ArtSee: Coloring DC

"Bringing the Art in DC to You." Art lovers dedicated to giving you the who, what, where and when in your local arts scene.

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We're installed at the Marriott! Join us on the 12th to celebrate the artists of the Outloud group - outloudartists.org

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Moroccan inspiration #swatchromsalon2014 @swatchroom

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We're installed @covedc - join us at 6:30 @ the 14th St opening! #dcarts #dc artist: Bhaval Shah Bell

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Morning meeting selecting art for a new project! Recognize this quote? #artsee #dcarts #lincoln

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Katherine Mann @scopeartshow #dcarts

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Thrilled to see two of our favorites in one place @ aqua! Jeremy Flick and Barb Januszkiewicz #dcarts #abmb2013

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The many pencils of Jessica Drenk with Adah Rose Gallery #dcarts #pulseartfair

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Wendy White at Anna Kustera @untitledmiami

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@transformerdc auction in full swing!! #dcarts #transformer

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Clothes on the floor #tabulapetitechic

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Got to stop by @heinercontemporary today to see the amazing work of Rachel Farbiarz "Take Me With You"

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Meeting with a new client @torpedofactory

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We are @ tryst with Rachel Pafe! Join us until 9!

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NEW BLOG LOCATION

For all of our written posts please see our website. We will no longer post tem here but rather use this platform to share art we love. 

Please also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for other updates.

Thank you! 

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Artist Spotlight: J. Ford Huffman

Surrounded by little theaters, DC-based artist J.Ford Huffman stands in his dining room and excitedly tells the narrative of each box, two dozen of which will be a part of his upcoming solo exhibition at Politics and Prose, Little Theaters, opening February 28 with a public reception on Saturday, March 2.

“This is called 'Map Room.' It's from a series involving impressions of the White House,” Huffman explained, pointing to a re-purposed wine box. Inside the box, an upside-down grandfather clock and monstrous fragments of a Greek temple set the stage for an unknown scene. Amid gaudy pink accents, an imposing street map of Washington DC hangs on the back wall, as if in a wartime conference room. 

  Many things hang on the walls of Huffman’s miniature worlds, each created with the intention to evoke the viewer to complete the story’s sentence.

Cook Books stars a tiny bronze man, reaching up to stir a disproportionately large holiday pot holding what else, but, a book. A picture-less picture frame extends beyond the wall and seemingly life-size primary color bricks are stacked upon one another, scattered around the curious kitchen. Peering into the miniature stage, one is instantly reminded of Alice in Wonderland. 

“It’s playful at first glance,” said Huffman who explained his interest creating a challenge for the viewer to contemplate "why." 

In Upper-case ‘BOOK’ Case, one of the capital “O” in the big yellow “B-O-O-K,” has fallen from the top shelf and lays defeated, knocked over, resting on its side.

“Did the ‘O’ fall because it just toppled over or did something more ominous happen here?” Huffman implored. 

  Cook Books and Upper-case “BOOK” Case are not the only theaters with a book theme.

“I love challenges so I wanted to see what I could come up with working around the venue. So for this one, books because Politics and Prose is a book store,” Huffman said.

Permabooks lines up gorgeously colored African wood samples along a bookshelf supported by makeshift legs, and is paired next to a vintage Barclay doll for scale and a barely translucent paper bush for depth. Table of Contents stacks a series of books, each one’s aesthetic beautifully flowing into the other to create a composed composition, all tied together with a red background, red 1887 marbleized paper floor, and red accents such as the miniature figurine’s apple. In contrast to the witty word play works, Content Context takes on a more modern feel, its white letters naturally spliced in half by a wood shelf in the top half. On the bottom, a white plastic figure gazes into an image from an 1879 edition of “Recreation in Astronomy.” The work is successful in making the viewer think, as the box's beholder gazes into the set the same way the miniature man looks out into a distant land. 

  “When I give lectures on journalism, or writing or editing, I always emphasize context versus content,” Huffman said about the inspiration for Content Context.  

Not all theaters in the show, priced at $300 and above, are book-related.Volts per cell is an interactive theater that requires the viewer to flip through anatomy profiles of the human head. Sisters pairs the 1889 painting of The Abbess of Jouarre with a plaster statue of Saint Theresa Little Flower of Jesus. Huffman includes a carefully placed mirror in the corner of the box so that one can clearly see the two nuns are looking at one another. The viewer wonders if they are looking at each other in admiration or contempt.

Huffman’s typically playful, sometimes provocative, and always clever little theaters, take the viewer on a delightful journey into a tiny, magical word beyond his own.

Little Theaters is on display at Politics and Prose from February 28 until April 4. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, March 2 from 7- 9 PM.

Politics and Prose is located at 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20008 and is open Monday through Saturday from 9 AM- 10 PM and Sunday from 10 AM- 8 PM

Bringing the Art in DC to You,

Roxanne Goldberg

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Through the Window of Steven Cushner's Creative Process

On January 9th, to kick off the new year, I attended the Hemphill press breakfast to do a write up on their latest show for our affiliate post on Borderstan.  It only took minutes to realize that Steven Cushner’s show was one of, if not, the best show I had ever seen in a gallery in Washington, DC.  In case you have not had the chance to see it yet, his work in this show includes large, symmetrical, over powering and familiar works on oddly shaped canvases.  It was only a week ago that the work of Steven Cushner’s genius started to come together.  Visiting Steven in his home studio, I was able to really understand his creative process and get a sneak peak at what he is currently working.

