Our Georgetown shows for 2003

Young British photographer Karen Kessi-Williams (nee Watendewao) has traveled and photographed the world on behalf of many British and international charities.

On exhibition are new photographs of Tanzania and Mozambique by this prize-winning British photographer, whose work centers around her documentary portraiture of life in Africa.

This exhibition (her third solo exhibition in the Greater Washington area since 1995) follows in the wake of a highly successful touring exhibition of her works throughout Great Britain and for the first time exhibits new work done in Tanzania and Mozambique in 2001.

The Washington Post has written about her work that her photographs are “so lyrical and perfectly balanced that they seem posed. They are the product of an artist with a feel for people and an extraordinary eye for the beauty in the face of an aged woman sipping a drink or a bunch of kids balancing precariously on a seesaw.”

A reception for the artist was held on Friday, January 17, 2003 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm. The show was reviewed by The Washington City Paper.

Four women photographers with widely diverse backgrounds share the gallery this month: Elsa Mora, Joyce Tenneson, Lida Moser and Dianora Niccolini.

Elsa Mora is a very young Cuban photographer whose work was exhibited at the VII Havana Biennal and will make her Washington debut in this exhibition. She has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions in New York, Switzerland, Mexico, Argentina and Spain. This will be her debut in the Washington, DC area.

Joyce Tenneson is one of the most acclaimed and famous contemporary photographers in the world and her work has been shown in over 150 exhibitions worldwide, and is part of numerous private and museum collections. Her photographs have appeared on countless covers for magazines such as: Time, Life, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Premiere, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. She is the author/editor of seven books and has won numerous awards including the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for best applied photography. In addition, in 1990, she was named "Photographer of the Year" by the international organization "Women in Photography." And in a recent poll conducted by American Photo Magazine, she was voted among the ten most influential women photographers in the history of photography. Critic Karl-Peter Gottschalk said about Tenneson: "Every so often an artist comes along who defies the easy labeling that curators and critics feel obliged to stick on everything under their rapacious gaze. In spite of lacking obvious inspirations and role models, these artists manage to create deeply felt, radical works that an extraordinary number of viewers respond to with fervor and pleasure."

Lida Moser's photographic career started as a student in 1947 in Berenice Abbott's studio. She then worked for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Look and many other magazines. She also wrote a series of "Camera View" articles on photography for The New York Times between 1974-81. She has also authored and been part of many books and publications on and about photography. Her work has been exhibited in many museums worldwide and is in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Archives, Ottawa, the National Galleries of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, the Library of Congress, Les Archives Nationales du Quebec and many others. Moser was a member of the Photo League and the New York School. The Photo League was the seminal birth of American documentary photography. It was a group that was at times school, an association, and even a social photography club. Founded in 1936 and disbanded in 1951, the Photo League promoted photojournalism with an aesthetic consciousness and a social conscience that reaches photojournalism and street photography to this day.

Dianora Niccolini is generally recognized as one of the early pioneers of nude figurative photography. She is best known for her pioneer figurative male nude photography. Although there were a few notable photographers - like Avedon's predecessor George Platt Lynes -- who had been photographing black and white male nudes privately, Niccolini was one of the first to offer them in a public venue, holding her first photography show in New York in 1975 despite the threat of being shut down by local authorities. But she didn't just help to push the nude male body out of the closet and onto gallery walls - Her work was also the genesis of a style of black and white photographs of statuesque, well-built male bodies that later came to be attributed generally to Robert Mapplethorpe, who entered the scene three years after Niccolini's first show. In 1975, her work was first reviewed in the New York Times critic Gene Thornton, who wrote "Dianora Niccolini . . . comes about as close to idealization as is possible in photography." Her photographs have been included in many photographic anthologies and were also widely exhibited in the mid seventies. 15 of her photographs, as well as the cover, were included in The Male Nude by David Leddick and published by Taschen in 1998. Also David Leddick's Men in the Sun, published by Universe/Rizzoli in 1999, and most recently Liddick's Male Nude Now, published in 2002.

A reception for the photographers was held on Friday, February 21, 2003 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm. Read the Washington City Paper review of this show here.

Landscape photography by the Best of Show winner at the 2002 Bethesda International photography Competition. MacCormack uses creative tungsten lighting techniques and long nightime exposures to create landscape photography that push the limits of color and blur the line between realism and fantasy. A reception for the photographer, catered by the Sea Catch Restaurant was held on Friday, 21 March, 2003 from 6-9 PM. The show was reviewed by The Washington City Paper.

