SIGHT SCENE BRINGS YOU the first look at the semifinalists for the 2007 Sondheim Prize. A number of D.C.-area artists are in the hunt for a $25,000 grand prize.

The full list of semifinalist artists is listed at the bottom of this post. Those who live or work or primarily in the District follow ...

Mark Cameron Boyd, Mary Coble, Kathryn Cornelius, Frank Hallam Day, Steven Frost, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Joey P. Mnlapaz, Gabriel Martinez, Brandon Morse, Erik Sandberg, Molly Springfield and Jason Zimmerman.

Springfield and Zimmerman each took home a Trawick Prize in 2006. Boyd, whose "What does this say?" is pictured at left, is coming off a 2006 solo exhibition at the Katzen Center at American University. (Oh, and his piece in "No Representation" at the Warehouse is a standout in the show.) Morse's video, displayed at artDC, garnered a lot of praise; Cornelius drew a lot of eyes during a performance on the art fair's opening night.

Apologies for the link-dump — but do judge for yourself.

Artists got in the game by submitting 250 words and a disc of slides. Six finalists will show in the Thalheimer Gallery at the Baltimore Museum of Art, but only one will walk away with the grand prize. Last year's winner, Laure Drogul, is a multimedia artist whose work includes an olfactory installation. Pictured here is Drogul's "Sentorium (ghostly garden parlor)."

Established by the Balitmore Office of Promotion & the Arts in honor of the 25th anniversary of Baltimore's Artscape festival, the Baltimore City Paper reported in January that the city had arranged to renew the prize; the plan is to create an endowment to award the prize (named after Janet and Walter Sondheim) annually.

Jurors for the 2007 prize include Derrick Adams, artist; Becky Smith (director of Bellwether Gallery in New York City); and Robert Storr, artist, critic, curator, professor, and all-around art wonk.

Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Sondheim Prize Semifinalists Revealed" »

DO POST-MEDIA ARTISTS fret about the move from one medium to another — the way that a newspaper columnist might sweat writing a poem? Is there an interstitial palate cleanser? Or palette cleanser?

Post-media artist Alberto Gaitán's Remembrancer, seen here, a robotic painting installation at Curator's Office, is not exactly a transition between media. His piece — a machine that slowly drips paint on three gridded supports, in patterns determined by a variety of data inputs — also includes sound, the work for which Gaitán is best known. And the painting itself is incidental, anyway; the real work happens in the design and implementation of the data collection process.

In the 1990s, Gaitán might have been called an interstitial artist, someone who works in a field that falls somewhere between genres. The terminology has been updated, loosely, to postmedia, a category that enfolds increasingly larger groups of artists (in particular, sculptors, who just refuse to be chained to any single media). Gaitán's overriding interests in data, robotics and information technology unify his work.

But the same interests also date his pieces — situating them squarely within the late '90s. Roxy Paine manufactured art using a variety of industrial automatic painting devices, such as Painting Manufacture Unit and SCUMAK (Automatic Sculpture Maker) — pieces that fully disguised the artist's hand while cranking out artworks like so many widgets.

Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Alberto Gaitán" »

NOW YOU SEE HER, now you see her again. And again. In "Exposures," a show of new work at G Fine Art on 14th Street NW, photographer Barbara Probst uses timers and tripods to be two, three, even five places at once.

Her images are deceptively simple. Take Exposure #46: NYC, 555 8th Ave., 10.09.06, 8:23 p.m. (2006), pictured above — with the title alone, Probst has given the viewer everything but the GPS coordinates of the image: location, date, and time. It's a familiar Realist strategy, one Flaubert described as the use of "only the facts of an irrefutable and consistent truth."

The photographs themselves form another set of coordinates — different angles and strategies used to construct the complete piece. In some pieces, Probst shoots so that these coordinates (that is, each photo) only make sense in relation to one another. The orange in the color photograph is explained as a dress in the black-and-white photograph. The face in the first panel, obstructed by the model's hand, is revealed in the third panel. And the obstruction in that panel owes to the cluster of images in the middle shot. The three elements of the piece inform one another.

Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Barbara Probst's 'Exposures'" »

THE SUBLIMATED self-loathing of someone who, having reached the pinnacle of popular success, still craves gilt-frame cred is a sorry spectacle indeed. Ever seen the "fine art" of Dr. Seuss? You don't want to.

Kaj Stenvall works exactly the opposite trick. "I have been always painting realistic things," he said. Which may seem odd coming from a fellow whose stock-in-trade since 1989 has been cartoon birds, ducks mainly.

But perusing "Birdhouse," his show at the Finnish Embassy, reveals that he wasn't fooling when he said, "I try to make serious art." Stenvall inserts pop personages into finer settings as an oblique means of refreshing timeworn conventions of portraiture and genre painting.

Continue Reading "Still Life With Duck" »

IT'S NOT EASY to have a dry Q&A with the painter, art writer, educator and commentator. He talks speedily in a charming Mississippi accent and diverts the chat with amenities ("Who are your people?"). But he does manage to passionately and knowledgably touch upon many subjects, including the influence of Washington-area institutions and artists on his own work, one of the subjects of his National Gallery of Art "Saturday Bookcase" lecture, at which he will also discuss the book "Dunlap," a lavishly illustrated partial overview of his career as a dead-serious art prankster.

» EXPRESS: Many people think artists are some kind of idiots savant who should shut up and create. What are you doing?
» DUNLAP: Well, I'm having a wonderful time in the art world, and I do wear a lot of hats. It think it's counter-productive in our society to put people in a category and never let them out. … I want to be a moving target, as it were.

