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New Gallery Opens At Smith Farm

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

May 9, 2008

Temple of the Phoenix

Tai Hwa Goh and Novie Trump

Smith Farm Center for Healing and the Arts is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit group that serves people affected by cancer and other serious illness. Among the many programs they sponsor is an art gallery that inaugurated a unique new space on U Street this weekend with a terrific show titled "Immersed in the Natural World." Curated by local standout Lillian Fitzgerald, who always finds artists of the highest quality for the spaces she curates at the National Institutues of Health and the US Botanical Gardens (among others), the exhibit showcases the work of three area artists whose work engages deeply with the natural world.

triptych by Tai Hwa Goh

Elizabeth Burger uses seedpods, roots, twigs and other natural material to build oversized yet delicate constructions. Tai Hwa Goh (who once shared a residency with me at the Greenbelt Center for the Arts) layers hand-waxed thin printed papers to build up paintings that seem like the remainders of fading memory. Novie Trump, who has quickly become one the most interesting ceramic artists around, uses her background as an archaeologist to make pieces that embody the iconic forms of reliquaries and ancient cermonial objects. In her installation "Temple of the Phoenix", pillars encircle a pile of bleached bones topped by a large lustrous egg. As the title suggests, the piece evokes the eternal quality of the birth/death cycle.

BTW: Novie Trump is among the artists whose studios will be open for Mt. Ranier Day next Saturday, May 17, from 12 - 5 pm. In fact, at 3708 Wells Ave, she is right next door to Sinel/Stewart/Weiss at 3706.

Tory Cowles at Touchstone

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

May 9, 2008

Tory's piece and Sheep Jones

Me, Tory, Susan Finsen, Sheep Jones

Tory Cowles has always been a painter whose work makes you smile on a rainy day and her latest solo at Touchstone shows her at her vibrant, expansive best. The work is large and splashed with gorgeous color, as we have come to expect, but the newest pieces show an added depth of vision, with hints of text and deeper meaning pushing through. We saw lots of old friends at the opening and had a grand old time. So go see this show on a rainy day, or any day at all, because who can't use a smile?

Also showing in the gallery is Steve Alderton, whose work has lately moved beyond abstraction. Perhaps influenced by time spent in France, his show includes several lovely and evocative landscapes that seem suspended in time.

Jen Stark at Civilian Art Projects

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

May 9, 2008

The Very Young Jen Stark

Among the many openings this busy weekend was Civilian Art Projects, the floor above Touchstone at 406 Seventh Street. I think the standout of the show is the just-graduated from MICA (sigh for the days when) Jen Stark, who carves into stacks of colored construction paper, fashioning intricate and intriguing objects that capture you with their visual appeal and make you stop for a while trying to figure out how they were made. She says she started doing them in Europe when the only art supplies she could afford, given the sad state of the dollar against the Euro, were construction paper and blades.

Arkin and DeLooper at PASS Gallery

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

May 6, 2008

Sondra Arkin

Betsy Stewart, Sondra Arkin, Ellen Sinel

PASS Gallery, Richard Siegman's long-standing DC non-profit space lives in a two-story building accessible from the alley between R and S Streets a couple of blocks east of Dupont Circle and has a history of showing local artists at an interesting point in the arc of their careers. This time he is showing Willem deLooper, a local institution currently featured in a retrospective at the Katzen Center at American University, along with Sondra Arkin, who has been showing widely in the city for about 5 years. The pairing is inspired.

Disclosure: Sondra is a close friend of mine. But any disinterested observer would have to say that her work in this show holds its own and a whole lot more. Her 7 encaustic paintings, ranging from 48" square down, are luminous, glorious exercises in the conjunction of color, texture and shape. A horizon line has appeared in the largest new work, transforming them into landscapes and adding an additional element of interest. Encaustic can be a dangerous medium for artists (here I speak from experience) because it seduces by its sheer beauty and can submerge one's intent. These pieces confirm that Arkin has clearly mastered the use of the medium for her artistic purposes.

Willem deLooper

DeLooper's canvases also mix large blocks of color and texture. They are reflective without being too quiet and connect him with the Washington color school artists who were his near-contemporaries without yoking him reflexively to that tradition.

PASS Gallery is open Tuesday and Saturdays from 1 - 5 and this show is worth making the effort.

Artists for Obama

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

May 6, 2008

Artists and Writers for Obama

George Pellecanos

Last night I was delighted to attend a fundraiser by Artists and Writers for Obama at the Halcyon House in Georgetown. We all got dressed up in our best clothes, the hosts invited people who buy art and publish books, as well, and got a great turnout. I'm told that $70,000 was raised. (Judging by the quality of the suits, my guess is that there were some lawyers there, as well, God bless 'em.) Mayor Fenty, looking impossibly young and energetic as usual, and just back from a trip to North Carolina to troll for votes, stoked the crowd and George Pellecanos, the crime writer laureate of DC and co-writer of The Wire, spoke in a truly moving way of what it would mean to this country to have Obama as president. The finger food was nice, the lawn was squishy under our best shoes and the view over the roofs of Georgetown and the Potomac River was spectacular.

