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Some new work from moi

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 27, 2009

Here is some of my newest work - it's all encaustic on board. I wish I took better pictures.

"Paperworks" at Pyramid Atlantic

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 23, 2010

There is a little gem of a show now at Pyramid Atlantic, the fabulous printmaking/papermaking/letterpress atelier/school/gallery in renascent Silver Spring. It’s called, appropriately enough, “Paperworks” and the works include a bit of everything on paper, from etching to drawing to cut-outs to photography.

me taking a bad picture of Ress's piece

Beverly Ress contributes three entrancing pieces that feature tiny, delicate drawings and cut paper marooned on full sheets of paper. In less sensitive hands, the elements could easily have seemed random, but Ress combines and places them with sure-handed elegance. (My picture utterly fails to show anything about her piece, regrettably, but it does have a reflection of me taking the picture, which I kind of like.)

Jake Muirhead's Broken Windows

Sikorska's grid

I was also drawn to Jake Muirhead’s work, particularly the etching titled “Broken Windows,” which is appealing in an entirely different way. It’s dark and dense, evoking urban decay, perhaps the detritus of our once-proud industrial infrastructure. Elzbieta Sikorska’s grid of drawings on rice paper hang suspended about a foot off of the wall. I love the drawings of imaginary animals but, I gotta say, the suspended grid format is beginning to feel like a gimmick for her. Time to cut the cord, m’dear.

Jessup at Adams Bank and Jenne at Civilian

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 17, 2009

There is perhaps little that unites these two shows except for the fortuity that they opened on successive nights in DC and as I think about, they could be argued as bracketing the current art scene.

Georgia Milld Jessup

one of the original eight in the Vogel collection

The first, at the Adams National Bank on 17th St NW, is a modest show of a small portion of the work of Georgia Mills Jessup, but it comes with a terrific story. Ms. Jessup, a descendant of the Pamunkey Tribe of Virginia, is now in her gorgeous, vibrant 80’s. She is one of 18 siblings of a large DC family of many artists (including my friend and her niece Adrienne Mills, the well-known local photographer). After earning a BFA from Howard and an MFA from Catholic U., she went on to teach all kinds of art to DC pubic school students and to oversee the art curriculum for the entire system – back in the day when every public school kid had art and music classes twice weekly.

And there’s much more to the story: One day in the early 60’s, the young artist and teacher arranged to rent a home in DC from Leonard Vogel. When she met him to conclude the agreement, they began to talk. (Having spent just ten minutes in discussion with the engaging Ms. Jessup, I can imagine this conversation.) When he learned that she was an artist, he asked to see her work. She packed 8 paintings onto the roof of her car and drove it over to him, whereupon Mr. Vogel said he would buy them all and that she would not be a renter because they would constitute her down payment on the purchase of the house.

a new piece - the view from Jessup's deck

Those eight paintings constitute the core of the current exhibit, supplemented by a few of Ms. Jessup’s recent work. The exhibit has been arranged by Mr. Vogel’s son, Kenneth, as a tribute to both Ms. Jessup and his father. And so it is.

Paul Ruppert and Phil Barlow at Civilian

Ms Civiian, Jayme Maclellan

Civilian Art Projects recently moved to 7th Street across from the Convention Center, in one of the buildings that until recently housed the Ruppert family’s Warehouse theater/gallery/café complex. I love the location, which is still redolent of those days and the space has not been scrubbed antiseptically clean.

the sick boy scout

George Jenne is a Brooklyn artist who supports himself by making props and models for tv and movies. He is showing in DC for the first time at Civilian. “Don’t Look Now” is billed as an installation, a “multi-media environment reminiscent of a movie set.” I don’t know if I buy the installation as a coherent whole, (e.g. the graphite drawings are pretty great-looking but what’s their connection with the skewed movie posters and the props?) but there are a couple of terrific objects definitely worth the visit. My favorite is a deeply disturbing boy scout with a furry monster head, scuffed-up bloody knees and other obscurely allusive parts.

Fowler, Ben-Achour and Manley at Gallery Plan

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Jan. 13, 2010

Heidi Fowler at the opening

Bravo to Gallery Plan B’s Paula Amt and her crew, who continue to show strong regional artists in the 14th Street corridor, economy be damned. The current offerings are Heidi Fowler’s and Anne Manley’s paintings and Sabri Ben-Achour’s ceramics.

Ben-Achour's work

Fowler's work

I was immediately drawn to Ben-Achour’s macho ceramics; the best are muscular and aggressive in their prickliness. Which is in substantial contrast, actually, to the sweet young guy who made them.

Sabri Ben-Achour

I also love Heidi Fowler’s work. In her paintings, the most stark elements of modern industrial architecture loom over cities and landscapes. They are done on fairly subtly textured surfaces that enhance a quality of transience that is quite evocative.

Kick Start?

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Jan. 13, 2009

I seem to be suffering a bout of creative lassitude. So I taped a big piece of paper to the wall and this is what happened. Papersmoke? Maybe it's the germ of something new.

Photography @ CHAW

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Jan. 11. 2010

Linda Hesh

The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (“CHAW”), is a non-profit community institution that lives in a gracious old school building at 7th and G Sts. SE which houses art classrooms, a dance studio, gallery space, a ceramics studio an open darkroom, and more. The gallery is currently showing the group’s fourth annual juried photography show and the opening Saturday night was jammed.