"Great Falls"
Forrest MacCormack

The Washington debut of American artist Kris Kuksi and we hope Washington is ready for the unforgettable images that Kuksi brings to paper and canvas. This is an artist armed with powerful technical skills coupled with such an unique view of his subjects that he certainly stands out in the modern dialogue of contemporary art. A reception for Kuksi, catered by the Sea Catch Restaurant was held on Friday, April 18 from 6-8 PM. See images from the exhibition here and read the Washington Post review of the show here.

Vladimir Pcholkin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1957. His career as a freelance photographer began at the age of 19, when he started to photograph ballet. His stage shots and studio portraits of famous Bolshoi dancers and other theater and movie celebrities soon brought him acclaim. Vladimir’s ballet and portrait work has been widely exhibited, and he has had 5 solo exhibitions in Moscow (including one at the Bolshoi Theater), St. Petersburg, and Vilnius.

His work has been published in books and magazines around the world, including an exclusive nine-book ballet series published in the United States, and individual ballet books in France and Japan.

As his images of cultural celebrities, such as Rudolf Nureyev, gained him international recognition, Vladimir found himself shooting for such personalities as Pierre Cardin and being interviewed by the press and television, even appearing on Good Morning, America.

After 1988 Vladimir moved beyond ballet, turning to art, editorial, and commercial photography. His photographs have appeared in international editions of Vogue, Elle, Time, Fortune, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and other magazines. Book credits include A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union and CNN’s Seven Days That Shook the World. He also worked as a contract photographer for New York’s Black Star Agency, doing editorial and commercial shots for clients that included American Express and Fedex.

An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 16 from 6-9 PM. See more images of his work here and read the Louis Jacobson review in the City Paper here.

Considered by many to be the finest contemporary glass artist in the region, Tim Tate is a brilliant creative talent who has gone beyond mastery of the technical skills of the art of fine art glass and is now pushing the genre into new areas where content is the prime force behind the work.

Tate marries his artwork with intelligent ideas and conceptual dialogues that bring forth reactions, opinions and set forward a whole new conversation and path for the genre of fine art glass. Using events and details from his personal life as well as public issues, Tate incorporates this as a rich set of conceptual ideas so that his work is no longer about the technical frontier of the art glass genre, or the use of colors and forms – it is all that and more.

How? Tate breaks new ground by adding a new vocabulary to the genre: A vocabulary made of content that requires and understanding of what the artist wants to express.

In doing so, Tate has absolutely changed and refined his art and vision, a change that was first kindled by the death of his mother, which he expressed by an obsessive desire to create small, beautiful glass hearts, which have nothing to do with religion, but childhood memories of JFK imagery in his home. In another series of works, undefined forms within tall cylindrical towers of nebulous glass come into focus as the towers are spun – defining symbols and crosses that represent cures for diseases, both physical and cultural.

Tate studied at Dale Chihuly’s Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state, Corning Glass in New York and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery. A reception for Tim Tate was held on Friday, June 20 from 6-9 PM. You can see more works by Tate here and you can read the great review in the Washington Times here and another great review in the Washington Blade here and a superb review in the Washington Post here.

Detail from "Adaptations" Fine Art Glass by Tim Tate

Our annual call for artists and one of the most competitive juried art competitions in the nation. With a focus on contemporary realism, this exhibition showcases the best of emerging and established national and international artists working in two dimensions. This year's exhibition was curated by Prof. Chawky Frenn, from the George Mason University art faculty. Prof. Frenn selected the below artists from nearly 900 works submitted for jurying. A reception for all accepted artists was held on Friday, July 18 from 6-9 PM. The Best of Show winner received $500 and will have a solo show at the DC gallery in 2004. The First, Second and Third Prize winners will receive $200, $150 and $100 respectively, and will be invited to exhibit their work in a future exhibit. The Honorable Mention winners will be invited to exhibit their work in a future exhibit. To listen to a WTOP Radio clip about the show, click here.

Artists create. From a deep well within, flow the need to give form to an inner world and the impulse to color the outer reality with one’s emotions and responses. From the specific, the universal could be experienced.

Realism! The fascination with the observed world continues to manifest itself as a metaphor, as an experience capable of breaking the confinements of time and culture to enter the realm of the timeless and the universal, and as a force that survives the theories of those who prophesy its death or deny it the power of concept and meaning.

Is Realism the best form for these paintings? What message do they express? Have they used the best means to communicate that? Can Realism with its long and complex history be suddenly obsolete because of the birth of new and equally important pictorial ideas? Does Realism have a coherent meaning given the diversity of contexts, uses and practices it surrounds? I will attempt to approach these questions by examining this exhibition, a microcosm of an immense reality, with the hope of bringing greater understanding and clarity to Realism with its inherent paradoxical functions.

