That the artworks are recent may be more immediately obvious to viewers of the Cushner works. The D.C. artist’s allover canvases, heavily worked and patterned with seemingly botanical motifs, have been shown often in local venues such as Hemphill Artworks. (In 2014, Cushner even did a stint in a retail space at 1700 L St. NW, where paintings could be viewed in process.) The Toronto-born Rotenberg is less known to D.C.-area audiences, although she lived in Baltimore for two decades before moving to Israel in 2015.
Rotenberg works primarily in wood, supplemented by details in metal and cast concrete. The surfaces are sometimes partly painted, or covered in gold leaf. But the colors and textures of wood, mostly cedar, are prominent. This endows the sculptures with a biological quality that’s bolstered by forms that suggest eggs, tendrils and internal organs. Yet certain aspects of the pieces, including their sheer scale, suggest heavy machinery.
The tension between organic and industrial is dynamic in the selection’s tallest sculpture, which stands in the three-story space outside the lower-ceilinged gallery that holds the rest of the show. The towering piece consists of eight wooden globes stacked atop each other, supported by a four-pronged pedestal. The six darker orbs are notched, with curved forms inside each slot; the two lighter ones are unnotched.
With such meticulous schemes, Rotenberg expresses her mastery over the material. (Remarkably, the artist fabricates her pieces without the help of studio assistants.) She’s a machinist as much as anyone who makes functional metal devices. Yet her attraction to wood’s natural qualities is evident. She values cedar for its appearance and, it appears, for its possible evocation of the human body. Far removed from the trees that provided their lumber, Rotenberg’s sculptures nonetheless feel somehow alive.
The Cushner show won’t startle anyone who has followed his career, but it offers a few twists on his customary loops, spirals and fan shapes. The 34 artworks include several woodcut prints, and while they’re inevitably upstaged by the large canvases, printmaking does seem to inform paintings such as “Mirror Mirror.” These recent pictures give a new emphasis to line, separating the central motifs from their backdrops more strongly than in Cushner’s earlier work.
Where foreground and background were once interrelated and often intertwined, they’re now more distinct. Some of the pictures overlay figures rendered with black lines atop fields of soft, drippy daubs in a rainbow of hues. There’s even a painting punctuated by four circles of unpatterned, near-white blankness. These voids — unusual if not unprecedented — come as a mild surprise in one of the artist’s intricate paintings. Perhaps Cushner means to provide a few pathways into his profusely flowering imagery.
Rachel Rotenberg and Steven Cushner Through Dec. 10 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum. 202-885-1000.
A camera lens is a portal, a sort of window onto moments that can be self-evident or enigmatic. For “Reflection Unknown,” Fred Zafran pointed his camera at openings, whether actual or figurative. The Multiple Exposures Gallery show is “an allegory of doubt and inquiry,” according to the photographer’s statement.
The most expected subjects are windows and doors, literal portals that become metaphors for discovery, transition and hidden depths. Zafran’s color pictures, many of which are overwhelmingly black, gaze into unknown interiors. In one photo, there’s someone on the other side of the glass, peering outward through a bank of curtained windows. More characteristic is a picture of a person at an entrance, a moment rendered in a whoosh of motion that supplies a sci-fi feel. A simple step through a doorway appears to be occurring in hyperdrive.
Not all of Zafran’s subjects are literally enterable. He also portrays shadows, lights, mist and bodies of water, from puddles to oceans. The liquid is reflective, like glass, but trickier. One picture of the moon over the sea depicts the natural satellite — also a reflector of light — and two white patches on the surface below. The three small illuminated areas are openings in the darkness, but they aren’t actually entrances. Zafran shows us visual paradoxes: things that appear permeable but actually offer no way in.
Fred Zafran: Reflection Unknown Through Nov. 19 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.
Most of the paintings in Irene Pantelis’s “Of Water Too Are the Grasses” are strongly vertical and semiabstract renderings of foliage that stretches above and below a layer of earth. Yet, as the Studio Gallery show’s title indicates, these elegant pictures have a liquid quality. The local artist achieved this by brushing paper with water and then making the image on the wet surface with watercolor, sumi ink and other substances. The pigments mixed with the water, yielding imagery that is soft and seemingly fluid.
According to her statement, Pantelis was initially inspired by the lawns of her suburban Maryland neighborhood, but she later thought of her childhood summers in Uruguay’s grassy pampas. Yet, with their muted or all-gray palettes, the pictures aren’t especially summery. They’re more autumnal, although “All Along” depicts a nest of bulblike forms beneath a narrow strip of brown dirt, suggesting the promise of rebirth when the weather warms.
The show, which also includes a single wire sculpture, depicts grass and its roots on a near-epic scale. Some of the paintings are large, and even the smaller ones amplify simple stalks and roots into parables of ecological peril and promise. In her watery microcosms, Pantelis finds something all-encompassing.
Irene Pantelis: Of Water Too Are the Grasses Through Nov. 18 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.
