Visual Arts

‘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.”

14th Street Gallery Walk

Ari Post •

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The first flecks of yellow are dotting the trees around Washington, a seasonal indicator that, among other things, signals the arrival of the fall arts season. The galleries around 14th Street, between U Street and Logan Circle, exhibit works by new and emerging local artists as well as those of national and international renown. The monumental quality of work brings together painting, sculpture, photography, installation and multimedia into a color show that rivals our annual foliage display. These galleries, all within a 15-minute walk of each other, represent the best of D.C.’s local art culture. Here’s what’s coming up.

Hamiltonian Gallery

“Heritage Aesthetic” is a new body of work by artist Amy Boone-McCreesh, which runs through Oct. 13, with an artist’s talk on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. Exploring the dialogue between painting and sculpture, Boone-McCreesh sources a variety of materials, incorporating fabric, hand-made paper, rope and fur, to investigates the visual language of ceremonies and rites of passage while exploring themes of transformation and transcendence. Her found object installations are a pastiche of cultural heritage, adopting material cues from tribal ephemera, Middle Eastern ornamentation, and American Indian vestments. Her deconstructed global aesthetic appropriates the embellishment associated with celebrations from across the globe, speaking broadly to human accomplishment, customs and the universal tradition of decoration.

Gallery Plan B

Sheep Jones (on display through Oct. 14) is
a locally based artist, who operates a studio
out of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Va. Working in oil and encaustic, her paintings, which look both timeless and fresh, transport us to a different place and state of mind—they are in themselves lessons in how to look at and interact with the world. Cavernous mysteries of color
and environment grow in the shadow cast by a worn, tin-roofed shack. A community of glowing, entwined root systems exposes the playful source of life beneath a garden. And though her work playfully celebrates of life, there is a graceful stillness that leaves you with a sense of calm, as if all is right and as it should be.

Hemphill Fine Arts

Hemphill opens its fall exhibition season with “William Christenberry:
Assembled Memory,” on view through Oct. 27. This retrospective of sorts
spans over 50 years and stretches seamlessly across Christenberry’s wide variety of media such as drawings, objects, photographs and sculpture. The work of this renowned artist is held in the
collections of the Hirshhorn, The Phillips Collection and MoMA, to name a few, and his exhibit at Hemphill brings together a diverse group of work from the earliest days of his career rooted in abstract expressionism, his mid-career, which speaks to the wonderment and pathos for the passage of time, and his more recent work, which expresses undercurrents of good and evil within our architectural heritage.

Adamson Gallery

Through Oct. 27, Adamson Gallery will host the work of London-based artist Karen Knorr. The
collaged images in her exhibit, “India Song,” insert animals into large format digital photographs of interiors in
various palaces, mausoleums and holy sites in India. The series takes inspiration from Indian mythology, depicting scenarios that are at once otherworldly and hyperreal, the lush and surreal images achieving feats of stunning, exotic beauty. In “Edge of the Forest, Agravena, Agra,” two tigers lie relaxed and aware at the entry to the Taj Mahal. Their presence defamiliarizes our knowledge of the Taj Mahal as a contemporary tourist attraction, moving the space out of the present and into a mythical past. The viewer becomes a traveler, not through space or time, but through worlds.

Project 4 Gallery

“TOIL” is an exhibition of recent work by British artist, Jill Townsley, in her first solo exhibition in the United States, at Project 4 Gallery through Oct. 13. Her work examines the role of repetition in life, through sculpture, installation, drawings and video. Through tedious, rote tasks like scribbling, counting
and stacking, and using materials as banal as cash register till rolls and hairgrips, Tillman transforms these objects into something greater. These gestures are the exploration of industrial, workmanlike environments—the way a factory operates or a clock’s gears turn. There is a piece of paper almost entirely black. Accompanying
it is a video that shows Townsley scribbling manically on a white sheet of paper, and we watch as the paper and her lines become lost in time. [gallery ids="101010,135180,135166,135177,135172" nav="thumbs"]

Dreyfuss at the Kreeger: Union of City and Culture

Gary Tischler • June 25, 2013

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People in the culture-noticing business often talk about Washington, D.C., treasures, hidden or obvious.  They mean old, historical homes passed into museum-stage, museums in our midst of which we and, therefore, tourists are often unaware, as well as the artists or performers of national and international renown who live in our midst. 

This sort of thing—treasures in our midst that sometimes go, if not unheralded, perhaps at times under-appreciated—is especially true in Georgetown and its surrounding neighborhoods, place historic and cultured by nature and fact.  

The occasion of the launching of an exhibition of four sculptures by John Dreyfuss at the Kreeger Museum on Foxhall Road  was a kind of serendipitous event which brought members of the Georgetown community, the city’s art community and the folks at the Kreeger, including family members, together.   The show is meant to showcase  the three pieces by Dreyfuss—who is represented by George Hemphill of Hemphill Fine Arts, which was and remains one of the gallery jewels of the city—and the addition of the Kreeger’s reflecting pool as a new exhibition space.

The Kreeger began as the home for David and Carmen Kreeger, designed by prize-winning, much-honored architect Philip Johnson in 1963. It opened its doors as the Kreeger Museum in 1994 under director Judy Greenberg. It sits along upscale Foxhall Road in a changing area where developments have sprouted in recent years. Far from most of the city’s museums, especially along the mall and downtown, it still casts a large shadow with its incomparable collection of paintings and sculptures and works of art, including an inviting hallway that is a kind of pathway of the career of Pablo Picasso.

The addition of a reflection pool for exhibition purposes is a perfect fit for the Kreeger’s existing sculpture terrace and sculpture Garden. Also fitting are the three pieces by Dreyfuss from his “Inventions” series in their scale and intent, their execution as clean, bold fabrications that inhabit both the living now and the coming future in a primal way, as if a clarion call.

Dreyfuss himself, the holder of a world reputation as a sculptor who uses modern materials and thinks and creates in an epic way, is also a long-time treasure in the flesh, so to speak. His work has consistently impressed for years, including those years when he worked in his studio at Halcyon House, something of a historic treasure as well. Dreyfuss has since moved out of Georgetown to the new condos of Southwest D.C. 

The exhibition opening was a kind of showcase for both the Kreeger Museum and sculptor Dreyfuss along with the idea of cultural leadership and cultural treasures—the art as well as the artists among us—on full display in our midst.  Long-time Georgetowners showed up,  members of the Kreeger family, writers and national leaders to bask in the beautiful setting which off-and-on-again showers and storms actually managed to enhance.  Art is not so easily diminished or subdued.

The sculptures of Dreyfuss—three more will be added in honor of the Kreeger Museum’s 20th anniversary next year—are the kind of work that demands and suggests reviewing on different moods, on different days from different angles. 

The Kreeger Museum itself—bolstered no doubt by the occasion—is the kind of place which makes you reluctant to leave.  You want to convene with the lone Van Gogh, with the many Picassos, with the Henry Moore sculpture or the large head inside a window and think about music played at eveningtide here.  

In this way, the day and the night became a treasure at the museum, too.

John Dreyfuss’s “Inventions” runs through May 1, 2015, at the Kreeger Museum, 2401 Foxhall Road, N.W. — www.KreegerMuseum.org. [gallery ids="101301,150060,150016,150055,150049,150024,150045,150031,150038" nav="thumbs"]

The Parish Gallery, 22 Years Strong

Gary Tischler • June 20, 2013

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Occasionally, an art gallery comes along that helps define a neighborhood’s culture. When Norman Parish saw a “Gallery Space for Rent” sign in Georgetown’s Canal Square one Saturday afternoon in 1990, he did not know that gallery was going to be his.
He and his now wife Gwen, who runs the Parish Gallery with him today, were visiting One Step Down, the legendary local jazz club on Pennsylvania Avenue (now closed). It was their frequent haunt since Norman had moved to Washington in 1988 for work at an engineering firm.

He had always been an artist—in Chicago, he worked alongside many of the founding members of the AfriCOBRA art movement, including Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell. He helped paint The Wall of Respect in 1967, an outdoor mural on the South Side of Chicago by a group of artists from the Organization of Black American Culture. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks even wrote a poem about it, titled “The Wall.”

Norman long had aspirations to open a gallery, and when he saw this opportunity, he took it. The Parish Gallery opened its doors in June of 1991, marking the beginning of hundreds of exhibitions and artists the Gallery would host over the years.

In the beginning, Norman did not sleep. “He would get up at 3 a.m., get off at 3 p.m., and come to the gallery for the rest of the night to open the doors for Georgetown’s evening.

“It’s because I found out how many artists there were that needed support,” says Norman. “They were good, really good. But they needed someone to help get their work out into the world.”

“At first, a lot of the artists we featured I knew from art school,” he says. “But around 93 and 94, other artists just started coming to me. These were artists missing opportunities because nobody was looking out for them, nobody was out there promoting their work.”

It was also important for him to continue his work in Chicago, promoting the work of artists from the African diaspora alongside artists from other walks of life.

“It was his passion,” says Gwen. “He was an artist, and he understood the difficulties artists encounter in trying to get their work out.”

“Norman never used his gallery as a showcase for his own work,” says Alla Rogers, a friend, neighbor, and owner of Alla Rogers Gallery. “His business was dedicated to focusing on underappreciated groups of artists.”

Over the years, The Parish Gallery has exhibited works by artists from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and Morocco, alongside those from Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Spain and France. He forges Eastern, Western and African traditions with a harmony and ease of diversity that most gallerists work their entire lives achieve.

He has had success with his own artwork as well—he was selected as part of a traveling exhibition with the Smithsonian, “Seeing Jazz,” in the late 1990s.

