It's been two weeks and a day since erstwhile Dupont Circle gallery Irvine Contemporary unveiled its first exhibition in the white box vacated by Fusebox. Whether director Martin Irvine and associate director Heather Russell believed in ghosts before opening day is an open question. But the gallery's former inhabitants do seem to haunt the place.
Irvine's first exhibitions -- a solo by Korean-born artist Ju-Yeon Kim and a group show of gallery artists -- reminds me of what I valued at Fusebox: a pared-down aesthetic and minimal clutter of extreme neatniks. The gallery's visual hygiene ensured that art always looked its best. Whether the pictures on the wall were idiosyncratic or derivative, pungent or banal, they always showed well because they were shown so well. Only a handful of this city's best galleries know how to hang a show that beautifully.
Chock it up to exuberance, disorientation or following in the footsteps of giants, but Irvine's first 14th Street show suffers by comparison. Kim's pale works on paper and canvas are asked to compete with a boisterous 15-person group show of gallery artists -- many hung just inches apart and lining a long wall that snakes to the back of the gallery. Again and again, a colorful sculpture or a bright photograph distracts the viewer.
Amid this visual clutter, Kim's work -- white on white or other subdued hues, with delicate calligraphic mark and tracery -- struggles to hold its own. Like Asian scrolls merged with abstract painting, her paintings and works on paper feature patterns of dots, or flowers and clouds. Even the paintings have the delicacy of drawings on paper. Some hold our attention better than others -- a fact determined by details such as cut-paper patches fluttering on the surface. Yet the show's hanging presents a gnawing problem: There's so much to look at that it's tough to see anything.
Some of the works in the group show "Selections & Celebrations" will look familiar to gallery-goers, as several of these artists were the subject of recent solos at the former location. Of the others who will presumably enjoy solo outings in the coming months and years, I look forward to seeing more from Gina Brocker, who is represented here by a single color photograph from a series chronicling itinerant Irish families. The untitled work here appears, at first, a casual snap of young children. Yet one young girl -- she's 7 or maybe 8 -- captured with her head thrown back and mouth agape, seems the exact replica of some ecstatic saint off a baroque altarpiece. It's an arresting image. When Irvine shows the full series, I hope it receives an elegant and considered hanging.
--Jessica Dawson (May 27, 2006)
