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Dan Treado's Panels for Discussion
· Dan Treado reappears, his painting much the same. Multi-panel pictures, their surfaces worked to matte perfection, depict organic-looking stuff: DNA squiggles, ferns and vines. A few horizontal line paintings -- though with a softer focus and a buzzed palette conjuring country club gin and tonics -- are also on view. In the back office, long horizontal pictures made up of various-size panels have a rhythm that gets the blood pumping.
Dan Treado at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m., 202-338-5180, to Oct. 14.http:/
Art Imitates Life, And Vice Versa
· Inga McCaslin Frick's digital photo assemblages exploit the flimsy membrane between the real and the depicted. Though mimicking the scale of history painting and that genre's sepia-toned gravitas, these pictures star bits of daily life in the painter's studio -- fake grapes, twine, a hibiscus, somebody's foot, some striped fabric. In a few of these pictures, Frick attached actual stuff to their surface -- the same swath of fabric or handful of grapes captured in the photo. You can hardly tell what's in the picture and what's outside of it, to delirious effect.
Inga McCaslin Frick at McLean Project for the Arts, 1234 Ingleside Dr., McLean, Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday 1-5 p.m., 703-790-1953, to Nov. 4.http:/
Marital Bliss for Artists
· Nicholas and Sheila Pye don't need marriage counseling, they need U.N. peacekeepers. The artmaking couple star in videos and large-scale color pictures based, we assume, on their real-life union. The result resembles two attractive people playing a pumped-up version of "house." Their macabre battles are fought with things such as jump-ropes, milk and burning fuses. Both videos -- "A Life of Errors" and "The Paper Wall" -- render matrimony against type: For them, it's adolescent and, surprisingly, hot.
Nicholas & Sheila Pye at Curator's Office, 1515 14th St. NW, Wednesday-Saturday noon-6 p.m., 202-387-1008, to Oct. 28.http:/
Capitalism's Dismal Side
· You can measure China's latest leap forward by the density of its high-rises in steel and glass. For this jewel box of an exhibition, Chinese artist Xie Rong photographed the crumbling stucco-and-wood skeletons of modest homes that mark the architectural casualties of Shanghai's economic boom. In the gallery's back room, interior views of these abandoned structures take gaping holes open to the sky as metaphors for the violence of capitalism.
Xie Rong at Mu Project, 1521 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Wednesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 202-333-4119, to Nov. 4.http:/
Some Things Borrowed
· The group show "Appropriately Yours" plays on the practice of appropriation, though the exhibition proves to be awfully subtle about it. The classic example of sanctioned theft is Sherrie Levine shooting Walker Evans's pictures in the early 1980s; essentially exact copies, they made their point, cheekily. Transformer's six young artists are hardly so bald. Though a pair of works on view suggest Rodin's "The Thinker" and Richard Serra flanges, not all the show's artists engage their forebears with as much humor or clarity.
"Appropriately Yours" at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW, Wednesday-Saturday 1-7 p.m., 202-483-1102, to Oct. 14.http:/
Spectrum Of Warnings
· Louis Cameron makes abstract paintings about post-Sept. 11 times. Slyly commemorative but hardly propagandistic, his pictures reduce Department of Homeland Security-issued threat levels to a rainbow-colored palette. The gallery's rear room hosts John Beech in an intriguing mini-exhibition of painting-photograph hybrids. Photographed urban scenes -- a dumpster, some road signs -- peek out from below thick swaths of shiny enamel paint; both demand, and receive, our attention.
Louis Cameron and John Beech at G Fine Art, 1515 14th St. NW, Tuesday- Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m., 202-462-1601, to Oct. 7.http:/
