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Editor's note: This top ten list was compiled by local art blogger and man-about-town Kriston Capps.
Let’s be forward about it—top ten lists don’t really make a lot of sense. Especially for a field as diverse as contemporary art. Really, how much better is the sculpture of the giant Cheetoh than the digitally manipulated photograph? A true accounting for the decision-making process behind a hierarchical ranking of art shows would make the BCS computerized college bowlgame system look like a coin toss. It all comes down to hunches, biases, instinct, and pure visual stimulation. So let it be said that all these shows were remarkable—and the list of shows vying for the eleventh spot is much longer than this one—but caveats aside, here were the strongest District gallery shows of 2005.
10. Jason Zimmerman, Fair Game — Zimmerman’s video installation, a series of segments clipped from more than 100 episodes of the Fox proto-reality series, COPS, showed only the foot chases, free of context. What’s missing from nearly all these clips is the perp—Zimmerman never shows the tackle to the ground. These images, literally controlled and narrated by the police, don’t provide for a defense testimony. The footage of the pursued, predictably, constitutes fleeting glances at mostly minority individuals from bleak neighborhoods. In the blur of motion, one clip is only distinguishable from the next by the dozens of ubiquitous station identification logos that cycle at the bottom of the screen. Zimmerman’s darkly comic observation: Now that’s entertainment. (Transformer)
9. Molly Springfield, anything we have not had to decipher on our own does not belong to us. — Springfield’s ambitious solo showed her tipping her hat to one of the looming literary giants: the title of her exhibition of trompe l’oeil–based drawings and paintings was lifted from a passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Similarly, Springfield’s work explores memory (without all the to-do over the cookie), creating precise drawings of pages from her own life. Specifically, Springfield draws her notes: the sort you used to pass around in grade school, the ones that documented the great tragicomedy that is your life. (Jet Artworks)
8. Julee Holcombe, Homo Bulla (man is a bubble) — Homo Bulla (man is a bubble) was heavy with the art historical nods; the hourglass, bubbles, and extinguished candles in the title piece (pictured above) are all icons that recall the French vanitas portraiture tradition, in particular Jean-Siméon Chardin’s 1739 The Soap Bubble. Other pieces revealed Holcombe’s Romantic streak. Self as Narcissus showed the artists crouching over a reflective pane, holding a computer mouse; the nude, 16-bit reflection, too digitized to be recognizable. She pooh-poohs the Internet’s role in contemporary life, a telling gesture for an artist who lives by Photoshop. (Conner Contemporary)
7. Kelly Towles, Underdog — The line between street art and fine art may be razor thin, but so is the margin for innovation in a genre crowded by wannabes. Towles sets himself apart with an aderol-fueled animation style that might be fairly described as either loose or psychotropic. The cast of the epic power struggle at play in Towles's prints and paintings includes boxers, amputees, fugitives, Dobermans, lunatics, dunces, soldiers, and a score of squatty birds. (Adamson Gallery)
6. Jiha Moon, symbioland — Art watchers greeted Moon with feverish attention after the artist took home the $10,000 Trawick Prize for young, local artists. Her subsequent show at Curator's Office of smaller ink and acrylic drawings confirmed the buzz (and bluzz): In these works, overarching atmospheres, weather patterns, and ribbons of energy played host to the small eukaryotic forms that distinguish Moon's marking system. Moon's delicate ecosystems make for a satisfying balance between Southeast Asian compositional conventions and the very contemporary all-over style of painting. (Curator's Office)
5. Linn Meyers, Current — Linn Meyers' drawings are a manifestation of her body. The artist draws long lines in ink and colored-pencil on Mylar according to predetermined parameters. For Current, the artist presented works dotted with punctuation formed by starts and stops (as dictated by her preset rules). By doubling up the Mylar in several works—background drawing layers visible through the fore—Meyers achieved a highly textured, fabric-like Op Art effect. And it didn't hurt that the works were simply stunning pieces to look at. (G Fine Art)
4. Dan Steinhilber, [untitled show] — Suave-brand shampoo bottles arranged on shower grab bars, artificial sweetener packets coiled in tightly swirling wall medallions, plastic cutlery molded in the shape of a caterpillar—who does Steinhilber think he's fooling? Nobody at all: Steinhilber's brand of homemade post-Pop sculpture reveals meticulous attention to composition and an authoritative eye for recombinant creations. A real junkyard dog, Steinhilber took mass‑produced, banal, commercial materials and reserviced them as new, distinct forms for this show. (Numark)
3. Ian Whitmore, Mirror, Mirror — Matching dense literary, art, and historical references with a temperamental balance between representative painting and gestural abstraction, Whitmore's Mirror, Mirror was a satisfying look take on common myths and fantasies. The myths were readable without an advanced degree; his attractive palette sublimated the violence at play in his canvases. But therein lay the strongest level at which this show worked: Every canvas showed a struggle between the literal painted representation of a subject and the abstraction that figuratively suggests the meaning of that subject—a conflict most appropriate for driving at the meaning of myth and magic. (Fusebox)
2. Kendall Buster, Model City — Buster's installation, on first glance, was a great iridescent swoosh of blue nylon cutting across the gallery in an arc. After walking, kneeling, and finally crawling under this draped ceiling to the far end of the room—the work didn't quite reach the end of the gallery—it became apparent that the swatch of nylon, in fact, comprised the joined bottom edges of 52 pup tents. Attending the crowded opening was like walking into a cross-section of an organism, with viewers (crawling around the floor, stooping while mingling, "camping out" in corners) playing the part of a culture under the microscope. This was as ambitious an installation as you're likely to find in the District. (Fusebox)
1. Mary Early, Sculpture — The big pineapple. It was a mesmerizing vision that greeted viewers walking into the project space at the back of Hemphill Fine Arts: a balsa-wood and beeswax sculpture in the shape of a tasty slice o’ pineapple, a work that looked as if it were gluey and unstable but just as easily might be substantive and firm. Early’s work invited touching, exactly as it should; her rough-shod geometry—the result of a repetitive, naturalistic process of laying down trapezoidal balsa pieces and beeswax in a radial direction—mimes the inexplicably simple ways that nature has given us her most exotic forms. (No actual touching, not without permission.) (Hemphill Fine Arts)
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