Visual Arts

Book Hill Galleries of Georgetown Host Fall Season Art Kick-OffSeptember 19, 2013

Georgetowner • September 19, 2013

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The Georgetown galleries on Book Hill are one of the few true gallery clusters in the city. Along a few blocks of Wisconsin Avenue, audiences are surrounded by art, free to walk into galleries that call to them from their vibrant window displays. This group of galleries offers us a great variety of works to explore, from renowned glasswork to classic landscapes and the contemporary and avant-garde.

This Friday, Sept. 20, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., each of the six galleries will launch a fine art exhibit and host an evening stroll, welcoming the breezy autumn art season with the Fall Season Art Kick-off. Here?s a look at what?s happening on Book Hill. For more information on the Georgetown Galleries on Book Hill visit www.GeorgetownGalleries.com

**Heiner Contemporary**

Heiner Contemporary will present ?Rachel Farbiarz: Take Me With You,? an exhibition featuring new drawing, collage and installation by the DC-based artist. The exhibit, which will be on view through November 9, reflects Farbiarz?s interest in the personal, idiosyncratic resonances that course through shared public, historical and political events. Using various media, she explores subjects including formal apologies, migration, war and burial and investigates how the emotional reverberations of words, objects and ideas linger and mutate throughout generations. For more information visit www.HeinerContemporary.com

**Susan Calloway Fine Arts**

An outdoorsman who explored the wilderness in search of inspiration, Larry Chappelear (1945-2011) created paintings as a visual diary of his experiences. His landscape paintings contain intimate enclosures of nature and accomplish what many landscape painters before him have sought to do: achieve a compositional balance among form and open space, color and light. A collection of landscape and abstract works by Chappelear will be featured in the exhibition, ?Dynamic Spaces,? through October 19. For more information visit www.CallowayArt.com

**Maurine Littleton Gallery**

Maurine Littleton Gallery will host ?Glass Sculptures & Vitreographs,? an exhibition featuring three-dimensional glass works and prints by artists Dale Chihuly, Erwin Eisch, Richard Jolley, Harvey K. Littleton, and Therman Statom, through October 19. Vitreography is a printmaking process that uses glass plates instead of traditional materials such as metal, wood, or stone. Developed in the mid-1970s by Studio Glass Movement founder Harvey Littleton, vitreography has been opened up to a wide range of possibilities by artists working in sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Over one hundred artists, including those featured in this exhibition, have created more than seven hundred print editions at Littleton Studios. ?Glass Sculptures & Vitreographs? offers a unique opportunity to view sculptures and prints by master glass artists side by side, giving insight into their individual creative processes. For more information visit www.LittletonGallery.com.

**Addison/Ripley Fine Arts**

Addison/Ripley Fine Arts will feature ?John Borden Evans: Solitude,? an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper that explore the old farmhouses and surrounding rural area of North Garden, Virginia. Evans depicts rural landscapes and animals in his thickly painted works, creating texture through build up and scrape away techniques. Through October 26. For more information visit www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

**Neptune Fine Art**

Neptune Fine Art will host ?Objects of Desire? through October 26, an exhibit that celebrates contemporary artists and the extraordinary work they create. Featuring ten established artists, the exhibit is a tantalizing glimpse into the work of these respected artisans: William Adair, Raya Bodnarchuk, Jeff Chyatte, Will Clift, Tazuko Ichikawa, Elaine Langerman, Laurel Lukaszewski, Jimmy Miracle, Wendy Ross and Foon Sham. The exhibited works delve into a wide variety of media, reflecting each artist?s finely honed talent, producing exquisite sculpture, editions and drawings. Sculptures in steel, bronze, aluminum, wood, and wax; porcelain wall reliefs, and intricate silver point drawings combine to fill the gallery. Come by for a chance to meet the artists. For more information visit www.NeptuneFineArt.com.

**Robert Brown Gallery**

Robert Brown Gallery will exhibit the photographs of Roger Ballen, an award winning photographer who has been shooting in black and white film for nearly fifty years. Part of the last generation that grew up with the media, Ballen sees black and white as a very minimalist art form and unique from color photography in that it ?does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.? For more information visit www.RobertBrownGallery.com.

