Nira Pereg’s video work “67 Bows” is manipulative, in both a literal sense and an emotional one. Pereg, a young native of Tel Aviv who studied in the United States before returning to Israel, has produced a loop video featuring a flock of flamingos in Germany’s Karlsruhe Zoo. (Warning: spoiler alert coming.) To footage of [...]
Grazia Toderi, an Italian video artist, presents two large-scale works at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, each of them fantastical and distinctly unsettling. Orbite Rosse (Red Orbits, 2009), projected in almost total darkness, features a multi-layered brew of photographic and filmed imagery, primarily city lights as seen from a distance. Far from romantic, these [...]
Kris Coronado leads off this week's arts section with her chronicle of a local actor's efforts to bring the zombie flick Night of the Living Dead to the stage. With songs. And sans zombies. Kriston Capps, stepping back a little from the controversy currently unfolding over the Smithsonian's removal of a piece of video art, [...]
Want art that’s grim? Check out the dual exhibit of works by Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres. The centerpiece of Gaillard’s offering is a 30-minute, three-part video showing scenes from a massive gang brawl in a Russian apartment complex, a light show projected on a soon-to-be-razed housing project, and a bleak landscape of Russian [...]
How did you spend your summer vacation? Minimalist composer Richard Chartier spent his in the basement of the Museum of American History. For three months, starting in June, Chartier recorded the "Grand Tonometer," a four-octave instrument built by German physicist Rudolf Koenig from 1870 to1875. Recording each of the instrument's 660 tuning forks from strike [...]
Good morning, D.C.! It looks as if Virgin FreeFest was worth whatever you did or didn't pay for it: Most of yesterday's news was roundup upon recap upon review of Ludamalkmuganza.
But, fortunately, TBD also recapped the most awesome nerd summit of the decade, "By Any Other Name: An Evening of Shakespeare in Klingon." The performance [...]
Louise Bourgeois, the subject of a major retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum last year, died of a heart attack yesterday in New York at the age of 98. She was best known for her deeply psychological sculptures inspired by childhood memories, sexuality and relationships. Her most famous works are a series of giant bronze spiders [...]
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 [...]
Washington, D.C., may have been her home, but often, sculptor Anne Truitt's mind was somewhere far away. As she worked, she lost herself in childhood memories, but her pillarlike sculptures stood tall like buoys, allowing her to navigate through adulthood's choppy waters. Staid and strong, they made tangible her fraught past in order for her [...]
2009 was the year that Washington's art museums decided they wanted to become relevant, topical, and just plain popular, writes critic Jeffry Cudlin in our Arts in Review issue. To judge by the exhibits, however, it was also a year prizing insular artists who kept a distance from larger trends. Cudlin writes:
At the Phillips in [...]
