reviews

ADAMSON GALLERY / DC COMMISSION ON THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES

You know the saying, necessity is the mother of invention. It's true-unless, of course, you are an artist. Then invention is often a necessity. A fact of life. For staying current. For keeping it alive. For staying fresh. Real. Unreal. New. In the literary arts, we have a whole genre dedicated to novelty. It's called the novel, a widely accepted and terribly legitimate means of expression. In the visual arts it's called¼well, what is it called? In the visual arts, we're often a little bit conflicted, reifying the venerable old masters while at the same time letting our eyes roam, not without due compunction, mind you, but letting them roam nonetheless, in search of the next invention, the next direction, the next movement.

So it really had to happen, this use of technology to create art. I mean, people have been playing with computers now for going on something like twenty-five years. So it was inevitable, logical, perhaps even necessary that someone would take hold of our desktops and lap tops, our palm pilots and printers-all of our chip driven gizmos and gadgets-to see what could be done with them, and what they could tell us about ourselves, and the selves we might yet be.

In an impressive digital print portfolio presented by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities at the Adamson Gallery, ten accomplished, local artists have slipped the surly bonds of earth, as it were, to explore this new medium, mediuma technologica. And here's why we should be glad that they did.

Working with David Adamson, who in 1993 purchased his first Iris 3047 printer and initiated one of the first and enduring digital ateliers, Claudia Gibson-Hunter (AKA Aziza) has produced a breathtaking image, "A Gathering of Self." In this work, Gibson-Hunter has produced an image inspired by Dr. Richard King, who holds that knowledge of the self is essential for survival in the future. The image of an African American woman is "embroidered" with a collage of symbols (cicada shells and spears of asparagus for perseverance, and magnolia pods for violence). The woman is an interlocutor with both the past and the future. For an African American to forget the past, as Gibson-Hunter tells us, is to run the risk of estrangement and death. The future, most obviously represented by a child in the woman's womb-but also represented by the innovative techniques used to produce the print-is uncertain. The child peeks out of its mother's womb, and the rapid advance of technology may pose a threat to African Americans who, because of their brutalized past, may not be conversant with recent technological advances associated with, for example, economic means and/or security. Warranting serious attention, this richly colored and highly textured image both articulates what it means to be an African American in contemporary America and defies its technological means of production.

Trish Tillman's ironic "Clarification" most obviously shows off what can be done in Adamson's digital atelier. The piece takes as its subject both light and space to create what Tillman calls a "spatial dialog." This dialog investigates the creation of motion out of "opposing [static] pixels" (Tillman). Light shimmers across the static surface to suggest abstract notions of landscape, for example, sunrise and sunset, and inquiries into the relationships of untold numbers of polarities. Everything about the composition is situational and without postulates. Clarification, my eye!

Kelly Towles' quirky image is concerned with the commodification of contemporary life. Depicting a goofy, banged up pugilist against the backdrop of a priority mail envelope that has been "sprayed" with graffiti, Towles narrates tales of social isolation, emotional exhaustion, loneliness, degradation, disenchantment, disenfranchisement, and, perhaps, even despair at the "sanitized" means by which her image was digitally created.

Lynn Putney seems to have thought considerably about her work in Adamson's digital atelier. In her artist's statement, she describes the process of adapting her traditional, physical style of working with oils, brushes, razor blades, and putty knifes to that offered by the "clean, smooth plastic stylus on clean, smooth plastic pad." Endeavoring to mimic her usual approach to making art, Putney describes being both overwhelmed and thrilled by working digitally because of the "infinite mutability of the image" it allows. The result is a wonderfully zany tale of space travel, childhood imagination, and adult technical sophistication.

Long interested in Japanese and Chinese painting, and the way such art is mounted on silk tapestry, Patricia Tobacco Forrester explores ways of suggesting the tapestry by overlaying her image on an actual leaf border. This work simultaneously explores digital printmaking's astonishing technical versatility and also juxtaposes the border and subject to generate additional themes. The work depicts a twisted and gnarled tree trunk and limbs which are bereft of leaves-perhaps the same leaves used both to frame the image of the tree and to establish a perspective or point of view? The haunting image of the tree seems almost to be clawing for that which it both nourished and was nourished by, suggesting the interrelated, temporal nature of life and the inexorable will to live from one moment to the next, one season to the next.

Like Lynn Putney, Percy Martin seems to have thought long and hard about the implications of working digitally to create images. Having begun work on computers more than ten years ago, Martin believes "the invention of the computer is equal in importance to the invention of the etching press." There is also something practical and, yes, ecologically informed, in Martin's thinking. "Etching," he says, "is limited by the difficulty of making changes; each change requires starting over with a new or cleaned plate. With the computer changes can be made instantly...." Like several among those in this show, Martin uses new techniques to treat old themes, specifically in "27 Steps to Sunrise" the myth of the flying African Bushwoman who, at flight's end, must complete ritualized steps in order to turn herself back into a woman.

How did we get here from there?-this is the kind of question Michael Platt must have asked himself in the many works of his informed by his twenty-four hour train rides from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana, and then back again. In "The Long Trip Home," Platt both layers and superimposes images that are compositionally interesting. In fact, Platt seems most interested in the contrapuntal orientation of elements in his archetypal compositions. A snake in the smoke over his train at the top of the image mimics, perhaps, the track itself; the way of history, the long journey out of the past into this moment; the journey home; or the traveler's mood. Line poles become crosses in Louisiana graveyards, or on houses, which become corn silos or, perhaps, fence posts?

Joey Manlapaz's "DC Tidbits" is probably the most eclectic of the digital prints produced for this exhibit. In this image, Manlapaz's decades long interest in the architecture of Washington, D.C., persists, but is complicated with what the artist calls, "...a mysterious amassment of shapes and colors on the surface..." -all of which are reflected on a storefront window. The glass is a metaphor for memory, time, consciousness, and unconsciousness, and works to reflect the myriad scrapbook "tidbits" which have remained with Manlapaz to prefigure her artistic vision.

Like Joey Manlapaz's piece, Billy Colbert's shares an interest in gathering and remembering. The piece takes as its central image a photograph of the now infamous Michael Jackson taken back in his youth and the days when he starred in "The Wiz," a then contemporary remake of "The Wizard of Oz," in which Michael Jackson plays a central role. Colbert says he likes to tell stories in his artwork, and the story he tells in this image is a very sad one. It's both a cautionary tale of the risks associated with celebrity and a funereal story of lost innocence, youth, and promise.

As anyone who has lived in or around Washington, D.C., can tell you, it possesses a wonderful architectural constitution, like London or Rome, where the past lives on, habituated to the quirky, variable, digressive, and synthetic impulses of modern cosmopolitan life. Manlapaz captures much of this flavor in her work, and so, too, does Bill Christenberry, who in his digital image has brought together many of the storefronts he saw and knew when he ran errands around Northwest Washington in the early 1970's. The urge to catalog and remember is similar to Manlapaz's, but is more systematic and orderly. Taken as a whole, the fifteen storefronts, especially since they no longer exist, look like a graveyard, with each of the individual storefronts representing a monument to a time and way of life that are vanished. An interesting and appropriate commentary on life in the nation's capital.

Commentary on life in the nation's capital. There is certainly plenty of that in this fabulous exhibit presented by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. And there is also plenty of technical innovation. What's going on at David Adamson's digital atelier is new. Exciting. Fresh. Liberating. It's medium a technologica! And the invention is just begun.


John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic