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CITY LIGHTS: still goingJan. 26, 2007
Prayers & Joking: New Works by Cara Ober
EXHIBITS
To Feb. 10
There’s a great deal of text in Cara Ober’s multimedia drawings, much of it scrawled in that searching, cursive script so familiar to lovelorn diarists. Every piece in the Baltimore artist’s solo show at Flashpoint is fairly dripping with the stuff: snippets of emo-sounding lyrics, half poems, and fey aphorisms. Ober’s also fond of Courier, the “typewriter” typeface—lowercase letters only, of course—that has graced a million twee album covers. The block of free-association serif text (“filled with helpless letters”) that hovers in space in one piece is so saccharine, so conspicuously placed, that there’s no mistaking it for heartfelt expression. In Untitled #5 (the fourth of july), she even includes a typo in one poetic turn of phrase (“water, like light, forms it’s own edge”)—a gentle dig at the self-seriousness of confessional writing. Ober’s definitely being cool but not ironic. The images she paints, prints, and collages onto her canvases—letterbox stamps, illustrated flowers, fleur-de-lis designs, sketched bunnies, sketched hearts, sketched cakes—all draw from the same tween-to-teen iconography. These elements rarely gel in her blocky compositions, which are uniformly characterized by stiff images set adrift against khaki atmospheres. Patches of abstraction don’t give the pieces any motion, either—though Ober does have a way with washes, as evidenced by the Ed Ruscha–esque slice of words in Untitled #1 (priceless). While there’s a degree of arbitrariness to Ober’s execution, the concept itself is sound. She’s not exactly investigating girlhood, womanhood, or the state in between, but rather the artifacts that state inspires—the mark-making itself. Prayers & Joking: New Works by Cara Ober is on view from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment, to Saturday, Feb. 10, at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW. Free. (202) 315-1310. (Kriston Capps)
To Feb. 17
At first glance, it looks as if Curator’s Office is showing the work of an introductory graphic-design class—and the students aren’t exactly gifted. Artist, critic, and independent curator J. W. Mahoney’s current show of ink jet prints, “Stella Maris,” appears hobbled by technical difficulties. Each fuzzy print combines a few disparate images and texts on a neutral ground and is presented unframed, attached to the wall with a few small magnets. Many of the images have pixilated edges; Quality in Motion has long horizontal streaks, suggesting a print cartridge giving up the ghost, midprint. Strange color shifts abound: one formerly black-and-white photo bleeds sickly shades of pale green and mauve. Of course, none of this is accidental: Mahoney has deliberately cultivated this look, often digitizing and re-digitizing images in order to lower their resolution, making pristine, hands-free objects look more handmade. The words and pictures he’s brought together in these posters are wide-ranging—snippets of everything from Tibetan symbology to Victorian photography to the occasional jpeg of Condoleezza Rice. The names of Southern streets and businesses—Beam Boulevard, Harvest Grill—adorn these pictures in blocky serif typefaces. Impossible as it might seem, none of these choices are random; every fragment has obscure personal associations for the artist—all of them leading to his deceased mother. Mahoney makes the viewer work for those associations, imposing additional distance with his distortions. Luckily, Mahoney’s a clever puzzle master, and his strategies of inversion and obfuscation nicely mirror the strange, imperfect workings of human memory. “Stella Maris” is on view from noon to 6 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday, to Saturday, Feb. 17, at Curator’s Office, 1515 14th St. NW. Free. (202) 387-1008. (Jeffry Cudlin)
To Feb. 18
Decades ago, the Brothers Quay used chunks of meat, dismembered dolls, and stop-motion animation to plunge into the depths of the id. Following in their footsteps is Corcoran graduate and local artist Melissa Ichiuji, whose “Nasty Nice” features 17 installations of doll-like sculptures—each a Frankenstein-caliber stitch-job of bulging panty hose, cloth, animal bones and, in one instance, Ichiuji’s father’s hair. Their activities are decidedly antisocial—shredding butterflies and bleeding rabbits. It’s a world (and one room) away from the panoramic photographs of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. Their “The Apollo Prophecies: New Photographs” portrays a moon mission in an alternate reality: from the spacemen in fur suits and beaked helmets to rockets filled with Victorian-era piping, it’s like a National Air and Space Museum exhibition conceived by Tim Burton and Jules Verne over a bottle of absinthe. The exhibitions are on view from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment, to Sunday, Feb. 18, at Irvine Contemporary Art, 1412 14th St. NW. Free. (202) 332-8767. (Nick Kolakowski)