After seeing the show at Hemphill, it surprised me that one of the first things that Cushner told me was that his relationship with color goes back as far as he can remember and at times can get out of control.  His studio is surely full of it, different from the muted tones of his current show. Every space on his wall is covered with his latest pieces and watercolor “sketches” of the images he hopes to put on canvas. Color, color and more color!  With the overwhelming color in his studio, I immediately wanted to know what led to his, almost entirely, black and white work currently at Hemphill.  This work came from an overload of color in the early 90s that Cushner says included work with awful, crazy colors.

Cushner’s work is very physical and gestural but he considers it “fake gesture”.  He tried to explain that the “fake” part comes in the editing stages of his work.  He explained that each of his works consists of many layers and most works may have even started out a completely different, color, size or shape.  He often has trouble figuring out which colors to use and where to take them, even if that means eliminating them all together. 

My favorite work currently in Cushner’s studio, is hardly a work in progress. In fact, if it doesn’t find a home, I hope to own it one day!  It is a work that he hopes will evoke the idea of infinity and a forever journey.  His inspiration was very clearly mountains and like the work currently at Hemphill, Cushner very deliberately worked on creating a drastic sense of space with illusion.  While the colors were more muted that he thought the final product would be, it was captivating, calming and gave the feeling of seeing a gorgeous sunset.  Like the work at Hemphill the works size in itself is truly remarkable and powerful.

Working with smaller canvases is more difficult for Cushner.  In our discussion of his technique, he expressed several times that he was more comfortable with large canvases and that they just feel right.  Clearly, the large-scale works translate in a truly unique and powerful way, whether in color or, as currently seen at Hemphill, in black and white.

I was honored to have had the chance to look through a small window of Steven Cushner’s creative through process. His show at Hemphill will be through March 9, 2013 and is worth everything minute spent sharing the space with his works of shaped canvases.

Bringing the Art in DC to You,

Elizabeth

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Hairy confrontations: A review of Sonya Clark's solo show of new work, AHEAD OF HAIR

Hair. It’s chaotic, it’s ordered. Clean and messy, it is a sense of frustration and joy.

In Sonya Clark’s solo exhibition at Contemporary Wing, AHEAD OF HAIR, Clark uses hair as a medium to represent race, class and culture.

“I’ve been combing hair since I was a child,” said Clark who has been working with hair as a medium in both hairdressing and fine art for over twenty years.

One of Clark’s more recent works, Pigtails, is evocative of youth. Resting on a wall-mounted shelf, a young girl’s stiff braided pigtails are woven from tactile black thread. Though the work suggests innocence, a hairstyle removed from the human head challenges the viewer to consider the means in which a young woman’s hair was taken. When hair is so deeply attached to one’s personal identity, a hairstyle without an owner begins to lose its character, lose its playfulness, becomes limp and empty. The effect is intensified looking down at the work, implicating the viewer as responsible for subjugating the hair and its human counterpart.  

  “Hair is basically a piece of someone’s body. It’s a very intimate experience of selling a piece of someone’s body to someone else,” said Lauren Gentile, Contemporary Wing founder and director.

 The emotions surrounding the oldest work in the show, dating from 2003, complements with the power elicited from the suggestion of stolen youth in Pigtails. Long Hair confronts the viewer with age. A brilliant digital print of a dread is so rich with depth and texture, the viewer cannot help but yearn to reach out, to touch the hair fibers clearly pulsing with life. Astonishment and disappointment converge when the illusion is realized. 30 feet long, the work represents the length of a dread grown for 30 years.

  “At first, I thought it was strange to use someone’s DNA and then sell it, with the history of selling bodies in this country,” said Clark who is inspired in part, by the infinite hairstyles that became available to black women after the Africa Diaspora. 

Unbreakable fashions together black fine-toothed combs branded “unbreakable” in a composition that is inherently broken, demanding the viewer to consider the societal and cultural pressures associated with issues of straight hair. Cotton to hair is at once filled with beauty—flowers touched with bronze are forever preserved behind glass—but quickly becomes bewildering when one considers the materials are cotton and African American hair. The ties to slavery are inescapable and uncanny.

    Though the subject matter is what compels the viewer to engage in dialogue, to contemplate his own notions of race, class and culture, it is Clark’s superb craftsmanship that makes her work truly standout. 

“When you see her work, there is something so elegant and subtle and thoughtful,” said Gentile, “The craftsmanship is always going to be perfect, the concept is always going to be well-thought out.”

To execute Quadroon, Clark revitalized the 1990s art of stitching, by fashioning cornrows into one fourth of a canvas, and from the other three-fourths of the canvas, a heavy mass of thread, stitched together to resemble dense, but straight, hair fibers, is pulled together at the very center of the work. A ponytail extends and falls naturally into the viewer’s immediate space.

  Quadroon is exemplary of Clark’s extraordinary ability to deeply engage with her subject while maintaining exceptional hold on her medium and craft. A reference to race classification, Quadroon has roots in an experience traveling through Ghana, where Clark, an African-American, was called “bruni,” the Ghanaian word for a white person. Clark explained that in the context of African culture, because Clark has a white grandparent, she is considered white, whereas in the United States, Clark being three-quarters African American, is considered black.

As Clark said, “I’m the same color in either place but the context is different.”

Albers Study captures this question within an art historical narrative, using Josef Alber’s canonic texts on color theory to take five colors and make them appear as six, by simply juxtaposing the colors in different ways. But Clark does not simply re-contextualize the lessons of Albers. She extends the ideology by taking two different shades of green and making them appear the same.   

AHEAD OF HAIR is on display at Contemporary Wing until March 2.

Contemporary Wing is located at 1412 14th St. NW and open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

Bringing the Art in DC to You, Roxanne Goldberg