ArtDistrict

Christenberry all over

DCist has a lovely roundup of William Christenberry activities - he was even on NPR today. Last night Art Guy and I attended his talk and book signing at Politics and Prose. I was charmed by his discussion on using art to recreate the landscape of his youth (Alabama). His slide presentation included pictures of houses, stores and a one-room school house - both with and without Virginia Creeper or Kudzu. I'm looking forward to visiting the exhibit of his work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Christenberry is well known as a photographer of southern scenes and buildings, but I was also fascinated by his sculptures (mostly also of buildings). In his photographs (many from an old Brownie camera) his compositions are very centered and front-on - not the usual 1/3 of the frame guideline that is usually tossed around for what he calls his "snapshots." The centered-ness of the subjects give them significant drama and importance, making the structures seem like characters in a story.

Stay inside, look at pictures

ArtDistrict is hot hot hot. The heat is a great excuse for Quirky Movie Week. I'm pleased to recommend Mongolian Ping Pong a sweet and soothing coming of age story set in Inner (not Outer, for those of you who know the difference) Mongolia. My heart rate went way, way down during that film. (Playing at Landmark E-Street Cinema).

A little racier was a trip to the East Wing of the NGA where I took in the lovely, and free, Underground. A silent film from 1928, this early noir, written and directed by Anthony Asquith, takes place in the London Underground (the Tube). The sex 'n violence tale of a working class love triangle was brought to life by the addition of a live trio (keyboard, cello and clarinet) in a commissioned piece by Steve Smith (the keyboardist). At no point in the movie did the escalators ever break down, and somehow everyone knew how to walk up and down. Were people just smarter then? Or maybe there were just fewer tourists.

To slow things down even further, I'm thinking of heading over to Politics & Prose where Corcoran professor William Christenberry will sign and discuss his self-titled book of photography. Starts at 7.

Portrait Gallery: Competition Exhibit

I just wanted to go back in time a bit (I saw this exhibit a few weeks ago) to recommend a very enjoyable exhibit at the brand new & improved National Portrait Gallery.
The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition winners are on display through February 19, 2007.

Fifty-one artists are featured in a very open and airy space. Thank goodness for high ceilings, as one of the pieces is the giant head of a baby. The other works are mostly paintings of varying levels of realism from hyper-realism to somewhat more abstract. All have a very contemporary flair, and one is done in lite-brite.

Conversions: Elipse Arts Center

On Wednesday, Art Guy and I attended the Conversions Exhibit at Arlington's Ellipse Arts Center. I found out about that evening's Juror's Talk from the Washington Post. I was excited by the idea of seeing Washington art legends (the Jurors) Sam Gilliam (local Color Field artist), Dennis O'Neil (printmaker) and Heather & Tony Podesta (art collectors of contemporary works).

The exhibit focused on works by local artists, and the Jurors picked pieces that had not been shown before. The aim of the exhibit was to have the artists commune with the art space, which makes it particularly enjoyable for those folks who like installation work. As a consequence, there were no paintings, but a lot of sculpture (and sculptural) art.

I was most impressed by the commentary from Heather Podesta. She is a very thoughtful art patron who elegantly expressed what it was about the art that appealed to her as she weighed the proposals.

Every piece in the exhibit was the result of careful and intense artistic effort. The Jurors joked that it was like a show for OCD sufferers. Attention was played to surface, to detail, to theme and repetition. Michele Kong's Reticula was a taut curtain of knitted hot glue swirls in a repeating pattern. Hung inside a large window well, the skein of translucent loops messed with my depth and color perception. A kind of "hardware" version of similar theme was Ami Martin Wilber's Three Fates, which strung a curtain of repeating segments of aluminum coils across three windows.

Lisa Kellner's Oil Spill made use of many thousands of precisely arrayed yellow quilting pins to create a floating 3-D image. From a distance it looked almost like a shag rug, but from up close the shadows cast by the pins gave the almost cartoonish abstract a very different quality.

Tomas Rivas, the only male artist in the show, carved intricate turn-of-the-century plaster forms into paired 8'X8' sheets of drywall. The artist's pencil marks and the fraying and lifting of the paper surface on the panels gave this work a more ephemeral look than the other pieces in the exhibit. I immediately thought of all the old Victorian-era homes in DC that have been "painstakingly renovated for modern tastes" throughout the city's recent housing boom.

Conversions
Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA
Through September 29, 2006
Artist's Talk: September 21, 7-9PM