‘Over Under Next’ Experiments in Mixed Media 1913 – Present

Ari Post • September 12, 2013

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It is important to believe that something significant can be born out of us, because we ourselves are significant. We are an active part of our environment, and so we absorb and affect both its landscape and its ephemera. When we create something, even while fiddling absentmindedly with one odd distraction or another, we intuit the possibility for a greater conclusion to come of it, pulled out from the life which courses through us. To be really pedantic about it: Asserting the natural filter of consciousness is important to the pursuit of things like abstraction, which depends on the ability to communicate something that is inherently not communicable. A different way to think about it might be: Our heads are overloaded with great and often untellable stuff, and if we are lucky we will someday find a way to get it out in the open.

In a unique and refreshing manner, mixed media in art brings the artist’s misplaced ideas and subconscious thoughts together with the very objects and materials of their world. It goes beyond painting or sculpture, wherein an artist creates every shape, line and color to reach their conclusion. With mixed media the content already exists, waiting to be assembled. The art form is quite new, co-invented in the early 20th century by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. According to the Guggenheim Foundation, the glued-on patches of wood, cloth and other materials that they added to their canvases offered a new perspective when they “collided with the surface plane of the painting.” The practice was discovered by many artists to be a useful new manner of visual communication that interacts directly with the surrounding environment.

“Over Under Next, Experiments in Mixed Media, 1913 – Present,” an exhibition at the Hirshhorn through Sept. 8, explores this medium from its creation in the early 20th century through today, demonstrating how artists continue to deal with their rapidly expanding world in beautiful new ways.

The first room in the exhibit is a trove of delicate and forgotten artifacts of modern art—an appropriate tone to set the direction of the show. There is of course a Braque, a 1913 painting collage of a violin and sheet music, which resonates as the catalyst for the ensuing journey. There is also a large-scale 1959 work by Robert Rauschenberg, perhaps the most renowned mixed media artist of all time. His innovative “Combines” of the 1950s employed non-traditional materials and objects, from photomechanical reproductions, to cloth and metal on canvas.

These works bookend some smaller compositions by a handful of highly influential, if lesser known, artists of the early 20th century: Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Joseph Stella, Man Ray and George Grosz, among others.

Born in Germany in 1913, Schwitters incorporated refuse that he scavenged from the streets into paintings, collages and even poems. Merz, Schwitters’s one-man art movement, was rooted in a desire to create connections between all things, using printed ephemera, rubbish, and found materials. In “Milwaukee” (1937), his complex design combines elements of nonsense and chance from the Dada art movement with unusually strong design properties. Leaving Germany in 1937 due to the deteriorating political situation, his work was radical enough to earn censure as “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime.

World War II ends up playing a supporting role in this exhibition, as the political landscape and accompanying propaganda of the Nazi party became inescapable fodder for mid-century European and American artists. Höch and Grosz were German contemporaries of Schwitters and members of the Dada movement, who employed collages to respond to their country’s societal upheaval. Grosz’s brutally comic “Clock-Faced Woman” (1953), with its assemblage of human facial features forming a devastating frown on a clock face with pinup girl legs, is reminiscent of his savage caricatures and political cartoons of German political machinations.

Hans Richter’s heavily political “Stalingrad (Victory in the East)” (1943 – 1944) is a large-scale panoramic collage that functions as a timeline of the war. Richter used English newspaper clippings with headlines like, “Nazi Lines Ripped At Stalingrad Front,” arranged in a playful composition of organic shapes and primary colors that recalls Alexander Calder’s mobile structures. Calder’s work is in fact displayed alongside “Stalingrad.”

An entire room is devoted to the work of Joseph Cornell, whose modern cabinets of curiosity act like dreamy funnels for displaced memories, desires and histories. The myriad works are so rife with subject matter of bygone eras that they feel like the diagrammed mind of an Alzheimer’s patient whose old memories resurface to displace the ones it has lost, intermingling with the static of the present. One piece shows us a map of the equator lining a shadowbox, with miniature glass goblets holding pearls inside and metal rings hanging from the top. Like much of the show, this is a body of work that must be experienced to fully understand. But then that is the beauty of art, and the significance of mixed media. It exists nowhere but in its own time and space, offering us a chance to understand our world in ways that escape us at the tips of our tongues.

