For its 30th annual survey exhibition, “Options 2011,” the Washington Project for the Arts has temporarily claimed a floor of an industrial building near the Convention Center. The space gives the show — curated by Arlington Arts Center Executive Director Stefanie Fedor — room for large, dramatic pieces, as well as the expected painting, photography and video. The work ranges from computer animation and fabric art — including Amber Robles-Gordon’s third gallery showcase of the last six months — to issues of Bittersweet, a new magazine that covers social issues of non-federal D.C.
Many of the 13 artists combine the minimal and the conceptual. John James Anderson combines sculpture made from lumber, nails, screws and carpentry tools, with commentary about hiring immigrant day laborers to work with him. Stewart Watson impales pillows with steel rods to make site-specific, anxiety-ridden “events.” Lisa Dillin’s photographs and sculptures coolly parody corporate environments and mindsets. Heather Boaz renders the commonplace eerie by photographing toy furniture posed on or near body parts such as eyes and knees, as well as less commonly displayed ones.
Among the show’s most engaging work are monumental pieces that mock artistic monumentality. Artemis Herber is showing shell-like forms that look to be made of rusted steel, evoking the sculptural colossuses of Richard Serra and Anthony Caro, along with pillars whose shapes are modeled on fallen trees (although they’re painted a shade of green that’s more redolent of celery than forests). But Herber’s work is made of cardboard; that rusty patina is paint.
Jimmy Miracle also uses inexpensive materials, including plastic carryout food containers. For “Beam,” he stretches filament from wall to floor to simulate a gleaming shaft of light. Like Herber’s “trees,” Miracle’s pieces give everyday stuff a pretense to glory.
Sam Gilliam
Skeptics of abstract painting joke a non-figurative canvas can be hung any which way, without making an aesthetic difference. Sam Gilliam halfway agrees. The veteran color-field painter knows exactly how he wants his work displayed but that can change. His current exhibition at Marsha Mateyka Gallery includes four pieces, previously shown at the Katzen gallery, that have been hung differently and renamed. “Opened Box A-D” are now “Tempo Series: #1-4.”
It’s been almost 50 years since Gilliam rebelled against the flat, rectangular canvas, and he’s still finding ways to tweak that traditional format. The four 2009-10 “Tempo” paintings, which are acrylic on nylon, are joined here by three new works on canvas, whose colors are less bright and textures more subtle. Where the pigment seems to flow on the nylon, retaining a sense of fluidity, it seeps into the canvas, melding color and form. The earlier paintings are stitched together, so that only the drape can change in different installations; “Tinkerbell’s Bookcase” (composed of four separate pieces) and the knotty “Gordonian” can be arranged and rearranged, theoretically, in infinite variety.
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