Aconceptual artist who’s grounded in the natural world, Fritz Horstman reaches wide in a small show at Hillyer Arts Space. There are only three elements in “A Wayfaring Nature,” but they enlist sculpture, photography and video — and cover a range of issues from the personal to the ecological.
Horstman works as a facilities manager for a rural estate and thus is professionally engaged with the changing of the seasons. He’s translated that into about 90 photographs, shot over the course of a year from the same vantage point: under the surface of a pond, peering at the shifting sky. (The photos are mounted in sequence at the top of the walls, emulating the friezes on classical-style structures such as the National Building Museum.) The wooden dowel that held the camera is on display, along with sections of seven logs, all of which incorporate painted or drawn lines or replace some of the wooden rings with alien material, such as newspaper, beeswax and styrofoam. It’s a simple gesture, but the contrast of wood and styrofoam suggests all the ways that humankind intrudes on its environment.
That’s even more explicit in the video, which contrasts underwater views taken from the same vantage point as the photographs with such standard eco-documentary subjects as trash-transfer stations and chainsaws. The latter’s melody, however, turns out to be part of a larger theme. The video is a symphony of hums and drones, mingling the burble of forest and field with the harsher tones of dishwashers and hair dryers, but also with singing and musical instruments. In sound and movement, the natural and the human mimic each other. The border between the two is “virtually indefinable territory,” Horstman writes, so he doesn’t simply oppose the good universe and its bad despoilers. After all, every creature’s understanding depends on its vantage point.
In the adjacent gallery, Lucinda Murphy’s “Evolution” mixes the gestural and the precise to evoke biological processes and components. The parts of these paintings — executed on paper with watercolor and acrylic and the occasional collage — suggest cells and bubbles, sediment and striations. Her work also encompasses waves, spirals, webs and sunbursts, often in warm tones and in busy compositions that recall Marc Chagall. On one wall, a suite of works is dominated by blue and aqua, implying a world of seas.
A native Washingtonian and former landscape architect, Murphy has a Darwinian outlook on natural beauty; she’s uninterested in classical symmetry, yet her works maintain visual unity, sometimes across a succession of panels. (These can be literally divided into separate pieces, or the division can be suggested by bands of color.) Her numbered series include “Layers” and “Chaos/Order,” terms that describe her work well.
Dan Tulk
The most intriguing works in “Lines and Shadows,” a small retrospective of Dan Tulk’s work at the Washington Project for the Arts, involve absence and implication. In “Give and Take,” vertically aligned strings are held in place by the attraction of two magnets, which leave a small void between them. “Untitled (String 8)” uses nails and filaments — and the shadows the latter cast — to define a series of boxes; some sides of the squares are missing, yet are suggested by the overall structure.
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