Depicting living creatures used to begin with killing them. So it’s encouraging to learn that some of the eeriest images in “Winging It,” an avian-themed group show at Heiner Contemporary, are of birds that are merely being inconvenienced. Photographer Todd R. Forsgren follows scientists who trap birds in nets so they can tag and release them. Allotted a few minutes during the procedure, Forsgren slips a white backdrop behind the captives and fires away. The resulting images feel uncannily detached from the creatures’ natural habit — often a Central American jungle — but throw the birds’ colors, markings and textures into high relief.
Forsgren’s work provides several of the highlights of “Winging It,” which includes paintings and collages as well as photos. (Two of the latter, startlingly crisp pictures of bird remains by Colby Caldwell, were in his recent show at Hemphill.) Connecting to the ornithological tradition, the selection includes a few prints by famed naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, as well as Megan Greene’s collages of traditional bird illustrations and Jenny Sidhu Mullins’s precisely detailed little pencil drawings of birds, insects and plants. Also small and exacting are Beverly Ress’s colored-pencil renderings on sheets of paper that have been scored with circles or arcs.
(Courtesy Dan Treado and Addison/Ripley Fine Art) - Dan Treado, \"All My Friends are Prizefighters\" (detail), 1988 – present, archival pigment print, 13 x 19 inches.
The most striking of the nonphotographic works are by Justin Gibbens, who works in watercolor, gouache and ink; he also uses tea to add earthy stains to his generally muted palette. Trained in scientific illustration and traditional Chinese painting, Gibbens depicts his subjects realistically but places them in stylized settings. The featured birds in such works as “Hovercraft (glossy ibis)” and “Simulator (plover)” are shown next to bodies of water whose waves and ripples emulate the style of traditional East Asian screen paintings. There’s contemporary science in these works but also an ancient sense of wonder at the beauty around us.
Click: Time & Space
Sometimes, a group-show concept can be so broad that it barely qualifies as a concept. Addison/Ripley Fine Art concedes that about “Click: Time & Space,” a survey of photographs it amiably calls “not at all comprehensive.” The work stretches from 1925 (and perhaps earlier) to 2011, from fetish-fashionista Helmut Newton’s 1979 picture of lingerie-clad women in a black forest to Dan Treado’s 1988 suite of 14 portraits of D.C. punk-rockers in boxing poses. All are frozen in time but otherwise have little in common.
What looks to be the oldest piece here is an undated, uncredited special-effects image of a woman in a dramatic pose, buffeted by white swirls. The other antiques include two architectural abstractions by Weegee (who was better known for crime scene snaps). The recent works tend to be bigger and more aggressively colorful, and they reflect the current taste for arresting the movement of things that are already permanently arrested: E. Brady Robinson depicts tableaux from Jesusland, a pious amusement park, while James Osher grabs blurry impressions of Old Master canvases. Multiple views of the same subject, shot from different angles or at different moments, are also common. Such gambits insist on the subjectivity of vision — even a vision captured “objectively” by an electro-mechanical device.
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