» EXPRESS: What makes a Washington-area artist besides geography?
» DUNLAP: D.C. is an international city and it's a city of international art. I'm fond of saying that it has a better group of artists than it deserves, considering the meager support the arts get.

» EXPRESS: You incorporate a lot of asides about art history and literature into your own work.
» DUNLAP: Writers have been a bigger influence on me than other painters: The magic realism of the South American writers and of course the Faulkners and Weltys, James Dickey and Willie Morris. Writing was the way they got their art done.

Continue Reading "Q&A: Artist William Dunlap" »

SO MANY GLASS ARTISTS, laboring under the misguided assumption that there is still a craft — art distinction to rebel against, overlook the medium's real challenge. As an art genre, glass has a long and sexy history, one that's tough to overcome. Glass is still seen as fragile, fashionable, feminine, and ephemeral, long after the notion expired that glass was best or only used to make vessels.

So Graham Caldwell has his fight cut out for him. With his wall-mounted sculpture, Caldwell aims to strip glass of all that baggage and deliver pieces that are strict, severe, and even unnerving. What he delivers in "Anatomies," his solo show at G Fine Art (and his first with the gallery), is something akin to alien vegetation.

Plasmodic pods, fungi, and tendrils erupt from the wall in outbreaks. The artist's proto-organic forms aren't completely without precedent — the chrome-colored pod pieces bring to mind Jeff Koonz and Anish Kapoor. The latter artist's playful approach to light and reflection (familiar to Chicagoans) is approximated by one of Caldwell's cluster of transparent orbs; the piece distorts the viewer's reflection as well as his perception of the steel hardware from which the orbs are suspended. Biomorphic imagery is apparent throughout the show, but especially in The Trophy and this toothy untitled work, pictured above.

Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Graham Caldwell at G Fine Art" »

Express contributor Kriston Capps surveys the local arts scene.

IVANNY PAGAN asks a lot of the viewer. His exhibition of paintings at U Street NW's Project 4, a joint show with Rich Macdonald that closes Saturday, features portraits of women he's known — but give them a second glance and you might not believe it. None of the clean, cool, bold oil paintings are finished, exactly; at a certain point into a painting, Pagan likes to let it alone. The backgrounds of his portraits are for the most part solid planes of color (the figure is set against white relief in most).

That's where things start to get dodgy. For example, in Antoinette I, at right, a small strip of painting is missing in a sense: while at the bottom of the painting the portrait bleeds off the edge, the depiction fails on the right-hand side before the canvas ends. Pagan calls attention to the ways that portraiture can mislead a viewer. The portraits themselves have a touch of fiction to emphasize the lie. Jubilee, a painting of a woman in the guise of a popular X-Men character, is based (like every other painting in the show) on someone Pagan knew personally. He mythologizes the women in his life with fantastic characterizations: Lilith, Marie Antoinette, and Kakusei.

Continue Reading "Sight Scene: Do Work" »

"I'M ONE OF THE FEW [abstract] artists in America working today who came from figurative painting," Sean Scully remarked, a basis underplayed in his fall 2005 show at the Phillips Collection. "Wall of Light" chronicled Scully's development from post-minimal canvases packed with thin stripes through hulking sculptural constructions bearing beefier swaths of color to the stony yet translucent works of the title series.

But, as Scully will explain Thursday afternoon in "Persistence and Style" at the National Gallery of Art, "There's two human needs, and one is to see the human body, which is never going to go out of style, of course. And the other is to be somehow abstractly spiritual. ... You can't get the sensuality of everyday life in abstraction very easily, even though I give it a good go. And on the other hand, you can't achieve the exalted spiritual freedom that you can in abstraction with figuration."

Born in Dublin, Scully has worked in New York since the mid-'70s. He also maintains studios in Munich and Barcelona. Each country influences his art, through its light, its culture and its conversation. In Germany, he said, "People talk about art much more in terms of layers of meaning. And that's an older, more established, deeper European tree, in a way."

Continue Reading "Bars & Stripes Forever" »

"SEDUCE AND DESTROY" sounds like a snarky post-Valentine's Day party for the jaded. But it's really a theatrical collaboration of some of D.C.'s forward-thinking talents focusing on integration.

The electronica/visual performance art ensemble Aphrodizia, led by classically trained keyboardist Yoko Kamitani, will fill The Space in Shaw with lush, cinematic soundscapes, while the Painted Lady Performance Project interprets the music through body sculpting in tandem with Dissident Display's visual improvisations.

The impetus for "Seduce and Destroy" ignited last October when Yoko, DD and Painted Lady performed at Modern Luxury magazine's anniversary party. Although the three entities were officially performing separately, DD co-founder Adrian Loving said there was a noticeable synergy fermenting.

"It was our idea for us to all get together as this body of entertainment for the anniversary party," he said.

Continue Reading "The Art of Seduction" »

ITS PRESENCE heralded only by a black-and-white sign that reads "Studio 416," the Dissident Display Gallery recently made a low-key entrance to the H Street NE corridor.

The brainchild of Adrian Loving and Ayodamola Okunseinde, both of whom have made significant contributions to the D.C. art scene — Loving as a DJ, graphic designer and event planner, and Okunseinde as a creative director and visual artist — the gallery's avant-garde interior is an extension of the owners' vibe.

White walls meet high ceilings and sleek design incorporates a DJ booth where Loving will spin sets at each show's closing party. Though he's quick to clarify, "Dissident Display is not a club with pictures on the wall." The booth simply adds another layer with which to "remix culture," a term Loving and Okunseinde coined to define their artistic process.

Before banding together, Loving and Okunseinde were separately trying to find their way after art school in the District. After recognizing a shared attraction to nightlife and multimedia art, the pair teamed up.

Continue Reading "On H Street NE, Art and Life, Remixed" »