“Over Under Next” will be on display at the Hirshhorn through Sept. 8.
For more information, visit Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="119177,119179" nav="thumbs"]

Wolf Trap: New Season, New Leader

Nico Dodd •

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We are lucky that lovers of the performing arts have so many venues to choose from, especially for outdoor concerts. Wolf Trap, in Vienna, Va, is special for its breadth of programming and sincerity of space. This year, the Wolf Trap Foundation has a new President and CEO. Arvind Manocha has spent the majority of his career with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl.

One of Wolf Trap’s distinguishing characteristics is that “it’s in the company of one,” Manocha said. “There is one national park for the performing arts. There are a lot of great national parks in this country obviously, hundreds if not thousands, but only one that was created expressly to celebrate and nurture the performing arts.”

Manocha grew up in northeast Ohio and graduated with honors from Cornell University. He went on to study literature at Cambridge University in England, where he was a Marshall scholar.

As an arts institution, Wolf Trap creates its season from every musical genre. At The Barns, a week of programming can include artists who play music as varied as zydeco to jazz to folk. Round that out with National Symphony Orchestra, the Wolf Trap Opera Company and musical theater productions, and persons have about any choice they could think of.

“To have a commitment to embracing music across a spectrum was, I think, very forward- minded of Mrs. Shouse and how this place was set up, and very much reflects the reality of how people consume music now,” said Manocha, reflecting upon the legacy of Wolf Trap founder Catherine Filene Shouse.

Manocha has a soft spot for design. In Los Angeles, he was a member of the advisory board of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and has served on multiple national design juries for the American Institute of Architects.

“I love architecture,” Manocha said. “You can go to a lot of soulless arenas that are designed to be hockey rinks that now have music in them, and patrons know that. They can tell when it’s not really intended for what it’s being used. When you come here, and you’re in a perfectly naturally beautiful spot with this amazing facility, it’s very clear that this was designed to be enjoyed as a concert venue.”

Driving up to the Filene Center, the wooden amphitheater rises from behind a hill. It has a striking presence on a clear winter’s day — or summer one, for that matter.

“It’s kind of monumental,” said Manocha, who succeeds another kind of Wolf Trap monument, Terre Jones.
Jones, who served as president and CEO of Wolf Trap for 17 years, is now president emeritus. He and his wife Polly moved to Santa Fe, N.M.

For such a multifaceted arts operation, a change of leadership could be a difficult change. Wolf Trap’s board chairman John Lee IV is happy with how things have progressed.

“I couldn’t think of anything to do over again,” said Lee, who has been on the board for four years and lives with his wife at the Watergate Apartments. “The whole thing’s been very seamless. The former CEO, Terre Jones, gave us a year’s notice. So, the transition of his leaving and Arvind’s coming in was as smooth as can be.”

The feeling is mutual for the crosscountry transplant. Manocha only arrived in Washington on Dec. 30, and his first day was Jan. 2.

“John is a great partner and turning into a great friend actually,” Manocha said. “He’s a wonderful person, who’s making this transition really smooth.”

In terms of the upcoming summer’s programming, Manocha is most excited for Colombian superstar Juanes.

“He is an unbelievable performer,” Manocha said. “He is one of the most important Latin artists of today. We also have the Wolf Trap debut of Josh Groban, who’s coming later in the summer.”

The photo here with Lee and Manocha were taken on a on a cold, breezy Wednesday. A few were taken in the seats of the amphitheater, and a few, not pictured, were taken on the Filene Center’s stage, the second largest in the country.

Admiring the architecture of the Filene Center from the stage, Lee commented about Manocha’s personal box up in the balcony.
“There’ll be time for that,” Manocha. “On a warmer day.” ?

Environmental Film Festival Coming March 12

Alison Schafer •

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Two weeks before show time, the Environmental Film Festival’s office on 31st Street NW is a place of quiet chaos. The festival begins March 12, and its small staff is working on details, logistics, and last-minute decisions. The festival’s staff is only ten people, but the numbers they generate are big: 190 films, 75 different venues, 111 world premiers and thousands of patrons.

Late on a recent Wednesday afternoon, questions flew around the office. “Do you know when he’s flying in?” asked Peter O’Brien, the festival’s executive director, about a presenter. “And how about the launch party,” Chris Head asked Georgina Horsey, “When do we send out the invitations? Now?” Someone else asked about the social media push. Will the launch party invitation go on Facebook, Twitter or just email?