As I looked at the paintings, I responded to a variety of aspects: emotional and abstract, lyrical and formal, conceptual and visual. These aspects encompass social, humanist, environmental, or psychological issues. Whether radical or conservative, the images are introspective and communicative, with modern sensibilities while paying homage to a rich and complex past. An observation was obvious as I looked at the work: the sheer excitement and joy in the technical accomplishment found its fullest expression not only in the choice of subject but in the transformation of the object in a visual language that captures and communicates the artist’s experience and ideas. The technical diversity- whether plastic, illusionist, decorative, painterly, layered or premier coup- pointed to the content as the experience revealed by the choices made.

Is the work of Douglas Malone, Catherine Kehoe, Clare Malloy and Gregg Deal self-concealing or self-revealing? Do they invite the viewer to self-introspection or to outward observation? Do they engage us in thoughts and reflections particular to the artist or to more universal issues as our brains are engaged in decoding their complex expressions?

Are the timeless issues of Social Justice, Power, Freedom, and Human Rights at the heart of Eliza Brewster’s quilt or a more personal struggle of the individual to come to term with these overwhelming and consistent issues? Is Carrie Christian’s “Strawberry Tarts” an attempt to conceal with humor the gravity and horror of her meditation on these questions?

Do we find in the images of Bruce Johnson, Marty Edmonds and Ben Schwab visual metaphors to deal with issues of chaos and order, Man and Technology, progress and decay or do we stop at naming what is being depicted assuming that we know what we’re looking at?.

Heather Neil’s “The Alchemist Daughter” and Roger Mark’s “Building 13, Fourth Floor” weave the mundane with the surreal, the familiar with the mysterious, the narrative with the enigmatic to create a world inhabited by the uniqueness of situations and experiences that transcend the recognizable object or situation to confront the eternal issues of identity, fear, or human relations.

The artist engages the viewer in inner and outer adventures through the pictorial language. A dialogue unfolds as the objective is blurred with the subjective, the personal with the general. The observed reality becomes a vehicle for varied interpretations and multiple layers of meaning, an adventure that doesn’t cease to illuminate! The pictorial subject weaves the narrative subject into a personal vision, a vision that resonates with our own experiences and sensibilities.

Sometimes Realism is necessary and essential for conveying certain ideas in an effective manner because it is the best mean to express specific experiences and emotions and to convey powerful meaning that would be derailed, misinforming or less effective if they were communicated otherwise. As there are forms of communication that are most efficient by being communicated abstractly, other forms of visual communication are better served by being represented realistically.

I hope this selection of work, which was truly hard to condense to fit the physical restrictions of the gallery, will enrich your experience as you develop your own dialogue with the images. The artist’s need is communicated. Do not get trapped by thinking that the painting is about the object, allow the image to engage you to discover new meaning in your understanding of inner and outer worlds that embrace all of us.

A group exhibition of photographs including new work by acclaimed photographer Joyce Tenneson from her latest book Flower Portraits: The Life Cycle of Beauty. The exhibit will also include photographs by Japanese photographer Mitsuo Suzuki, Canadian Andrzej Pluta, and local photographer Bert Shankman. See many of the flower photographs available here and here. Read the review in the Washington City Paper here.

The Washington debut of painter Boris Zakic, the Best of Show winner at last year's Georgetown International Fine Arts Competition, selected by Stacey Schmidt, Asst. Curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Zakic is a very young brilliant painter who is an Asst. Professor of Art at Georgetown College in Kentucky and who delivers astounding photorealism coupled with intelligent ideas and messages. His style harks back to the Renaissance with its impressive attention to absolute skill and detail - but its imagery and composition makes the content very contemporary. The constant theme in Zakic's work is the integration of text - usually a single word - with an image - most often a figure. A reception for Zakic was held, in spite of Hurricane Isabel, on Friday, September 19 from 6-9 PM. See most of the images from the exhibition here.

Zakic has written about this work:

For the past few years, I have been exploring the theme of translations. I have dealt with this concept less as a bridge between languages, but more broadly, as a relation between different modes of communication (as for example, between photography and painting, or text and image, etc.). I recognized it, in principle, as a space in between.

Most of the paintings exhibited at this gallery, by and large, utilize the translation’s space-in-between as a search for reconciliation between categorical overlaps, dissonances and interdependencies amidst its elements. These elements, extracted from diverse ‘vernaculars’— semiotic, photographical, spatial, figural, abstract, or other— are arranged to provide these vernaculars themselves as margins for what Jean Francois Lyotard calls the “unrepresentable” and “untranslatable.” My reasoning, at the outset, was that if one wanted to get to the untranslatable, the analysis and deconstruction of the translation itself would be a good place to start.