Tripplaar's Galveston

a happy Tim

The work selected constitutes a pretty good survey of the photography world today, ranging from the essentially abstract to the self-consciously arty to the political, with landscapes, portraits and what can only becalled snapshots included. I was attracted to Kristoffer Tripplaar’s color pictures of neglected and apparently abandoned places made in Galveston in 2008, likely too late to be Katrina damage but why else the abandonment? Have the colors been muted or is everything so bleached out and arid? The pictures effectively pose the questions.

half of Goslee's self-portrait

Pat and Simon

I also love Pat Goslee’s dyptich and tryptich digital prints on aluminum. Her two-paneled “self portrait” is all light on dark, barbed wire fencing and what may be light waves, tough, prickly and protective against light, high-spirited and delicate – not a bad representation of the yin and yang of a real personality.

Michael O'S. and Ms. Arkin discussing

Sculpture Now 2010 at Edison Place

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 9, 2010

Faith Flanagan and Brigitte Reyes conferring

I'm back in town and seeing my first new art of 2010. The Washington Sculptor’s Group holds an annual juried show that, as the name suggests, showcases the selected current work of members. As in past years, this year’s version is housed in Pepco’s open and expansive Edison Place Gallery at 8th and G Sts. NW.

attention to Holtsman's "Twelve Squares"

The juror, Ryan Hill, has, he says, chosen work that “draws on our longing for a passing ideal of wholeness, our ways of making fragments cohesive…” I like the idea and the elasticity of the construct; we do constantly strive at both the conscious and unconscious levels to make visual and experiential sense of fragmentary information and as a contemporary organizing principle in the time of whizzing bits of data, it is very apt.
The show, however, seems a bit sparse on the ground, with the often small pieces set adrift in the large galleries and, with the exception of John Simpkins-Camp’s hanging monopoly-money dirigible, no use is made of the fabulous space created by very high ceilings.

Leila Holtsman

I love Leila Holtsman’s “Twelve Squares”, a wall-mounted “painting” of acrylic ink on weathered steel. Her use of hard yet vulnerable materials creates an elegant surface where the painted grid seems about to slide off in dissolution.

Elena Patino has contributed a collapsing cube of translucent white gridded plastic tubing connected with thread and monofilament. She calls it “Cuadricula (Long Live Sol Lewitt)”. It is a vulnerable and lovely object that makes good use of the shadows cast by the deteriorating cube.
The piece with the most stage presence is no doubt Karen Bondarchuk’s five-foot dead crow made of scavenged roadside tire scraps. There is nothing more dead than scraps of old tire; the perfectly inert blackness sucks up light and the piece makes an effective if ambiguous statement about the human effect on nature, given that the crow is a pretty nasty scavenger of death.

Kerry O. Furlani's piece

Just to prove that I don’t respond exclusively to decaying stuff, I’ll also call out Kerry O. Furlani’s two wall-mounted slate pieces and Alice Yutzy's stoneware plinth "Emergence". They both won me with the impeccable nature of their craftsmanship and the evocative quality both artists achieved by the smooth feminine curves in juxtaposition with architectural shapes. Are they battlements? Sexual or military?

Finally, I must do a mini-rant here; I am discouraged by some work that is badly made, sloppily constructed and unlikely to last intact much beyond the month-long duration of the show. One sees that too much in contexts where it can’t truly be said to be driven by conceptual dictates. It usually feels like a childish insult to me.

Ellyn's Cognitive Dissonance Goes to New York

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

December 13, 2009

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Cognitive Dissonance

As my Facebook friends know, I have been working for the past month on a commission for the Porter House Restaurant in the Time Warner Building in New York. It’s now all done and will, God willing, be off to New York on Tuesday to be framed and hung. Mr. Weiss and I cut it off the wall today (or rather, he cut and I hopped around having crazy nerves) and got it ready to travel. So here it is – it’s called “Cognitive Dissonance”, is 3.5 feet wide by 12 feet long and is made mostly of oilbar and dry pigment.

my studio assistant Weiss cutting her off

Mid-City Artists and Friends at Coldwell Banker

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

December 12, 2009

Zade Ramesy assemblage

bad picture of my encaustics

Coldwell Banker, a stylish Dupont Circle real estate agency that doubles as an art space has given its walls over to Mid-City Artists, that loose gang of artists who live and/or work in the Dupont Circle/Logan Circle/Shaw environs. The members of MCA, in turn, each invited a friend to join in this invitational exhibit, which opened Friday evening with a terrific reception - little sandwiches and everything. These guys do memorable opening reception chow so no artist need starve.

Bill Harris

Chuck Baxter and his quilt

I was Ms. Sondra’s friend and my three encaustics even sold at the opening, so that was a lovely bonus. I saw some interesting stuff, including Bill Harris’s terrific monoprint, Zade Ramsey’s moving and well-wrought assemblages, Chuck Baxter’s quilt made of business cards collected at Artomatic, Tom Drymon’s beautifully subtle white painting (titled, aptly,”Floe”) and Trish Tillman’s intricate cut-paper collages all the way from New York.

Trish Tillman's

Mark Parascandola, Ms. Sondra and Tom Drymon

So thanks to those real estate guys at Coldwell Banker. They are on 17th Street between P and Q and should be supported should you have real estate needs.

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