The theme of this year’s festival are rivers in human lives. One film, Lost Rivers, is about the hidden veins of water underneath major cities. Another traces the Rhine from its source in Switzerland through Europe to the North Sea. Where the Yellowstone Goes will answer that question, and another film looks at the perils facing the mighty Amazon.

For Washingtonians, the festival offers a look at the city’s own rivers. For those who spend time on the Potomac, Potomac: A River Runs Through Us highlights Washingtonians’ ties to the river that is the source of our drinking water. Festival-goers can explore the Anacostia via a series of stories from and about people that river.

Back on 31st Street, however, are the people who make the films run on time. Without them and their long days, the river of films, events, and presentations would dry up. Right now, the planning is in full swing. “What if we run out of food for the party?” someone asks. Meanwhile, Helen Strong, who does PR for the festival, wonders aloud if she can get Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA, to do a quick TV interview after a film. “My mind is blown by the amount of work the people in this room do,” says Rana Koll-Mandel, pecking away at her computer.

There is reason for so much concern. Last year, they did run out of food at the launch party. “We had enough planned,” explains Peter O’Brien, “but someone didn’t show up with it.” It all worked out fine–they had plenty of wine at the party, and plenty of films at the festival.

‘Pump Me Up’ Opening Revels in ’80s Subculture

Nico Dodd • August 15, 2013

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Scenes collided at the Corcoran’s “Pump Me Up: D.C. Subculture of the 1980s” at the exhibit’s opening reception Feb. 22. The exhibit chronicles D.C.’s graffiti, Go-Go and hardcore punk scenes from the late 1970s through the early 1990s and was curated by Roger Gastman, a graffiti historian from Bethesda, Md. Georgetown native Henry Rollins, deejayed the night with a selection of ’80s jams. Rollins grew up on 30th and R Streets, NW, across from Montrose Park.

Rollins, of hardcore punk group Black Flag, and Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, both worked in Georgetown businesses when they were young adults, first at the Georgetown Theater and later at the Haagen-Dazs, a location now occupied by Avocado Cafe. Rollins recounted how the two went to the Bayou to see Bad Brains open for the Damned in June 1979.

“They were terrifying,” said Rollins. “Our jaws were on the ground.”

The night reunited a lot of participants and enthusiasts in ’80s subculture.

“Pump Me Up” will be on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through April 7.

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Zach Appelman Stuns as Henry V at the Folger

Gary Tischler •

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Zach Appelman is a lot of things.

He’s a native Californian, an actor, and a onetime student. He’s even got a black belt in karate.

On his website you see a group of photos as well as his official photo, reddish brown hair, intense, clear blue eyes. The other photos are roles he’s played, people he’s been, a man in an 18th-century wig, a World War I soldier (Sgt. Fine in the Broadway production of “War Horse”), a bare-chested, muscled guy in mid- scream it seems, a regular guy in a checkered shirt, a studious-looking man in a 19th-century coat, a tense man in uniform, a laughing man, mouth wide open.

In his younger years, he has played many parts, been many people—Biff, one of Willy Loman’s sons in “Death of a Salesman” at the Chautauqua Theatre, directed by Ethan McSweeny, a Shakespeare Theatre favorite here; a bit in the hugely popular series “Homeland” as the vice-president’s aide, a part in the independent film “Kill Your Darlings”, out this year, with Daniel Radcliffe.
He has been in the Shakespeare chronology, Francis Flute, Tybalt, Surrey and Salisbury, Silvius, Edmund, Dromio of Ephesus and Alcibiades in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Chautauqua Company, the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Theatre Artists Group, and at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. At the Yale School of Drama, he’s been Ferdinand, Orlando, Oberon, and Chebutykin in ‘Three Sisters” and Aslak” in “Peer Gynt”
To name a few.

Today, here and now, Zach Appelman is the king.

He has the title role in the Folger Theatre production of Shakespeare’s “Henry V”, directed by Robert Richmond, who directed successful productions of “Othello” and “Henry VIII” at the Folger, and who chose Appelman for the part.
Not every man or actor can be and play the king, especially this king, the heroic king, the king played by many young actors, including some very famous ones: there’s Kenneth Brannagh in HIS movie version, which some saw as an anti-war film, and there’s Sir Laurence Olivier’s patriotic 1940s film version.