At best, with this body of work I had hoped to produce an engaging case for reconsidering the climate of opinion surrounding the nature of common artistic dualisms while rendering any further re-translation of these paintings inadequate, ineffective and futile. At the very least, I had hoped to give form to some of the problems and debates of contemporary painting.

When we opened our second, larger location nearly two years ago, we decided to make our original Georgetown gallery more readily available to young, emerging artists from both our regional area as well as emerging national artists. Maryland sculptor Sarah Wegner, a 2000 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is a perfect example of the kind of young, emerging artist that we had hoped to showcase. In this exhibition, Wegner (who has exhibited in various group shows locally) makes her solo debut at the Fraser Gallery in Georgetown with a month-long sculptural installation from Oct. 17 - Nov 19, 2003.

Using both fabricated and cast processes, and a mixed media of both, Wegner populates the 400 square foot space with an installation that gives the appearance of a bedroom, where all of her pieces interact with each other, from smaller, bug-like figures, a bed, to a full-sized skeleton.

"I want to show the relationship between nagging anxiety, female identity - for example the skeleton is my exploration of identity and aging... the materials I used (metals, found objects, rubber) all age naturally," says Wegner.

An opening catered reception, free and open to the public, welcomed Sarah Wegner on Friday, October 17 from 6-9 PM. Read the artist's statement and see all images from the exhibition here. This show is a Best Bet on WETA Around Town.

A member of the faculty at the Corcoran School of Art, Kaufman's second solo at the Fraser Gallery brings forth a fresh new array of elegant assemblages that are not only a very unique form of this artist's creative expressions, but also a singularly different marriage of sophisticated painting and drawing with three-dimensional found objects. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, November 21 from 6-9 PM.

"Cloister"
Katie Kaufman
Charcoal on Arches paper, salvaged window
25.5" x 21.5" x 4.5"
$875

"Haven"
Katie Kaufman
Charcoal on Arches paper, salvaged window
28.5" x 21.5" x 4.5"
$900

"Secondhand"
Katie Kaufman
Charcoal on Arches paper, salvaged window
26.5" x 21.5" x 4.5"
$875

"Within the hour"
Katie Kaufman
Charcoal on Arches paper, salvaged window
28.5" x 21.5" x 4.5"
$875

"Interview"
Katie Kaufman
Charcoal on Arches paper, salvaged window
23" x 21.5" x 4.5"
$850

"The Longest Night"
Katie Kaufman
Charcoal on Arches paper, salvaged window
20" x 71" x 4.5"
$1400

"This legion, which curbs the savage Scot and studies the designs marked with iron on the face of the dying Pict," are the written words of the Roman poet Claudian that give the only insight as to the name given by Rome to the untamed Britannic tribes living North of Hadrian's Walls and one of history's nearly forgotten Dark Ages people: The Picts.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of Scottish or even European history is the people who once inhabited the lands north of Roman England, as far north as the Shetlands. Who were these fiercely independent people? Where did the come from? Which language did they speak? What did they call themselves? We first hear of them in the third century from a Roman writer in Spain, who describes their fierceness and battle skills of both men and women. The writer Eumenius, writes about them 200 years after Rome has been in Britain, and the name associated with the Pict is forever coined. To this day, we do not know if this is truly as in "pictus" (the Latin for "painted") or a Latin form of a native name. Because of the isolation of northern Scotland, history yields little, and the Roman Empire's expeditions into the north ended in little gains.

"We, the most distant dwellers upon the earth, the last of the free, have been shielded...by our remoteness and by the obscurity which has shrouded our name...Beyond us lies no nation, nothing but waves and rocks"...The above words by the Pictish chief Calgacus are recorded by the Roman enemy in the words of Tacitus and are a perfect example of the obscurity and legendary status held by the Picts almost 2,000 years ago.

Borrowing from the designs in the unique Pictish standing stones that dot the Scottish countryside, Campello recreates, for the first time in nearly 1200 years (The Picts ceased to exist as an independent people in 845 AD, when Kenneth MacAlpin, Scottish by father and Pictish by Mother, usurped the throne of the Picts and Scots and proceeded to erase all traces of Pictish culture from Scotland), the unique Pictish designs of animals, objects and imaginary beasts. See some of the drawings here.The Picts were the "original" people of Scotland before being wiped out from history by the Scots and Vikings in the 9th century. As Europe's only matrilineal society, they decorated their bodies with a diverse assortment of tattoos whose meanings have been lost to history. The artist is a recognized Pictish amateur historian. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, December 19 from 6-9 PM. Read the Washington Times review here and the Georgetowner review here.

The Fraser Gallery

1054 31st Street, N.W.
Georgetown
Washington, D.C. 20007
Tel/Fax: (202) 298-6450

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