Remembrances of Exhibits Past

NOTE: This is the text of an article I wrote for a publication. It got bumped—unfortunately, these things happen. Sometimes freelance contracts specify kill fees and grace periods and nondisclosure yadda yadda, etc., so I wasn't able to put it up on the blog until now. The shows reviewed here ran through October, so this is by definition old news. Nevertheless, I submit for your approval.

It’s not a Sunday brunch in the District until representatives from all three branches of the federal government make an appearance at the table—at least, in conversation. Maybe it’s everyday overindulgence in politics that explains why the District has so rarely seen politically oriented art over the last few years. As if a number of people came to the realization at once, several galleries buck the trend with season openers that bring the political to the fore. Improbably, these shows feature heavy political themes without any mention of Washington.

G Fine Arts
“Blasts,” a group show at G Fine Arts curated by New York-based curator Paul Brewer, explores the explosion as both a notion and phenomenon. Working in a wide variety of media, the show’s artists work under an expansive understanding of the term. Louis Cameron takes a topical route with Warfare Riddim, a video loop featuring an animated digitized Atari graphic (lifted from a DJ Spooky album cover). Cameron’s pixilated burst reduces violence to a sample, a kilobyte-sized, media-ready message. Christoph Draeger’s The Last News picks up the media sensationalism angle with a video installation featuring artist Guy Richards Smith, who delivers satirical newscasts against a video loop showing the successive destruction of the world’s capitals.

Maggie Michael lends a new work, Explosion #8, which demonstrates a formal approach to the theme. The 21-foot-long mixed media drawing incorporates more motion than the biomorphic, dripped acrylic paintings that have characterized her previous efforts. The human body can still be detected in the piece, but splattered ghastly throughout in the form of curvy, evocative marks that hint at human devastation.

Also working from a formal direction, Rosemarie Fiore’s Firework Drawing takes the explosion meme quite literally. The New York artist detonates fireworks in tubes in order to blaze the trace imprint onto paper. The collages she makes from these annular imprints marry the violent imagery and automatic process that characterize much of her work. Like a bomb, Firework Drawing is an act of calculated chaos.

But in a show that for the most part makes the explosion seem like an altogether polite affair, it’s Joy Garnett’s contribution, Jog, that hits hardest. Garnett’s painting is modeled after a photograph taken during the first Gulf War; brilliant Kuwaiti oil fires roar in the distance as a jogger, gas mask equipped, runs in the dusk. Plumes of flame are mirrored in the oily road surface. The fact that the man pictured is jogging, not fleeing, serves as a perfect reminder that these devastating events change people in such unpredictable ways.

Transformer Gallery
Around the corner at Transformer Gallery, Jason Zimmerman’s first solo exhibition is made of smarmier stuff. The show features Fair Game, a video projection of segments clipped from more than 100 episodes of the Fox proto-reality series, COPS. Zimmerman shows only the foot chases, without providing any context. The jostle of stocky backsides as one Joe Friday after another bounds into the dark leaves the viewer gasping in laughter—a bit like the television cops after brief spurts of exercise.

In the blur of motion, one clip is only distinguishable from the next by the dozens of ubiquitous station identification logos that cycle at the bottom of the screen. What’s missing from nearly all these clips is the perp—Zimmerman never shows the tackle to the ground. These images, literally controlled and narrated by the police, do not provide for any defense testimony. Officers jump fences and burn around corners in mostly poor neighborhoods; footage of the pursued, predictably, constitutes fleeting glances at mostly minority individuals.

Appropriate, given the debate about race, poverty, and privilege that broke wide open in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Zimmerman thin-slices a pop TV show and discovers a microcosm of the media phenomenon in New Orleans that saw greater immediate emphasis placed on looters than on refugees.

Numark Gallery
It’s old hat to acknowledge that political, corporate, and media messages permeate our world like ether. The ways in which we internalize that omnipresence is the focus in “Empire of Sighs,” a group show at Numark Gallery curated by local independent curator Andrea Pollan. The works in the show explore the political in the personal. Kyung Jeon’s gouache, graphite, watercolor, and ink drawings on rice paper show what the Eden story might have been like if someone like Marcel Dzama had written the Bible. Jeon works in lots of impulses that skirt the line between fetish and traditional, but the drawings just aren’t very fresh. In Chamber, an adolescent Asian girl, as much object as protagonist, is locked inside nominal spaces that both constrain and sexualize her—a pretty typical cover of the “not quite a girl, not yet a woman” refrain.

Laura Carton digitally detracts from her images—specifically, she removes porn stars from porn site screenshots. The set that remains in www.sweetcameltoe. com is a skanky, suburban vista; the backdrop of www.dirtydomains. com could be the dining room of upper middle-class homes everywhere. (A reminder that Big Porn, for all it is demonized, is a juggernaut that eclipses any other entertainment industry.)

A reductive sculpture made with magnets, string, and primary colors by Julianne Swartz seems far off topic in context, but a series of snowglobes by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz and a sculpture by Roxy Paine reinforce the fetish theme. The snowglobes introduce the viewer as voyeur to dioramas of desperation; Paine’s realistic, oversized hallucinogenic ‘shroom under glass puts fantasy tantalizingly out of reach. And a show highlight comes in the form of Michele Kong’s ethereal installation, a transformation of industrial products into an old world, silk-like object—globalization in reverse, perhaps.

Curator’s Office
Pollan is also showing Jiha Moon at Curator’s Office (Pollan’s own gallery). Moon is getting good airtime after recently snagging the $10,000 Trawick Prize for young artists in the area. The artist brings formal training from the United States and her native South Korea to bear in her all-over ink and acrylic drawings.

Like Julie Mehretu—to whom Moon bears a passing resemblance in both biography and style, and whose name inevitably appears alongside “globalization”—Moon’s marking system involves variations on a number of signature motifs: overarching atmospheres, weather patterns, and ribbons of energy play host to eukaryotic forms (Blubber Blobber) and small iconic stamps (Forecast). Moon’s organic ecosystems allude to the world of flora, fauna, and phenomena; her drawings—most clearly in J-Walk—combine diverse global strategies for representing nature.

Fusebox
Moon’s drawings are big gestures on small canvases; the big gesture in a big space is Kendall Buster’s installation at Fusebox. Model City is Buster’s second solo show at the gallery (her first was in 2002).

On first glance, Buster’s installation is a grand iridescent swoosh of blue nylon cutting across the gallery in an arc. The fabric forms an undulating plane that intersects the white cube, slicing from just above the door to a point waist high, before rising again to roughly eye level. After walking, kneeling, and finally crawling under this draped ceiling to the far end of the room—the work almost but doesn’t reach the end of the gallery—viewers realize that the swatch of nylon, in fact, comprises the joined bottom edges of 52 pup tents.

Model City makes tactile Buster’s training as a scientist. While under the installation, the viewer feels that she is enclosed by a breathing membrane; from the perspective at the far end of the space, the viewer looks out over the other side of this skin and sees that it is pockmarked by simple architectural structures that, in context, resemble hard, chitinous, protective scales. Attending the crowded opening was like walking into a cross-sectional model of an organism, with viewers (crawling around the floor, stooping while mingling, “camping out” in corners) playing the part of a culture under the microscope.

The tents come from Ikea’s basic outdoor line—the gold standard in uniform, global design and consumption—putting Buster’s commentary in mind with a conversation that seems to be pressing Washingtonians at the moment.