“I am enraptured by the violence of nature,” writes Olivia Rodriguez about her recent work. A few months ago, when Washington museums and galleries were packed with images of natural beauty, this might have seemed an odd statement. But that season has passed. Currently, local art spaces are displaying rot, maggots and mold.
Rodriguez’s “Immortal Decay,” at the Curator’s Office, features mushrooms and other fungi, as well as various types of insects and mollusks, dining on substances both natural (wood, earth) and less so (chewing gum, a half-eaten hamburger). Some of the flora and fauna are attached directly to the walls, as if the gallery’s blank white interior was in fact teeming with unruly life. The objects look so real that they appear to be genuine organisms, preserved under some sort of plastic coating. But they’re actually crafted from epoxy resin and painted with acrylic pigments; of the dozens of things in the show, only one clump of dirt is actually what it appears to be.
(Courtesy Anna U. Davis and The Gallery at BloomBars) - Anna U. Davis. “Modern Plague,” acrylic, paper and ink.
(Copyright Adam Nelson, courtesy Conner Contemporary Art) - Adam Nelson. “Alluvion,” 2012; PETG plastic, screen printed imagery, steel, light .
Rodriguez’s work could be even more confrontational. British bad-boy artist Damien Hirst has exhibited dead animals, as small as butterflies and as large as sharks, as works of art. Rodriguez’s sculptures are tidier than that, yet still a calculated offense to the idea of art as heroic, uplifting and beautiful. But then, beauty is a matter of opinion — and of convention. “The most beautiful universe is sweepings piled at random,” wrote the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Compared to that unsentimental assessment, “Immortal Decay” is fairly gentle. After all, it includes ladybugs.
‘Fellows Converge 2012’
Selin Balci doesn’t make art about biology; she lets biology make the art. Her “Contaminations” feature microbial growth on boards, which are then arrayed in patterns that provide some order to the haphazard flowering of black, gray and green. Balci’s subtle, slightly creepy work is included in two current group shows of young artists: “Academy 2012” at Conner Contemporary Art and “Fellows Converge 2012: Obstructions” at the Hamiltonian Gallery.
The latter exhibition showcases the artists who have had Hamiltonian fellowships this year, who were asked to work under certain constraints or “obstructions.” (The premise comes from Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth’s 2003 film, “The Five Obstructions,” in which von Trier put severe limitations on five shorts directed by Leth.) The funniest (and most impossible) impediment for this conceptual-art venture? “Make a piece that is not conceptually driven.”
The obstacles placed in the paths of the Hamiltonians didn’t hobble them significantly; the resulting works resemble those the artists have shown previously. Among the highlights are Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s slightly pixelated video of eight fidgety people slumped in a cell, as if trapped in Old Master painting; Sarah Knebel’s large, upward-gazing photo-collage of many kinds of blooms, all digitally grafted onto the branches of a single tree; and Nora Howell’s Asian-style lanterns, whose simple black-and-white illustrations of urban life were made with the help of people who live on her Baltimore block. These neighbors don’t seem to have obstructed her at all.
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