Go O Go!

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

April 25, 2008

52 O St. NW has been an artists' studios building for well over 25 years. In this land of gentrification eviction, that practically qualifies for historic landmark designation. This weekend is 52 O's annual spring open studios and I saw a lot of good art, some very good. Unquestionably seeing the cloud instead of the silver lining, I am reminded again of the heartbreaking truth that there are so many interesting, serious artists around and not nearly enough original art buyers.

Betsy Damos

Several DC stalwarts work at 52 O. Betsy Damos's work covers so much territory in materials and concept that I stand in rank admiration. There are large sculptural pieces in plexi, metal, wood, and a kind of chain mail that she fabricates out of wire. There are small contemplative drawings and the latest work is drawn on canvas and evokes the feeling of deep forest on a bright day.

Stevens Carter

Stevens Carter, who has public work throughout the area, has done some large pieces that stopped me in my tracks. They feature brightly-colored almost anime floating shapes that look like they are being viewed through a microscope. The effect is enhanced because the pieces are in fact three-dimensional, with some of the painting on the front glass (I think).

Michelline Klagsbrun

Another artist who has been at 52 O for some time is Michelle Klagsbrun. Known primarily for her figurative work, she has recently produced some large canvasses that fashion organic shapes into imagined landscapes - a little bit of the Georgia O'Keefe thing going on, but far more complex. Also not to be missed is Andrea Haffner, who embeds flowers, twigs and other naturalia into deeply - colored resin for wall pieces and jewelry. They are gorgeous.

Thom Flynn

There is also something of a new generation at 52 O, many of whom are definitely worth watching, including Ben Tolman with his amazing pen drawings and Thom Flynn, whose large canvases literally burst with highly- colored chunks of torn cardboard covered with layers of a high gloss material. This picture is pretty awful because Thom for some reason trained a spotlight on his pile of art materials, but I thought it was better than nothing.

Encaustics and Depuydt Prints at McLean Project for the Arts

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

April 25, 2008

Gessner, Nexus 1-XX, detail

Go see this one before it travels away. Dopey title notwithstanding, (" Divas and Iron Chefs of Encaustic" yech) this show demonstrates the range of surface lusciousness and emotive meaning that is achievable with this medium. It has already been well-reviewed , e.g. Michael O'Sullivan's piece in the Weekend section of WAPO today,which also contains a full photograph of what is for my money the most entrancing work, Lorraine Gessner's "Nexus 1-XX".

Margolis, Four Months, detail

Photographs, however, particularly my primitive cell-phone efforts, do not begin to capture the sweet sheen and layered depth of the work. The eight artists are mostly college art faculty from various mid-Atlantic institutions and their interests and styles vary widely, from the slash-and-burn expressionistic daily "calendar" paintings of Deena Feigelson Margolis to the contemplative and oddly delicate light-suffused pieces of Heather Harvey.

Depuydt

Also not to be missed are the large format prints by Donald Depuydt that line the staircase up to the main galleries. Superimposing layers of dense imagery using a variety of intaglio and other processes which I could not entirely decipher however much I tried, Depuydt has achieved mysterious and sometimes frightening effects. I only wish that the MPA had managed to give him better space where the viewer could move back from the pieces to see them in better perspective. I hope that next time they do.

Dog is my co-pilot

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss
Emo Herself

Art Anonymous

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

April 24, 2008,

Little guy

I spent a pleasant chunk of today with my good friend Sondra Arkin making teeny tiny little pieces of art - 5" x 7"- for the Art Anonymous fundraiser for the Corcoran School of Art. Given my (at best) ambivalent feelings on the subject of the Corcoran (see April 4, below) let me add that I am doing this because my friend Philippa Hughes asked me and I always try to do everything that the fabulous Philippa asks. But I digress.

This is the Corc's description of the event:

Art Anonymous
Sale and Reception Saturday, May 10, 6–11 p.m. in the North Atrium of the Corcoran Museum

The Corcoran Gallery of Art and FRIENDS of the Corcoran are proud to host their first Art Anonymous fundraiser, benefiting the Corcoran College of Art + Design’s BFA Scholarship Fund. Leading contemporary artists will offer for sale unique, postcard-sized works alongside the creations of students, faculty, and staff of the Corcoran College of Art + Design and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. All works are only $100—the catch: you do not know the identity of the artist until after the purchase.

So that officially makes me a Leading Contemporary Artist.

The piece reproduced here is not the piece I donated. I am abiding by the rules and keeping that one a big big secret. The little bitty piece here is another one that I made for me.

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