Closing April 27: Morton Fine Arts’ Patterns, Patchwork, Origami at Gallery B
The artists in the exhibit Patterns, Patchwork, Origami: Sculptural and Relief Paintings all work across media and category, creating wall hangings that push the limits of materials and are anything but two-dimensional. The tiny serpentine script that spirals around Prina Shah’s circular painted forms is slightly raised—the paint has been piped out of a henna cone, like an icing inscription on a cake. Jenny Wu turns latex paint into a sculptural material, layering it into strips or marbling colors together, then cutting these pieces apart when they dry and re-arranging them onto wood panels and coating them in a thick layer of glossy resin. Many of these are gridded, striped compositions, but one cuts the paint bits down until they’re almost like confetti. The collage work of Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is typically jam-packed with materials and shapes that collide into each other and form layers dense as a rainforest canopy. Her massive circular collage is particularly overflowing, embedded with mosaic tiles and decoupaged with paper and ephemera of all kinds. Calling to mind paper fans and airplanes, Hiromitsu Kuroo’s fabric collages play with fabric as a material, twisting and folding canvas that might otherwise be the backdrop for a painting and staining it with bleach. Kesha Bruce also straddles the line between fiber art and painting, working with fabric patches that are painted and adhered to a canvas, making the distinction between fabric or paint and “collage” or “painting” hard to parse, and showing how little that distinction actually matters. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the genre-hopping that fills the gallery. Patterns, Patchwork, Origami, curated by Morton Fine Art, runs through April 27 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. Thursday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. mortonfineart.com. Free.
Through May 18: Matriculture at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art
The exhibition catalog for Matriculture at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art describes the titles as “a philosophy of nurture that is both a traditional lifeway and an innovative and responsive intervention to our contemporary moment.” Two artists, Devin Harclerode and Nadia Nazar, explore softness, nurturing, and materials shaped through labor, thinking about caretaking as both a timeless practice and an urgent, timely issue. Harclerode’s curtain compositions hang throughout the gallery space like makeshift room dividers, made of many squares of silk joined together in large arrays. They’re also drawn on, with sketches showing figures, plants, suns, and childlike scribbles. The fabric in many places is hued with natural dyes like madder and iron, and is mostly translucent. The titles of the works refer to them as windows, specifically windows to significant personal moments—a very revealing peek behind and through the curtain. Nazar’s steel sculptures move fluidly and exude a tenderness in their organic forms that belies their sturdy forging. Some of these feature braids of iron that could be either ropes or chains, though their links appear to be easily broken, and the artist’s iconography often looks to her own family chain and matrilineal heritage. She has also created stop motion animations using cyanotypes, a simple monochromatic photography method, along with mixed media. Outside the gallery, Nazar’s sculpture “Vazha” stands like a tree with delicate steel outlines of the leaves. A closer look at the fruits hanging from the branches reveals them to be parts of instruments like banjos and guitars, a possible nod to the fruitfulness and life that art gives. Matriculture runs through May 18 at Tephra ICA, 12001 Market St. #103, Reston. Wednesday to Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday noon to 3 p.m. tephraica.org. Free.
Through June 15: Eliza Clifford: The Flowers We Keep at VisArts
The natural and the artificial collide in Eliza Clifford’s bountiful screen printed textile works. Clifford pulls from her personal photo archive, showing snippets of her days that are both mundane and magnificent, daily errands living alongside natural wonders. These photos are turned into highly detailed silk-screen prints on fabric that retain documentary quality and depth of field, while also embodying a halftone silk-screen texture. The custom printed fabric is stitched together into quilt compositions along with fabrics dyed with natural elements like avocado pits, marigolds, and onion skins. Bedsheets and buttons are also incorporated, and, along with the kitchen materials used for dying and the homespun quality of some of the fabric piecing together, nod to domestic and home labor. Some motifs, like flowers, are silhouetted against backdrops, popping out of the square grids that underlie the work. Elements are repeated as patterns or reoriented and flipped, becoming kaleidoscopic or disorienting the viewer with shifting perspectives and depths of frame. Photo frames inside of photo frames give a sense of multiple browser windows obscuring a view or portals opening. By collecting these fragments of digital photography that may otherwise languish in the camera roll and making them into an object that is often an heirloom, Clifford cements these small moments in life and nature as worthy of holding on to and passing down. The Flowers We Keep runs through June 15 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 4 p.m.; Friday, noon to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. visartscenter.org. Free.
Through June 29: In Light We Move at The Silva Gallery x Latela
Rose Jaffe’s work is highly recognizable around the city, living everywhere from local shops, where you can buy her prints, to murals, multiple stories high, adorning buildings, and she has no shortage of exhibits displaying her work. At the Silva Gallery x Latela Curatorial, she displays the ongoing evolution and experimentation of her printmaking process, working with monoprints—unique images that can only be printed once, as opposed to printmaking techniques that can create endless copies. Materials such as bubble and plastic wrap are used to create different textures, and colors mix together and layer on top of each other in vibrant palettes. Jaffe always works in zippy colors, and the monoprints offer opportunities for an even wider spectrum of color options for the artist. Even the frames of the prints come in a rainbow of hues, to delicious effect. Her energetic and nurturing figures mingle with each other, various flora, and even their own minds, exploring connections both communal and spiritual. These stylized women stretch and twist and squiggle, curling around and over each other in pleasing configurations, and demonstrating not just body diversity, but the massive potential of those bodies both on their own and as a collective. Jaffe’s prints showcase a range of feelings, but most prominently joy and playfulness. These works share a rhythm and movement—two in particular call out dancing in their titles, and they do in fact seem to be boogying away contentedly. In Light We Move runs through June 29 at The Silva Gallery x Latela Curatorial, 1630 Columbia Rd. NW. Monday through Saturday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday noon to 5 p.m. latelacuratorial.com. Free.
Opens May 3: Banks Violette: i like america and america likes me at von ammon
A pepper’s ghost is an illusion dating back to the days of vaudeville and sideshow acts, where an image is reflected off of a pane of glass to seem to be projected in midair like a hologram, sometimes from an unseen room or chamber. At von ammon, artist Banks Violette uses this effect to fill the gallery with moving images. He draws from clips of coyotes in the 1983 movie Suburbia, slowing down and looping the footage, inserting these spectral predators into the otherwise placid gallery space. The coyotes and the show’s title, i like america and america likes me, are a hat tip to a performance piece by the same name done by the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, in which the artist spent three days in a gallery alongside a live coyote. Wildness and chaos encroaching onto the tidy confines of patriotism and capital are fixtures of Violette’s work, which at times includes industrial structures and light sculptures that look like collapsed or repurposed stadium fixtures. The artist also creates graphite drawings that range from minimal thumbnails of pop culture detritus to hyperrealistic horses and skulls rendered in film negative, the graphite so dense and dark that it appears truly black rather than gray. All signs point to things getting dark in the sculptures and works on paper that will make up the rest of the show, including the “don’t tread on me” snake reimagined as a multiheaded hydra. i like america and america likes me opens May 3 and runs through June 15 at von ammon, 3210 Grace St. NW. Friday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. vonammon.co. Free.