To Feb. 24
Swedish artist Maria Friberg likes to show male bodies adrift—somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, suspended on water, piles of leathery books, or stacks of crushed cars. This time around, Friberg has tucked her subjects in for the night: In each of the three simultaneous videos in her current show, “Embedded,” at Conner Contemporary, four men in black leotards lie on a low platform bed under high piles of white sheets. Their eyes are closed; their bodies undulate, slowly writhing with what looks like labored breath or pent-up sexual energy. As each video progresses, the men shift their bodies out from under the covers and off the bed, gradually migrating to the four corners of the screen and, eventually, off-screen. Embedded #3, a large Cibachrome print of the same subject, looks slick and commercial, like a Metro advertisement, until one notices the beveled edges of the plexi behind which the print has been mounted. These make the piece seem more like intimate home décor—a decorative mirror, maybe. In another large print, Still Lives #5, a stack of crushed cars in shades of white, silver, and bluish-gray fills the lower two-thirds of the image. A man sleeps atop it, surrounded by blank white space—suggesting that this is a studio construction. But as unnatural and dreamlike as this setting is, it’s actually natural: A few stray patches of distant green trees, peeking out here and there between cars, confirm it. These sorts of small, particular touches enrich Friberg’s work and keep it from seeming too pat or too broadly conceived. The exhibition is on view from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment, to Saturday, Feb. 24, at Conner Contemporary Art, 1730 Connecticut Ave. NW, 2nd Floor. Free. (202) 588-8750. (Jeffry Cudlin)
To Feb. 24
Colby Caldwell’s affection for film is transparently obvious. He loves the stuff—not just the photographs and video he produces but flimsy film itself—and “small game,” his first solo show at Hemphill since 2003, reads very much like a valentine to the medium. At turns he is saccharine, almost regrettably so: (t) here, an enlarged photograph of the first frame of a roll of celluloid film, shows sprocket holes and all but makes short use of Caldwell’s considerable darkroom talents. Those are best showcased by the photographer’s landscapes and portraits. For these, Caldwell projects still images from Super 8 films (some of which are on display); he then re-photographs these projections and applies to the results a series of digital filters, burns, and other tweaks to achieve his signature effect. It amounts to a nostalgia lens: a soft, sympathetic gaze that fixes his subjects in time, whether it be the smell of ozone after a rain in after nature (33) or the wind wisping through a hunter’s hair in gestus picture (12). Having returned to still photographs after dabbling in Super 8 for several years, Caldwell picks up right where he left off. Fans of his previous work will be especially happy to know that he’s returned to one series: the dark backward (4), a Gerhard Richter–esque abstraction snipped from a corrupted film file—one he’s examined like a piqued naturalist for years. The abstractions reveal a rule that applies to all Caldwell’s photographs: His love for the process rivals his affection for his tenderly depicted subjects. The exhibition is on view from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, to Saturday, Feb. 24, at Hemphill Fine Arts, 1515 14th St. NW. Free. (202) 234-5601. (Kriston Capps)
To March
Artists’ drawing on others’ pain for inspiration is an old trick, but it’s one to which Ted Meyer adds some unexpected color. His latest exhibition, “Scarred for Life,” is a collection of 35 mono-prints showing scars—from accidents, disease, even a failed suicide attempt—that forever altered their bearers. Created by applying a model’s inked skin directly to paper, and then accentuating with gouache and color pencil, each print walks a blurred line between abstract art and medical diagram, an effect heightened by the exhibition’s venue: the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which counts among its macabre exhibits the bullet that felled Abraham Lincoln. One image, Lost Finger Due to Band-Saw Accident, features a blue handprint as delicate as one left on a frosted windowpane; the jolt comes as you realize the hand in question is missing a digit. The works feature starkly clinical names—Hip Replacement Due to Severe Arthritis, Lung Removal After Suicide Attempt—that reinforce how each scar comes with its own history. Meyer, a Los Angeles–based painter and illustrator who was born with Gaucher disease, a genetic condition that necessitated two hip replacements and a spleen removal, was quoted recently as saying that scars “freeze a moment in time, a car accident or gun shot.” The exhibition is on view from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, to March 2007, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 6900 Georgia Ave. and Elder St. NW. Free. (202) 782-2200. (Nick Kolakowski)
