Review | In the galleries: Solo shows convert art into energy

Work that Ju has proven elsewhere is wildly colourful, and there are brilliant reds and oranges in these works. However the emphasis is on shades of blue, which gleam in opposition to the white partitions just like the cobalt-pigmented ornaments of East Asian ceramics. Different conventional components embody Korean and Chinese language textual content and a practical rendering of a tile roof contained in a culture-hopping bigger piece. What distinguishes Ju’s fashion, nonetheless, is much less Korean mementos than freewheeling vitality.

One other of the solos, Sharon Shapiro’s “Then the Dream Modified,” presents a harder-edged form of montage. The massive-scale collages are primarily based on aspirational pictures of prosperous, mid-Twentieth-century American suburbia, into which the artist inserts incongruous components. This displays “the complexities of rising up feminine within the American South,” notes Shapiro’s assertion. The ensuing photos additionally spotlight contrasts between wealthy and poor, chaos and stability, settled and itinerant. Within the vivid “Crossing,” three migrants wrestle throughout not the Rio Grande, however a yard swimming pool. Numerous American desires, pressing in addition to complacent, splash collectively within the spliced picture.

Upstairs within the resident artist’s gallery, Stephanie Lane demonstrates a number of types of gestural abstraction. Her massive “Thresholds” work embody one during which a multicolored, torso-like form emerges from darkness and three drawing-like photos rendered principally in black asphaltum (a carbon-heavy pure substance) on whiteboard. Though solely a few of Lane’s spiraling, spontaneous photos embody hints of human kinds, all of them recommend our bodies in movement.

Ju Yun: East Meets West; Sharon Shapiro: Then the Dream Modified; and Stephanie Lane: Thresholds By way of June 18 at Arlington Arts Heart, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington.

At this time’s close to ubiquity of digital imagery has impressed a number of artists to retreat into pictures’s previous. Certainly one of these technological escapees is Elena Volkova, a Ukrainian-born Baltimorean with an experience in tintype, a mid-Nineteenth-century course of. It captures direct positives on skinny sheets of metallic, yielding small however shimmering black-on-silver photos. Volkova used the archaic approach to make the up to date “Anacostia Portraits” on exhibit at Honfleur Gallery.

The aim isn’t precisely documentary. The themes of those formal but empathetic head pictures are recognized solely by first names, though a number of pictures embody visible clues. A number of of the persons are artists, certainly one of whom was photographed with paintbrushes in hand. Many of the sitters are African Individuals whose pores and skin tones are rendered wealthy and luminous by the high-contrast technique.

The metallic miniatures require shut inspection, however Volkova just isn’t such an antiquarian as to insist on that. She additionally supplies digital enlargements on white paper which can be simpler to discern, and show that tintypes blow up fairly nicely. With their slim depth-of-field, the pictures do resemble historic artifacts. But the poses and expressions seem fully updated.

Elena Volkova: Anacostia Portraits By way of June 18 at Honfleur Gallery, 1241 Good Hope Rd. SE.

The work in MasPaz’s “Peace Is Each Step” are so intently linked by design and coloration scheme that the distinctions amongst them aren’t instantly apparent. A number of the items within the Fred Schnider Gallery of Artwork present are on paper, others on canvas and a 3rd group — essentially the most distinctive — on formed wood panels. All are linked by the identical pictorial format: daring black outlines of streamlined pure kinds, crammed with blocks of tan and metallic gold.

Born in Colombia and raised in Arlington, the place he’s primarily based, MasPaz is a graffiti veteran whose nom de aerosol means “extra peace” in Spanish. Impressed by sojourns in New York Metropolis and South America, the painter developed a method that’s as indebted to avenue tagging as to pre-Columbian sculpture and ceramics. Amongst these artworks’ motifs are flowers and the solar, whereas patches of gold spray-paint signify the dear mineral that drew Europeans to what they got here to name the Americas.

The wood-panel items are essentially the most dynamic, partly as a result of their minimize outlines comply with the shapes painted on them. Additionally, MasPaz leaves some areas naked, calling consideration to the wooden grain and including a barely completely different hue to the slim vary of beiges and golds. In photos that distill pure objects to graphic archetypes, the unadorned wood surfaces are a remnant of the true factor.

MasPaz: Peace Is Each Step By way of June 19 at Fred Schnider Gallery of Artwork, 888 N. Quincy St., Arlington.

Technically, Robert C. Jackson’s hyper-realist work are nonetheless lifes, since they hardly ever depict animate life-forms. But the Pennsylvania artist’s humorous situations are well-populated with stand-ins for residing creatures. Balloon animals, corporate-mascot collectible figurines and a windup chick are among the many inhabitants of the images in “Again to the Future,” Jackson’s Zenith Gallery present.

The most typical components within the artist’s compositions are toys, meals and classic crates, typically emblazoned with soft-drink logos. Typically a single form of edible is juxtaposed with an apt plaything, equivalent to bananas piled beneath a toy gorilla or doughnut holes heaped beneath a miniature police officer. Jackson sometimes dabbles in artwork criticism, as when he portrays a balloon animal taped to an summary portray — each rendered with exact realism, in fact.

The artist has been known as an inheritor to Pop Artwork, and he does meticulously copy business imagery a lot as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein did. However the place these precursors reproduced labels, pictures and comics, Jackson prefers three-dimensional gadgets. Fairly than a field of Cap’n Crunch, for instance, he repeatedly portrays a figurine of the cereal-shilling mariner. Specializing in 3D gadgets permits the artist to show his spectacular conventional portray expertise, but additionally to yank them out of context. The place Pop Artwork commented on mid-Twentieth-century society, Jackson’s work conjure his personal little universe, rooted in shopper tradition but additionally indifferent from it.

Robert C. Jackson: Again to the Future By way of June 25 at Zenith Gallery, 1429 Iris St. NW.