Big Ink is a mobile print workshop that has hauled Big Tuna coast to coast since 2012. The press produced the show’s largest pieces, all of which are vertically oriented black-and-white woodblocks. These include Gretchen Woodman’s exquisite picture of a deer, reaching toward a branch to grab one last apple as a rabbit supervises, and Ralph Robinson’s robust bear, defined by horizontal lines as if it’s a screenshot from a low-definition video.
A few of the jumbo prints use their size to conjure an immersive sense of place. Matt DeLeo places the viewer at sea, gazing across choppy waters at the refuge offered by a lighthouse. Even more detailed is Cait Giunta and Ned Roche’s immaculate rendering of an old-fashioned office door from the inside, so the word “private” is displayed backward. It’s a vivid evocation of interior space, and of a lost era.
Supplementing the huge woodblocks are nearly 100 prints that scale from little to tiny. Of the smaller pieces most akin to the large prints, the standouts include Daniella Napolitano’s elegant “Baby Javelina” — a piglike wild ungulate — and Millie Whipplesmith Plank’s portrayal of three birds nestled in what appears to be barbed wire. Other little prints employ various techniques and often use color. One of the most vibrant is Ryan Kalentkowski’s watercolor-painted woodcut of a bird framed by what the title calls a “strawberry moon.” Such pictures may not require a Big Tuna to make, but their expressiveness is vast.
Big and Little Inks Through Nov. 26 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. 301-608-9101.
Sensorial’s Africana Superrealities
Texts and symbols characterize much of the work in “Sensorial’s Africana Superrealities: Five Contemporary Diaspora Artists,” a multimedia show at IA&A at Hillyer. All the contributors, three of whom were born in the United States, attended or now work at Howard University.
The most prominent artwork is British-Nigerian Raimi Gbadamosi’s set of three hanging flags, striped in the red, green and black established as Pan-African colors by Marcus Garvey in 1920. Just as direct, if more cryptic, is Elka Stevens’s quilt, a traditional African American craft object given a modernist vibe with its array of stark black-and-white icons.
Much busier are collage-drawings by Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, who is also the show’s curator. The Cuban-born artist incorporates printed matter in which such words as “Cuba” and “libre” (“free”) are prominent. The phrase Black Lives Matter features in a piece by Reginald Pointer, but he works with ceramics rather than paper. His intriguing creations include two-part blocks in which faces interlock and a smoky-surfaced globe whose two round portals offer partial views of the interior.
Akili Ron Anderson’s vigorous paintings are nearly abstract, but with shapes and details that evoke the human body. The swirling forms of one picture center on an eye, a universal symbol of awareness and perception that in this arrangement seems to focus on another symbol. The painting is hung so that the orb peers at those red-green-and-black banners across the room.
Sensorial’s Africana Superrealities: Five Contemporary Diaspora Artists Through Nov. 26 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Ct. NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.
United by technique but distinguished by varied designs, the paintings in Dan Treado’s “Double Platinum” feature such motifs as concentric circles, overlapping dots and abstracted patterns suggestive of microscopic life. All the entries in the Addison/Ripley Fine Art show are painstakingly executed with multiple layers of thinned oil or acrylic paint to fashion surfaces that appear silky and almost machine tooled. Except, that is, two playfully lumpy sculptures made of wads of brightly colored bubble gum.
Treado is not a representational painter, yet he’s skilled at illusionistic flourishes. His target-like pictures, made on round birch panels, have a sense of depth and motion that’s nearly hypnotic. (They’re from a series titled “You Are Getting Sleepy.”) Some of the other paintings feature blobby shapes whose graduated colors look to be shifting and reflective and that appear to be floating above the other imagery, even though the pictures are in fact perfectly flat.
As the gum sculptures reveal, Treado isn’t solemn about his art. The show’s seven-foot-wide centerpiece, which contrasts three black-and-white panels with two that pulse with fluorescent forms, is called “Ex-Lion Tamer Moves in With His Mother.” That winking title is akin to Treado’s painting style, which employs meticulous processes to yield playful effects.
Dan Treado: Double Platinum Through Dec. 2 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.
All the works in Donna Cameron’s show at Washington Printmakers Gallery are prints, but they incorporate vestiges of other art forms. Mostly derived from photographs, the collages in “Confluence of Energies” sometimes feature sprocket holes like those that edge 35, 16 and 8mm film. The artist, who divides her time between Brooklyn and Arlington, Va., holds a patent for cinematic paper emulsion, which recycles fibers into film stock.
Some of the artworks, printed on paper, slate or aluminum, echo Cameron’s experimental short films, a selection of which are available on YouTube. “World Trade Alphabet” shares the title, but not the imagery or format, of a nine-minute abstract film.
Rather than horizontal, like a typical movie, Cameron’s prints tend to be strongly vertical. The blurred, overlapped details can be architectural, but several predominantly green prints depict ferns that reach toward the sun. The interspersed rows of standing sprocket holes suggest both organic stalks and man-made columns. Unlike in Cameron’s films, the images in these prints don’t move, but their repeated upright lines give them a sense of propulsion.
Donna Cameron: Confluence of Energies Through Nov. 26 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.
