through opera glasses from the expensive seats, and with his nose somewhere in the upper stratosphere.

Sort of like the old guys from the old Salons looked at the refuses, and we know how that turned out.

On the other hand, a bad review is better than no review at all, and two reviews in a art-review-poor newspaper such as the WaPo is, is quite a score for G40. So, in a Warholian sense, Kennicott is helping out the cause that he is attempting to diminish.

Asi es la vida!