Wondimu and Kravitz @ McLean Project for the Arts
In this series there are two bodies of work. The first was created in the post studio space of the desktop computer and essentially printed onto cloth (digitally produced dye sublimation prints on poly poplin – say that ten times fast!). This work can take two forms. The first is of enlarged pixels in the portrait of Sojourner Truth, who looks like she could be either African or Caucasian from the way the pixels play in the portrait. The second is as a tangle of linear scribbles, a la Jackson Pollock, as seen in the gargantuan print Protest (pictured above). It is this second style that is also mirrored in latex paint on large canvases.
Content definitely trumps form in this body of work: not that the form is bad, it’s just heavily borrowed. Pollock never tackled race in his work, only his subconscious and his liver. Wondimu’s work addresses both the language of paint and the language of race and ethnicity, which are often the same. Pollock's technique is an easy vehicle since his mature work of splattered paint is often described as "skeins" – often mispronounced “skins” rather than with a long A (like Spain) – of paint. As for where those skeins fall on the canvas, or in their digital prints, the colors start to mix, blend, overlap, and intersect. Also, like some studies of racial populations, the skin color in Wondimu’s work often times “keep to their own neighborhoods.”
After walking up the ramp into the Atrium Gallery, there is a series of cut arabesques, by Walter Kravitz, that run the length of the wall leading into the Emerson Gallery. The arabesques are cut polycarbonate (like Plexi glass) that have been sprayed on both sides with an enamel paint. This work is an appropriate transition between the two exhibitions. Entitled Transgression, it transgresses the boundaries of what makes a painting, drawing, or sculpture. For us art lovers, this is exciting stuff: a drawing is not limited to pencil on paper, a painting is more than paint, and sculptures go beyond Rodin.
At first glimpse into Emerson Gallery, Kravitz’s Drawings conjures a myriad of responses. Divided into a section of graphite and watercolor on paper, and a section of charcoal and acrylic on canvas, the work on the walls are somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Arnaldo Pomodoro. The work twists and ungulates as beautiful and delicate abstractions. There are figures trapped in these billowing landscapes and architectural labyrinths. Taken from a distance, some of the abstractions and landscapes composite into sinuous and tortured tiny people. Each piece has this multiple read of subject and content: a Where’s Waldo of imagery.
For instance, a piece like Iraq, for which the political content at first seems only to emerge from the title, looks like an all-over abstraction of small geometric shapes overlapping and intersecting. Moving closer to the work, the abstractions mutate into small machines; figures carrying, pulling, and tugging; oil towers and architecture; smoke and tourniquets. If the title is any indication, it is a heavenly depiction of hell. This is how all the pieces function, allowing an audience to place conjecture upon each piece as they figure out what the individual components of the work represent – as if they need to represent anything at all.
McLean Project for the Arts is located at 1234 Ingleside Avenue, McLean, Va. and is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday 1 to 5 p.m. The exhibition runs through June 9.
Images of Wondimu's Protest (top) and Kravitz's Buddha (bottom) courtesy of McLean Project for the Arts.