Democracy Dies in Darkness
By Mark Jenkins September 21, 2018
Ordinariness is a notable component of the work by this year’s finalists for the Trawick Prize, the Bethesda-based contemporary-art competition that’s in its 16th year. So are twine, beeswax, coal slag, rusted barrels, and needles and thread. All are enlisted in efforts to transcend their own banality in this exhibition at Gallery B. The judges chose six Marylanders and two Washingtonians, most of whom have shown recently in local galleries. (Virginians are eligible, but none made it to the finals this year.) The first-place winner, Caroline Hatfield, is an installation artist who uses coal-mining detritus to signify environmental destruction, while creating a sense of place. Miniature mountains peek through the heaps of black slag she piled on the floor. Mary Early employs handmade yellow wax segments to define space. Here, she suspends dozens of the bars in a symmetrical rectangular arrangement, outlining a sort of hanging box. Nearby, Nicole Salimbene assembles rolled-up retail receipts into a dangling construction that’s taller than the average person. Salimbene, who took second place, also offers a table studded with needles and wrapped with black thread that resembles hair. Third-place winner Timothy Makepeace draws industrial architecture on a suitably large scale, rendering the commonplace sublime with photorealist attention to detail. Jay Gould makes black-and-white nature photos in which human presence (or absence) is eerie. Even more elusive is the Clay Dunklin video, in which a barely visible gray corona comes and goes. There are just two painters, and neither works in a conventional format. Lori Anne Boocks’s color-field abstractions are on fabric that’s bunched and tied with string. Phaan Howng covers one side of the gallery with a floor-to-ceiling post-catastrophe forest, painted on translucent fabric. Like Hatfield and Early, Howng brings outside in and is as interested in shaping space as in making images. The Trawick Prize Through Sept. 29 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. No. E, Bethesda.
The white canvases and black frames used in Qais Al-Sindy’s “16x20x20” are identical in size, and appear equivalent in every other way. Yet, the Baghdad-bred Californian collected the materials for the 20 16-by-20-inch paintings on view at Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al-Quds in various countries around the globe. That inspired the artist to explore themes of NEWSLETTER WEEKDAYS exile and fundamental humanity: The ingredients come from everywhere yet are essentially the same. Start your day with The 7 Sign Up Executed in an expressionist style, the pictures mostly show colorful single figures on gray backgrounds. Al-Sindy gave
Both Michael Brown and David Molesky might be classified as outsider artists, but their methods are vastly different. Brown, who calls his works on paper “doodles,” has an affinity for graffiti, tattoo art, underground comics and 1960s hot-rod illustrations. Molesky, who depicts civil wars and street protests, is an oil painter with classical technique. What the two share, aside from being shown together at the Fridge, is a fascination with fire and smoke. The title of Molesky’s show, “Return to Sender,” refers to rebels who hurl tear-gas canisters back at the riot police who threw them. The Brooklynite’s canvases show insurrection but emphasize flashes of light amid darkness and billowing clouds — the sort of strong yet ethereal forms favored by the Romantic artists who nudged painting toward abstraction. Rebellion and conflagration also feature in Brown’s untitled show, which consists of a few 3-D constructions and hundreds of drawings. The D.C. artist’s style is rooted in kiddie comics and animation, skewed and tainted to suggest the loss of childhood innocence. Where Molesky chronicles a world set on fire by conflict, Brown tours a Toontown that’s quietly gone to seed. Michael Brown and David Molesky: Return to Sender Through Sept. 28 at the Fridge, 516½ Eighth St. SE (rear).
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