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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Mark Jenkins
THE MOST EPIC OF KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN’S RECENT MURALS is the roughly 375-foot-long “Potomac River Shen Series,” installed for several months last year in Union Station’s vast waiting room. By the numbers, “Seed Float” is comparatively modest. The mixed-media collage-painting, on exhibit 24/7 at 355 Pod Space, is a mere 70 feet long. But that’s more than enough to dominate the street-facing window space, which is programmed by the nearby VisArts. In addition, “Seed Float” has the advantages of texture and depth. Where the Union Station piece was printed on vinyl, the newer artwork includes such cutout features as circles and streamers.
Diverse as they ultimately are, Mann’s murals have common elements. They usually begin with poured paint and ink, and incorporate nature imagery into pictures that are primarily abstract. The splashed, dripped, and pooled colors suggest water, a motif of the D.C. artist’s work, and also allow the pigments to assert themselves on their own terms. There’s a faint echo of Morris Louis in Mann’s technique, although her approach is decidedly more maximalist.
Both Chinese and Western landscape painting underlie Mann’s style, which is also informed by environmental threats never anticipated by her predecessors. (The piece’s title refers to a test of a seed’s viability, a suggestion of the fragility of flora.) The complexity of forms, materials, and gestures partly reflects the artist’s status as “a biracial, second generation Asian American,” her statement notes. If the pieces don’t fit together neatly, that befits her experience and her identity.
Both “Potomac River Shen Series” and this mural are overwhelmingly horizontal, but the latter plays many vertical elements against the lengthwise composition. Strings of multiple circles, vine-like paper tendrils, and a lacy veil of printed and partly cutout leaf-forms all hang in front of the main scroll, both obscuring and expanding it. “Seed Float” contains worlds within worlds. It sweeps the eye from end to end, but also pulls it into tangled depths.
INCISED FORMS ARE ALSO INTEGRAL TO MARTINA LONCAR’S PICTURES, which depict tree trunks, roots, branches, and stumps. For her evocative VisArts show, “Entangled,” the Takoma Park, Md. artist uses pencil, ink, and lithographic crayon render depict the arboreal subjects in black, gray, and reversed areas of white. The tree parts are often silhouetted, and sometimes carved from the paper. In one collage-drawing, an impressively intricate array of cuts represents wood grain.
The shared theme and limited palette unify pieces that employ a variety of techniques. They even link the six two-dimensional works to the one that’s sculptural. Adding wood, wire, and plaster to the paper and pigment of the other depictions, Loncar constructs a trunk and its sprawling roots from blackened paper, delicate yet seemingly substantial.
The artist’s inspiration is the interconnectedness of trees, which she likens to human entanglements. So it’s fitting that all the artworks seem to be of a piece. Even a stump, just a remnant of a living tree, is somehow linked to the whole.
THE COLLAPSE OF BALTIMORE’S FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE is one of the inspirations for “ETA,” a transportation-themed group show in which a sense of place often yields to sense of no place. Mollye Bendell’s minimalist prints of highway medians and shoulders, for example, are rendered starkly in gray on grayish blue. The effect is coolly insubstantial, but then the places Bendell portrays only ever had the slightest of presences.
Curated by Jordan Horton, VisArts’s 2024 emerging curator, “ETA” presents multidisciplinary work by members of the art collective strikeWare. The group was founded in Baltimore, but Bendell is the only member who still lives there. The other two do reside relatively close to the Northeast Corridor: JLS Gangwisch teaches in Connecticut, and Christopher Kojzar in Vermont.
Gangwisch’s generative video of nighttime highway scenes is partly abstracted and jumpy, conjuring motion and rapid change. It can be seen as the kinetic counterpoint to Bendell’s highway very-still lifes. Elsewhere, Gangwisch playfully collides old and new technologies, employing vintage television sets and an overhead projector alongside virtual-reality glasses.
New and old also meet in Bendell’s images of the decaying vessels of Mallows Bay, the Potomac River site of a “ghost fleet” of sunken ships. The pictures are made of collaged 3D scans, which are fragmented in a manner that evokes the riverine wrecks. Nearby is Kojzar’s video of a boat bobbling near a beach, unused and yet activated. Whether scuttled or simply unused, these craft are poignantly unmanned.
While the other two contributors focus mostly on uninhabited places, Kojzar’s conceptual drawings are keyed to human activity. Working in public spaces, the artist makes realistic pencil drawings that he deems finished whenever a stranger interrupts him. The arrested drawings are later embedded within thick white matting and placed within pastel-hued circular frames, as if to safely contain the tension inherent in the process.
The artist’s strategy engages the lone observer — an interloper and probably an outsider — with the larger community. It also comments on the contemporary culture of suspicion and surveillance. Kojzar, who showed related work at IA&A at Hillyer in 2019, calls his work “a very passive protest” in a video on his website. In a nation built for private vehicles, a pedestrian with a pencil is certainly a curiosity, and perhaps a threat.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann: Seed Float
Through Feb. 28 at 355 Pod Space Gallery, 355 Rockville Pk., Rockville. visartscenter.org; 301.315.8200.
Martina Loncar: Entangled
strikeWare: ETA
Both through Jan. 19 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. visartscenter.org. 301.315.8200.
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