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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Stephanie Rudig
April 25, 2025
Through June 15: Eliza Clifford: The Flowers We Keep at VisArts
The natural and the artificial collide in Eliza Clifford’s bountiful screen printed textile works. Clifford pulls from her personal photo archive, showing snippets of her days that are both mundane and magnificent, daily errands living alongside natural wonders. These photos are turned into highly detailed silk-screen prints on fabric that retain documentary quality and depth of field, while also embodying a halftone silk-screen texture. The custom printed fabric is stitched together into quilt compositions along with fabrics dyed with natural elements like avocado pits, marigolds, and onion skins. Bedsheets and buttons are also incorporated, and, along with the kitchen materials used for dying and the homespun quality of some of the fabric piecing together, nod to domestic and home labor. Some motifs, like flowers, are silhouetted against backdrops, popping out of the square grids that underlie the work. Elements are repeated as patterns or reoriented and flipped, becoming kaleidoscopic or disorienting the viewer with shifting perspectives and depths of frame. Photo frames inside of photo frames give a sense of multiple browser windows obscuring a view or portals opening. By collecting these fragments of digital photography that may otherwise languish in the camera roll and making them into an object that is often an heirloom, Clifford cements these small moments in life and nature as worthy of holding on to and passing down.
The Flowers We Keep runs through June 15 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 4 p.m.; Friday, noon to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. visartscenter.org. Free.
Read in Washington City Paper