In May of last year, a malignant tumor was discovered in Norman’s brain, and he underwent surgery immediately to have it removed. It has been a slow road to recovery in the following months, but as he points out, “I’ve been having more good days than bad days, and things are looking up again.”

After taking it easy for the second half of a year, the Gallery’s current exhibit is a “welcome back” of sorts. The current group show, “Through the Years,” features over 50 gallery artists that show Norman’s ability and range as a curator. It encapsulates the effect he has had on the Georgetown community and the people he and Gwen have brought together since the Gallery’s founding.
“And there’s more to come,” he says. “This isn’t even half. I have more artists than I can actually show, and I plan on hosting a follow-up exhibit in the near future.”

Norman is a true American artist, and The Parish Gallery represents the great artistic breadth that Washington has to offer. And we have confidence that he and Gwen will continue their artistic mission for many years to come.

Book Hill Art Gallery Walk

Ari Post • April 19, 2013

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There is more to see as spring rears its head than most people can take in, artistically speaking, let alone the blossoming outdoor wonderland. As our spirits and energy thaw after preserving itself through the winter, it is an all-encompassing blessing of April to be suddenly surrounded by great beauty at ever corner. Within Washington’s art galleries, the work is vibrant, robust and very much alive, bolstering the rejuvenated spirits of the city. The galleries on Book Hill, nestled together on Wisconsin at the top of Georgetown, have arranged a collection of unforgettable exhibits to welcome in the spring season. Here is a look at what they are offering.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
1670 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Through April 27, Addison/Ripley will be featuring the work of Amy Linn, an artist whose distinctive, vibrant and ambitious drawings balance precision with an elegant chaos. The works explore cultural diffusion, inspired by time Linn spent in Singa- pore and Russia. Her pencil marks fly and flare on pristine white surfaces, constellations of lines and points that pulsate like microscopic organisms or the Northern Lights. The growing complexity of her compositions and her deep commitment to her task, expanding weaves of tiny points of colored pencil in exuberant arrangements, can barely be contained on the paper. There is a lightness and balance that grounds her work, that can only be described as a soul. www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

Robert Brown Gallery
1662 33rd St., NW
Robert Brown Gallery’s current exhibit, “Window on Weimar,” on?display through May 24, includes etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, drypoints and char- coal drawings by some of the most renowned German artists of the early 20th century: Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, Lea Grundig, Max Pechstein and William Sharp. Many German artists in the 1920s valued content above form, using printmaking as an expression of immediacy, intimacy and a wider means of communica- tion with their audience. With the rapidly evolving political landscape as a backdrop, each artist offered their unique view of the human experience as effected by the Weimer era in Germany after WWI. With first hand experience of the destruction and suffering of war, artists in the Weimar Republic became distinguishable as advocates for social justice in addition to artistic creativity. www.RobertBrownGallery.com

Susan Calloway Fine Art
1643 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Causality is the relationship between events, where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first. This concept is explored within the boundaries of color and space in Washington-based artist Shaun Rabah’s exhibition Color Causality, through May 4 at Susan Calloway Fine Art. Each painting is composed of minimal layers of color, each a response to its predecessor, in an overall pursuit of beauty and purity. To truly see one of Rabah’s pieces, one must look beyond the surface layer to the numerous sub-layers and textures that together compose the final vision of the artist. In every piece, it is his intention to expose the life-cycle of each work, from the first brush stroke to its final manifestation. There will be an opening reception for the exhibit on April 12. www.CallowayArt.com

Heiner Contemporary
1675 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Heiner Contemporary is exhibiting “Concrete Abstract,” a group exhibition curated by Matthew Smith that explores the confluence of abstraction with the everyday, through April 20. Featuring work by a group of nine artists, the works in the show cultivate?a non-representational?visual language that?emerges from familiar?ready-made objects,?whether they are found?or alluded to compositionally. These ultimately balance the functional with the abstract, pushing and pulling out of context with the real, concrete world. Highlights include the Joseph Albers-like, neatly color-woven paintings of Jeremy Flick, and the real and suggested quilted surfaces of Matthew Smith and Becca Kallem. There is a discussion with the curator on April 20, open to the public. www.HeinerContemporary.com

Maurine Littleton Gallery
1667 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Maurine Littleton Gallery has been exhibiting and represent-?ing leading contemporary artists in glass, metal and ceramics?since 1984. Their current exhibited work includes the work of Washington-based artist Drew Storm Graham, whose mixed media paintings composed on stacked layers of wood extend off the walls by as much as a foot. Inspired by the countercultural movements of graffiti and tattoo art, his work aims to embody the bold and impetuous attitudes rooted in these cultures. Despite their unruly exterior, the artist notes, this type of art is itself impermanent and ephemeral, existing within a frame of time before its canvas is painted over by city officials or deceased. By creating a solid three-dimensional reality, Graham’s art reinvents its subject with physical permanence. www.LittletonGallery.com
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