“Yeah, those are big shadows, I suppose,” Appelman says. The voice on the phone is youthful, confident, engaging. “You have to find your own way into the part, bring it to yourself, to your own time. I think Henry is a very complicated man, it’s a complicated part, it’s not just the speech, the St. Crispin’s day speech, ‘we band of brothers.’ The play is so familiar, and that speech is so familiar, it’s been said and spoken and memorized by so many people.”

“You start with the text, and you find some very interesting things,” Appelman said. “This is the Henry now king, but still a part of him is the Henry hanging out with the ruffians in the taverns, with Falstaff, in “Henry IV”. One quality I’ve found is that he hides things from others, he’s secretive, he can’t just show himself, he likes disguises, especially when he’s king, and now, he has to be a leader, and be seen as a leader, he’s had to already deal with a conspiracy, and now he’s in France, and can’t be everyone’s friend, he’s the king. I think a lot of people think of this as a war play, or an anti-war play, but it’s not just about that. There’s tragic qualities to this, there’s so much humor.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility, and a major challenge,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare at Yale, in regional theatre, and different parts. If you’re my age—27, and by the way, that’s the age Henry was at this time in the play—you get a lot of the swains, the men that the women in the comedies fall in love with, the young guys. There was a production of “The Tempest” which I auditioned for and I got Ferdinand and I was kind of disappointed because I would have liked to have done Caliban, something meaty like that. I was told that giving life to the Ferdinands or the Orlandos, making them interesting and getting people to pay attention was the kind of thing that made you a good actor

“Same thing with Henry, he’s a lot more than the hero king, he has to be all things to all people, and that includes making decisions that affect people he cares about, he has to be the courtier with the French king’s daughter, a courtship that can be very funny.”
Appelman grew up in San Francisco Bay Area, in Palo Alto, home to Stanford, and first tried acting in college, which swept him on the road to a career.

He sounds perceptive, and thoughtful about his craft and how it echoes. “ This is first time here. I think Henry is one of those people who’s had to learn to be a leader, and that’s a theme that certainly echoes here in Washington at this time. I haven’t had much of a chance to explore the city, but there’s been a lot going on right now—the inauguration, and all the excitement around it—but we’ve been rehearsing. But that’s what we have now—a divided country, opposing forces or parties, it echoes strongly. “
Looking at his record—BFA from UC Santa Barbara, MFA in Acting from Yale School of Drama, a stint with the Adcademia Dell’Arte, honing his stage combat skills, listing as special skills juggling, dialects and accents, and playing blues, rock and folk guitar—you get a sense of an actor working to enrich his abilities and craft.
Which sort of fits—a president has to learn to be a leader, a king has to learn to rule, and an actor brings everything he has to the task of being a king on stage.

“Henry V” continues at the Folger Theatre through March 3.

The Georgetowner’s Fourth Annual Photo Competition

Ari Post •

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As 2013 rears its flu-riddled head, weary from a long year of bitter political standoffs and tempestuous clashes of conflicting social mores, now would seem a good time for all of us to sit back, watch the sunset and remember that we all live under the same sky. Maybe we can look back over the past year and see it a little differently: a year of confronting our demons, overcoming our obstacles and learning our limitations. It could have been a year of achieving unprecedented feats, or perhaps it was a year when we were humbled by the realizations of our shortcomings. Thick or thin, the onset of a new year is a good time to take stock of the last 366 days in review.

The Georgetowner’s annual photo competition, like any annual competition, was founded to commemorate the preceding year. Our neighborhood teems with life, and as these photographs make clear, it is ultimately the smaller seasonal and daily occurrences that make up our memories and define us for ourselves. There are friends and families, summer days on the Potomac, and autumn evenings walking along the canal, with the timeless grandeur of our historic row houses serving as an ever-present backdrop.

Of all the standout entries we received, the camera lens most regularly seemed to settle on our neighborhood as a focal point for some of Washington’s most memorable landscapes and cityscapes, but the overwhelming submissions that flowed beyond Georgetown and into the wider limits of our city were impossible to ignore.