To May 10
DNA: Something about it makes artists go crazy. Anselm Kiefer unloaded untold quantities of his own semen onto books and titled it 20 Years of Solitude. Tim Hawkinson built bird skeletons from his fingernail clippings and egg shells from his hair. Marc Quinn was recently in the news after his sculpture Self—a frozen mold of his head made from nine pints of his own blood—started melting. Given all this deoxyribonucleiphilia, it’s refreshing to see the works of Dennis Ashbaugh. For over 15 years, Ashbaugh has simply painted the stuff of life, transforming digital images of DNA sequences into outsized canvases that recall the majestic tonal washes of Rothko and the color striations of Newman. The “gene portraits” on display in “Hidden Codes” aren’t particularly stunning, but their peculiarities grow on you: If the catalog essay is to be believed, the “apocalyptic meltdown” effect of some of the pieces’ crackled surfaces were caused by Ashbaugh interring them underground. With no actual DNA smeared around here, there’s little chance of catching something, so appreciate the art from microscopically close distances from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, to Thursday, May 10, at the National Academy of Sciences’ Rotunda Gallery, 2100 C St. NW. Free. (202) 334-2436. (John Metcalfe)
MUSEUMS
Ongoing
First George Segal put white-plaster people in real-life environs. Then Duane Hanson constructed statues so realistic that museumgoers sometimes tried to engage them in conversation. Neither artist's work, however, is adequate preparation for Australian artist Ron Mueck's Big Man. After a period in storage, this hunched-over nude is again glowering from a corner in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, impatiently showing his wrinkly knees, saggy belly, ample scrotum, and gnarled foot veins to astonished passers-by. Constructed of pigmented polyester resin on fiberglass, the figure is hyperrealism with a hint of menace. Seated as he is, the man is roughly at adult eye level, but if he could only stand up, he'd tower over his observers. Modeled on someone in late middle age, the sculpture is in part a vision of inevitable decay. Yet there's also power there, suggesting that the guy isn't just a big man—he might be a dad. The sculpture is on view daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 7th and Independence Ave. SW. Free. (202) 633-1000. (MJ)
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FILM
To Feb. 18
When the new Iranian cinema was introduced to the West about 15 years ago, it seemed like the second coming of Italian neorealism: documentary-influenced tales of peasant life, emphasizing the struggles and dreams of little boys. The director who embodied that paradigm was Majid Majidi, whose Children of Heaven and Baran were among the most successful Iranian films in American art houses. His latest drama, featured this weekend in the Freer’s Iranian Film Festival 2007 showcase, has a different sort of protagonist. Like the young hero of Majidi’s The Color of Paradise, The Willow Tree’s Youssef is blind. But he’s a middle-aged poetry professor who faces not lifelong acceptance but a second chance at vision when a specialist manages to restore his sight. Blind for 38 of his 45 years, Youssef is overwhelmed by being able to see. His initial wonder soon turns to bitterness at what he’s missed, and his marriage to faithful but not especially pretty Roya is threatened when he starts noticing more attractive women. While Majidi is not the most complex of Iranian directors, The Willow Tree benefits from his decision to relinquish his usual child’s-eye view. Upcoming weekends offer A Little Kiss, a parable of two dying writers who take a final trip home together, and Stray Dogs, a harrowing account of two Afghani children’s tenuous existence while their mother is jailed. The Willow Tree shows at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 19, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 21, at the Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium, 12th St. & Jefferson Drive SW. Free. (202) 357-3200; see asia.si.edu/events/films.asp for a complete schedule. (Mark Jenkins)
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