In a city of amazing art, some is a little more amazing than others.
We’re not talking about the blockbuster museum show, or the one that everyone in town is talking about. A line around the block proves nothing.
We’re talking about the strange and the singular object; the artifact so stupendous and surprising that, when you see it, it makes you stop in your tracks and say, “How on earth did I almost miss that?”
Well, we’re not going to let you miss it.
Here are 10 objects of drop-dead beauty and lingering wonder. Some you’ve heard of; some you haven’t. None will you soon forget.
“-SCAPE”
For his thesis show this spring, art-school grad Woojin Chang wanted to make a piece that expressed his feelings about growing up in South Korea. The resulting 29-foot-wide digital print (see inset) depicts a landscape whose terrain is made up of tens of thousands of tiny people — each smaller than a dime — scrambling atop one another in a struggle for survival.
Created from roughly three dozen figure drawings that the artist scanned into his computer, shrank and then multiplied, the picture is a showstopper. Chang says he’s influenced by video games, but nevertheless hopes that viewers will see the serious side to his work.
Through Aug. 22. Conner Contemporary Art, 1358 Florida Ave. NE. 202-588-8750. www.connercontemporary.com . Free.
“KATE”
From a distance, Chuck Close’s portrait of Kate Moss looks like another of the artist’s signature, large-format photographs. The size of a beach towel, it makes the supermodel’s greasy, unkempt hair and blemishes all too apparent. She’s still beautiful though.
More beautiful is the fact that it’s a tapestry. Created on an electronic loom from a daguerreotype original, the picture mixes old and new technology. Though it looks black and white, Moss’s face is rendered in colored threads woven together in accordance with instructions contained in a digital “weave file.” The instructions are complex: A single weave file reportedly contains more raw data than all of Shakespeare’s plays combined.
Through Sept. 5 in the “Capital Portraits” exhibition. National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW. 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-633-5285). www.npg.si.edu . Free.
PEACOCK ROOM
The Peacock Room has never looked this good. Well, maybe it did one day in the spring of 1908.
That’s when art collector Charles Lang Freer had photos taken of the room, whose furnishings he had purchased a few years earlier and transported from the home of a wealthy Londoner to his mansion in Detroit. In London, the room (designed by painter James McNeill Whistler) was a showcase for Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, and nothing else. Freer turned it into a showcase for a variety of ceramics from not just China, but also from Japan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Korea, and in every color of the rainbow.
In more recent years, long after Freer moved his art collection to the museum that bears his name, the museum restored the Peacock Room to the way it was in London.
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