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Highs -- and Lows -- in the 20s
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Other works include a quilt made from used and emptied tea bags -- a sad but impressive sight, suggesting lost purpose and fragility. Another, called "Rides Home," is a grid of bus transfers dating from February 2005 to March 2006.
As a collection of the artist's rides home, they might have been a meditation on the quotidian. Instead, many of the transfers are found or donated by friends, and thus the schedules are erratic -- four rides home on March 1, 2006; no rides for a month in late 2005. Burrows missed the mark with this one, but she's off to a great start.
Gina Brocker at Irvine
Photographer Gina Brocker set herself an unusual task during graduate school in Wales. She befriended a family of Irish Travelers -- the tribe of nomads whose very identities revolve around itinerancy -- and set about documenting them.
The Donovans were more stable than most. Brocker's pictures from 2005 and 2007 show familiar surroundings -- children appear in the same playground -- as the family transitioned toward a settled lifestyle.
Brocker's vision of the family's children, who appear in this portfolio at Irvine, hardly stresses their nomadic roots. Instead, youth and faith dominate these pictures.
The Donovan teens are like any others. Several pictures show them on their cellphones, leaning as if expecting major revelations. Others show them hanging out in empty parking lots, girls wearing revealing tops as if their bodies were their currency.
Brocker goes to great lengths to underscore the family's Catholicism. An image of Pope John Paul II and a ceramic Last Supper relief show up in two interior views. Celtic crosses rise up in a landscape. Looking at a picture of a baby girl whose shirt reads "Angel," we think, perhaps, that Brocker tapped the sacred in the everyday.
Reynolds and Griffin, Ben Tolman and Mandy Burrow at Hillyer Art Space, 9 Hillyer Ct. NW (enter from Florida Avenue between Massachusetts and R Street); Monday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; 202-338-0680, to Aug. 29. http:/
Gina Brocker: Portfolio at Irvine Contemporary, 1412 14th St. NW; Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; 202-332-8767, to July 26. http:/