Sometimes, it takes a picture to capture the essence of a time and place. In Georgetown’s case, this is especially so, as time and place are bridged tenuously between the tradition of the past and the promise of a future. As we look on from Waterfront Park, past the Kennedy Center and into the city beyond, one thing remains in focus: we live in a beautiful place.
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A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII at the Corcoran Gallery of Art

Ari Post •

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There is an exacting notion of displacement that permeates the current work of artist Taryn Simon, on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through Feb. 24 of next year. At its essence, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII is a tapestry of 18 fractured and unresolved stories of small familial communities all over the world. This is not an easy show to deal with. It is psychologically unsettling, often times disturbing, and frankly cold, its presentation rigid, systematic. However, the experience is unlike anything else on display in Washington.

The show asks us to deal with pasts and realities that are not our own in a way that is neither fictional nor specifically historical. It tests our limits of empathy and estrangement, ultimately exposing our own interpersonal narratives in how we cope with and perceive these lives we will never know but instinctively judge.

Simon, whose past documentary work has included a series on wrongly convicted prisoners (“The Innocents”) and another on items detained at U.S. customs and post offices (“Contraband”), is fascinated by the concept of bloodlines. For A Living Man, she spent four years traveling the world, researching, cataloguing, determining an order for, and finally photographing the ascendants and descendants of eighteen individuals and their family trees. She categorized her findings into 18 “chapters,” with each corresponding to a single bloodline.

They are each displayed as a panel that includes a grid of portraits of the family unit, a written statement about the bloodline’s significance, and supporting photographs acting as narrative elements to the stories she came across in her research. Each includes a numbered key with biographical information about each subject who sat for her.

In Chapter I of the project, from which the title of the series takes its name, Simon focuses on the story of a man and three of his living family members in India who died—at least as reported by their local government. Accordingly, they are listed as legally dead in the local registry, which was done to deny them any hereditary transfer of land.

Another chapter documents Latif Yahia, an Iraqi citizen who was forced to become the body double of Uday Hussein, the psychopathic son of Saddam Hussein. Simon tells the story of Yahia’s facial reconstruction surgeries and of the threats he received upon his family when he initially refused to go along with the plan. In a frame on the photographic evidence page sits a gold-plated Iraqi AK-47 and sniper rifle, both seized by the Americans when storming Uday’s palace. In a rare, if odd, moment of comical brevity, Yahia does impersonations of Uday.

Chapter XVII, which documents a group of displaced children from Ukranian orphanages, is an interesting sample. The lack of a clear bloodline is actually a defining factor. The orphanages for children between the ages of six and 16 are often just a temporary holdover before the children are released and immediately and targeted for human trafficking, prostitution and child pornography. The images show children dressed in clothing that is surprisingly nice but rarely well fit (as they are donated).

No one is smiling in any of these portraits. At first glance from across the room, this could be an entomological display—hundreds of moths and butterflies in a glass case.

“The works are designed to imply patterns and codes and systems, and to imagine the collision of order and disorder,” says Simon, “representing something that came before, that’s happening now and will happen again.”

Up close, Simon’s subjects indeed look like they were posing for a much more archaic portrait—say, for instance, a 17th-century oil painting. Like the curious, young Infanta Margarita in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, perfectly still and wary of the artist who is capturing her likeness, Simon’s subjects face the camera, arms down, unflinching and without emotion save for the corrosion of despair, pride, resentment, fear or whatever default setting that has come to define their existence.

Ultimately, as the work suspends in time these slow and unrelenting human dramas, what the audience is left with is an ominous sense of cyclicality: are these currents of history that its players are inevitably caught in, just ripples fol- lowing in the wake of their past? And will their next generations evolve, or are they crashing against the shore only to get pulled back out to sea?

Without asserting an opinion on the wide array of social and political discord rampant through these visual bloodlines, Simon packs a brass-knuckled punch to the emotional gut of her audience. The displacement lies in the external forces of governance, religion territory, power and luck that play out during the lives of every individual, clashing against internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.

“The numbing persistence of birth and death and the accumulation of all the stories between—are all of these stories and lives just piling up, or is something unfolding?” Simon asks. “There is no conclusion or overarching declaration, it’s about the difficulty and understanding of what we’re all doing here and what it all leads to.”