review

Genius or Gobbledygook? “Real Beauty” at Carroll Square Gallery

Genius or Gobbledygook? “Real Beauty” at Carroll Square Gallery

LOUIS JACOBSON, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com

 

Art theory is often inscrutable, and it’s doubly so for abstract painting. That’s why the framing of the “Real Beauty” at Carroll Square Gallery needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

“Abstraction is arguably the truest representation of how the world feels, though by definition it obscures how the world actually appears,” reads the exhibit’s wall-posted introduction.

Is this genius or gobbledygook? It’s hard to tell. And most of the works—all of them abstractions, by four different artists—don't offer much help in sorting it out.

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The art of Amber Robles-Gordon is the art of Anacostia, quite literally.

Robles-Gordon cobbles together sculptures and canvas collages from scraps of paper and fabric she finds in the neighborhood’s trash cans and storefront windows. She’s shown her work at the Honfleur Gallery. Right now, she has a striking wire and fabric mesh artwork on view near the Deanwood Metro stop.

But as ARCH Development Corporation continues to expand its constellation of arts destinations in Anacostia—the latest is the Anacostia Arts Center on Good Hope Road SE—Robles-Gordon wonders if her neighborhood will still have room for her.

There’s a tendency to see Anacostia, long on talent and struggle but short on just about everything else, as a blank canvas. With the right kinds of art and advertising, the thinking goes, Anacostia can become a hub for the creative class. But who gets left out?

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Subtle Attention-Seekers Without Strings

Subtle Attention-Seekers Without Strings

Delusions of Grandeur seems about right for the name of an artists’ collective showing in a hole in the wall in Brentwood.

Located on the second floor of the Gateway Arts Center, the 39th Street Gallery is a 450-square-foot box that has been known to put on pretty cool little shows, including a recent micro-retrospective of the great D.C. painter Manon Cleary, who died last year. But the National Gallery of Art it is not.

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#MyDeanwood: Honoring the Past to Create the Future

The Washington Post

 

‘#MyDeanwood’

Patchwork is the operative mode — and metaphor — in “#myDeanwood: Honoring the Past to Create the Future,” a survey of art chosen to reflect Northeast Washington. There are other media in this small show, but most of the pieces are assemblages. Journalist and artist Esther Iverem makes quilted collages with historical elements, both personal and cultural; she sometimes invokes Oya, the Yoruba spirit of communication with ancestors. Sherry Burton Ways’s dolls are constructed of sticks, fabric, paper and what appears to be human hair; mounted atop strips of patterned fabric, these totemic figures evoke layers of history. Most interesting is Amber Robles-Gordon’s “Matrixes of Transformation” series, which does indeed transform her colorful fabric combinations by photographing them. These 2-D images have a strong sense of depth, but by focusing on details, they offer a more direct way to see Robles-Gordon’s tangled work.

 

 

#myDeanwood

DeanwoodxDesign ArtPlace Temporium

on view through Aug. 31 at the Tuban-Mahan Gallery, the Center for Green Urbanism, 3938 Benning Rd. NE. www.deanwoodxdesign.com

Jenkins is a freelance writer.

 

 

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Fibers, Filaments, and Fragments:

Amber Robles-Gordon and the Deconstruction of Self

By Jessica N. Bel

The power of a fiber rests within the nature of its unitary value. The interconnectivity of fibers creates a whole, an object that comes into existence because of the unification of its parts. Memory, personhood, and identity are conflated with the materiality of our things- our fashions, our gadgets, the products we buy, the things we keep and the detritus we discard. Our sense of “being” can be discovered with a thorough examination of what we leave behind. What we value, things we remember, in the modern world, material culture is the conduit to the self. In the meticulously rendered textile and mixed media sculptures of the exhibition “With Every Fiber of My Being”, artist Amber Robles-Gordon destabilizes the power of the fiber in its familiar context of object-hood, by restructuring the parameters with which the viewers come to understand it; fibers and filaments transform into representations of a deeper sense of one’s personal memory and self-constituted identity.

The intentional fragmentation of an object conveys an act of disjuncture- a ripping apart, a shredding of, a tearing up- of familiarity, of stability, of normality. So, what happens when this disjuncture becomes a repetitive act of labor in self-rendering? Binaries explode. Polarization’s collide. Linear understandings of histories become a painterly, disjointed pointillism. Robles-Gordon destabilizes the specificity of our “stuff”- lace adorned dresses, rackets, worn t-shirts, beaded bracelets, badminton balls, etc.- and threads together a reformed sense of self through abstracted amalgamations of material culture. In Air, Water, and Earth. Layers of Self, Robles-Gordon’s mixed media sculpture reshapes disparate parts and fragments into lines of color that coalesce in a circular form. Principles of abstraction are still at play in this sculptural entanglement. Excised from objects disjoined from their past modalities, filaments function as undulating lines of color across the picture plane. Grid-like wires attempt to contain the rotund mass, creating a vivid, precarious sense of tension and fragility. It is in this moment of contained visual clutter and chaos, in which power is reassigned and the accepted meaning or constitution of object-hood is simultaneously bifurcated into its past and re-situated at the limen- a space of betweenness where agency flourishes and categories collapse.

The condition of the postmodern and millennial artist is also situated at the liminal space of particularity, where sampling and fragmentation meet at the axis of hybridity. Furthermore, contemporary practitioners like Egypt-born, New York-based Ghada Amer, as well as South African artists Nicholas Hlobo and Nandipha Mntambo, have taken to the act of immolating textiles and objects to reconstruct notions of gender, sexuality, and personal identity. Through tedious and laborious acts of puncture, stitching, and re-binding fragments, the artist could possibly regain control of representation and the deconstruction of self vis-à-vis the destruction of object-hood. In short, the artist can reconstitute the self through reassigning the meaning and function of parts of things ripped apart and ruptured.  This new modality and materiality relies upon the vocabulary of fibers and filaments strung and threaded along to chart new spaces of visual memory and selfhood.Jessica N. Bell

http://www.jessicanbell.com/

‘Options 2011’ combines minimal and conceptual art

By Mark Jenkins

Washington Post

For its 30th annual survey exhibition, “Options 2011,” the Washington Project for the Arts has temporarily claimed a floor of an industrial building near the Convention Center. The space gives the show — curated by Arlington Arts Center Executive Director Stefanie Fedor — room for large, dramatic pieces, as well as the expected painting, photography and video. The work ranges from computer animation and fabric art — including Amber Robles-Gordon’s third gallery showcase of the last six months — to issues of Bittersweet, a new magazine that covers social issues of non-federal D.C.

Many of the 13 artists combine the minimal and the conceptual. John James Anderson combines sculpture made from lumber, nails, screws and carpentry tools, with commentary about hiring immigrant day laborers to work with him. Stewart Watson impales pillows with steel rods to make site-specific, anxiety-ridden “events.” Lisa Dillin’s photographs and sculptures coolly parody corporate environments and mindsets. Heather Boaz renders the commonplace eerie by photographing toy furniture posed on or near body parts such as eyes and knees, as well as less commonly displayed ones.

Among the show’s most engaging work are monumental pieces that mock artistic monumentality. Artemis Herber is showing shell-like forms that look to be made of rusted steel, evoking the sculptural colossuses of Richard Serra and Anthony Caro, along with pillars whose shapes are modeled on fallen trees (although they’re painted a shade of green that’s more redolent of celery than forests). But Herber’s work is made of cardboard; that rusty patina is paint.

Jimmy Miracle also uses inexpensive materials, including plastic carryout food containers. For “Beam,” he stretches filament from wall to floor to simulate a gleaming shaft of light. Like Herber’s “trees,” Miracle’s pieces give everyday stuff a pretense to glory. 

www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/options-2011-combines-minimal-and-conceptual-art/2011/10/12/gIQA24UPiL_story.html

‘Delusions of Grandeur’

The Washington Post

One link between the three young, local artists featured in “Delusions of Grandeur: Ascension” is African American identity. Another is fabric. Amber Robles-Gordon (whose work was reviewed by The Post in July) makes abstract hanging assemblages that feature ribbons and scraps. Jamea Richmond-Edwards does idealized portraits that incorporate textiles, sequins and bows. Shaunte Gates includes bits of cloth and other found materials in allegorical paintings that draw on the tradition of biblically themed medieval and Renaissance canvases, but also sometimes suggest the heroic poses of sci-fi and comic-book characters.

The artists chose the exhibition’s title, and in a statement explain that it refers to “the ‘delusions of grandeur’ that each artist possesses in order to continue progressing . . . in their artwork.” The “ascension” part comes from one of Gates’s paintings, which depict muscular men who are both divine and debased, as likely to sprout wings as to wear to a crown of barbed wire. His figures are rendered realistically, as are some of his settings, notably the urban alley shown in “January 6, 1956: Time Traveler.” But other backdrops are wilder, sometimes verging on abstract expressionism. “May 28, 2004: Lost One” shows a man plunging into a loosely rendered whirlpool, as if diving into the picture plane itself.

Richmond-Edwards’s work is more formal. Faces, penciled in shades of gray, combine African American features with the somber bearing of Greco-Roman sculpture. Many of the countenances are identical, giving the work a paper-doll quality. These visages are surrounded by bright colors and patterns, and adorned with a rose-petal print in various colors. If the result seems a little too fashion-schooled, clothing is a part of cultural identity. Playing dress-up is one way that people define, or redefine, themselves.

Jenkins is a freelance writer.

Artists:

Amber Robles-Gordon

Jamea Richmond-Edwards

Shaunte Gates

Delusions of Grandeur: Ascension on view through Sept. 16 at Parish Gallery-Georgetown,

1054 31st St. NW, 202-944-2310, 

Washington, DC

www.parishgallery.com.www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/photos-reach-deep-into-go-gos-pocket/2011/08/31/gIQAAaq6uJ_story_1.html