The contributors are not all unknown quantities, and they include several who have had shows elsewhere in the region recently, including Eric Celarier, Ellen Cornett and Luis Del Valle. Celarier makes colorfully tinted contact prints of objects, some of them electronic, in teeming compositions that suggest organic life. Cornett offers precise but whimsical colored-pencil drawings of fashionable sheep, including one who sports a body-covering tie-dye design. Del Valle’s painting on an international-orange road sign is a partial portrait that emerges from a welter of graffiti.
Del Valle’s substitute for a canvas is unconventional, but not all that atypical among his fellow Artomatic veterans. Christian Tribastone’s vast drawing-painting of a street and underpass was executed on an unfolded cardboard box. Rita Elsner’s sweeping mountainscape, viewed from a high vantage, was drawn with pastels on a series of paper bags. All three artists combine the reclamation of found materials with well-schooled technique.
The influence of graphic novels and other forms of visual pulp fiction is widespread at Artomatic and can be seen here in the work of Camron Anderson and Jenny Kanzler. Anderson’s expressionist paintings of battered faces include the letters “XXX,” the circa-1980 insignia of D.C.’s underage punk rockers. The grayish hues of Kanzler’s tiny paintings are apt, since her subjects include confections made partly of metal. Elegant but eerie, Kanzler’s steely treats look as if they could be baked only by someone with access to an anarchist’s cookbook.
Curators’ Selects: Artomatic 2024 Through Aug. 4 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.
Ad Astra Per Aspera
The debut show at Alliance Gallery, the Arlington Artists Alliance’s new venue, takes its title from the Kansas state motto, which translates from Latin as “to the stars through hardship.” The slogan is meant to link all five artists in “Ad Astra Per Aspera: Empowerment Explored Through Textiles, Collage and Print,” which includes painting-stitchery hybrids by Anna Nazaretz Radjou and Nicole Tobin. But the most striking pieces address struggles of African American history.
At the center of the Christina Papanicolaou-curated show is Eleftheria Easley’s hanging grid of hundreds of printed paper squares, some of them with multilingual text. Among these are tickets, coupons, stamps, maps, game cards, nutrition labels and Beatles lyrics. Solicited on social media, the scraps constitute a sort of World Wide Web of pre-internet artifacts, evocative and nostalgic.
Photographer Pedro Ledesma III takes a much more local approach, limiting himself to Richmond. One of his pictures shows a statue in midair, presumably making a much-delayed retreat from a campaign to glorify the losing side of the Civil War.
Justyne Fischer turns more directly to Black history with mixed-media portraits of John Lewis and Angela Davis. Fischer’s most ambitious contribution is a multilevel portrayal of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, then one of the country’s most affluent Black neighborhoods. The artist hand-burned a scene of destruction onto two wooden panels and then printed a version of the same image on translucent fabric that hangs in front of the panels. As the gauzy curtain moves, a century-old infamy flutters into view.
Ad Astra Per Aspera: Empowerment Explored Through Textiles, Collage and Print Through Aug. 18 at Alliance Gallery, The Crossing Clarendon, 2800 Clarendon Blvd., Arlington. arlingtonartistsalliance.org. 571-483-0652.
Best regards,
The main event of Isabella Whitfield’s “Best regards,” is a field of 50 two-foot-high caution signs that nearly fill a room of the Hamiltonian Artists gallery. But just as important is a small item that’s barely visible, secluded in the back of the room and nestled near the ceiling. Both artworks are designed to perplex and to encourage viewers to take a second look at items that initially appear ordinary.
Those signs resemble ones made of plastic and usually emblazoned with warnings that the nearby floor is wet. But Whitfield’s are fabricated from medical-grade cotton and lack any text. Rather than the customary bright yellow, they’re in a narrow range of pastel hues. While the sign-like pieces resemble things that are commonplace and functional, the smaller sculpture is mythic: Made of scrap steel, it depicts two dancing horses, one of them winged. The shiny steeds hint at an untold fable.
These objects, along with the few others in the show, are exactingly made. The local artist doesn’t want any flaws in workmanship to distract from the desired effect, which is to be as familiar yet potentially deceptive as the email sign-off that provides the show’s title. Whitfield may have only the best regards for gallery visitors, but she wants to keep them guessing about her intentions.
Isabella Whitfield: Best regards, Through Aug. 10 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW. hamiltonianartists.org. 202-332-1116.
Holly Cole
When depicting threatened African and Asian animals, Holly Cole is realistic but not literal. The local artist’s “Vanishing,” an Art League show of painted quilts and soft sculptures, highlights both endangered species and the qualities of textiles. Cole’s roughly life-size head of a male lion, for example, features a mane made of tufts of torn, war-surplus burlap. The technique is rough, but the effect is majestic.
Cole is a former costume designer whose career included work with the Muppets, so she knows how to give fabrics not just shape but also personality. Her sculpture of an orphaned baby elephant could hardly be more endearing. Equally charming are painted renderings of juvenile rhinos and elephants being tended by humans at a hand-rearing facility based on an actual one in Kenya.
While her sculptures of African animals are substantial, Cole’s tribute to orangutans is more ephemeral. A set of multilayered curtains depicts the great apes in a tree canopy, swinging through dangling foliage. A three-part narrative, the installation moves from a healthy forest to one in which both animals and plants have almost disappeared. Cole’s amiable style doesn’t preclude outrage and pathos.
Holly Cole: Vanishing Through Aug. 4 at the Art League, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. theartleague.org. 703-683-1780.
