Jackie Milad’s “Inside Mouth” is the anti-emoticon. While text messagers and G-chatters everywhere are able to simplify complex human emotions into three simple keystrokes, Milad chooses to make them even more nuanced than our own muscles permit. Her exploration of human expression is manifested in meticulous, gridded drawings of hundreds of faces—angry, sad, silly, and [...]
Bernhard Fuchs, a photographer now working in Dusseldorf, Germany, intensively documented the landscapes surrounding his native Helfenberg, Austria, for a series of 11-by-11-inch color prints now making its American debut. Fuchs’ photographs bear some resemblance to the unpopulated woodland imagery of Terri Weifenbach recently shown in D.C. But whereas Wiefenbach’s scattershot panorama of dull green-and-beige [...]
Susan Orlean may be the most popular female nonfiction writer alive, and she’s the last of a dying breed. And unlike, say, the Beltway’s ever-expanding cast of child pundits, Orlean has earned her celebrity. Any given piece of hers, regardless of the subject matter, is readable all the way through, chock full of gloriously small [...]
The Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami has long blurred fiction and reality—in his films, it’s never clear what reflects the real world and what’s been plucked from the director’s interior universe. A subset of such ambiguity is Kiarostami’s interest in art, its intent, and how it affects us. His 1997 film Taste of Cherry ended with [...]
As is often the case with a Marsha Mateyka Gallery exhibit, its current group show, “Recent Work,” revels in visual complexity. D.C.-based Andrea Way offers bubbling amoebic forms, while Nancy Wolf mulls urban change in China with intricate drawings that meld traditional mountain forms with rising skyscrapers and teeming streets. But for sheer wonderment, the [...]
The Boy Scout motto will serve you well walking into George Jenne’s fantastically macabre show, “Don’t Look Now,” at Civilian Art Projects. Be prepared for a life-size statue of a boy scout in a furry mask, sticking his tongue out and grunting at you. Upon closer inspection, those patches on his uniform aren’t for learning [...]
Jeremy Kost is not the life of the party, but that’s why he’s able to document it so well—he’s so unassuming that people trust him with their image, from drag queens in a New York nightclub to Bill Clinton on a red carpet. Kost captures the high-to-low party circles in which he travels much in [...]
In a city that immortalizes our country’s most meaningful historical moments in stone, here is a show that elevates the banal into monuments of exquisitely carved marble. Banal to us, that is. The beautiful, trompe l’oeil statues of everyday items by Sebastian Martorana must be stand-ins for great moments in the artist’s life—or at least, [...]
By his biography, John Gerrard would not be the most obvious artist to zero in on America’s desolate, rural terrain, but somehow the Dublin-born, Vienna-residing artist became fascinated with the horizontal, largely featureless landscapes of the great American interior. In a three-work exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gerrard offers views of three [...]
By now, the family-dysfunction-at-Christmastime trope is as reliable as it is played-out. But it sometimes lends itself to magic, as in the French director Arnaud Desplechin’s messy, cerebral 2008 film A Christmas Tale. The Buddhist of Castleknock, a work by the Irish playwright Jim O’Hanlon that Solas Nua is presenting as part of its regular [...]
