The Day I Stopped Believing by Billy Colbert

With an entrance so unassuming its easy to walk right past, the Healing Arts Gallery, once you find it, is a new and welcome addition to the D.C. art scene. The venue is part of the Smith Farm Center on U Street NW, a nonprofit dedicated to using creative methods for the health and education of people suffering from cancer and other serious illnesses. For the last 13 years, in their offices upstairs from the gallery, they've offered healthy cooking classes, yoga and meditation, and other services for individuals and their families.

Unlike, for example, Art Enables, the gallery doesn't feature work by those who fall within their mission. Instead it plans to feature fine art by (mostly) established local artists, and has started things off nicely -- Tai Hwa Goh, who recently had a show at Flashpoint, was part of their inaugural show in May, while their current exhibition includes Michael Janis and Billy Colbert (we'll get to them in a minute). The "healing" part comes from the process of enjoying the art itself, supplemented with a full calendar of events, discussions, and workshops. When I stopped by on Wednesday, I interrupted a lecture for photographers on how to market their work and display in galleries, a workshop the gallery generously hosted for the Hamiltonian Gallery down the street, whose construction snags have their delayed opening for another month.

Smith Farm has been hosting art exhibits for awhile, but they were crammed on movable partitions in their upstairs offices, next to their cooking class kitchen. They first envisioned the gallery when their pet shop tenants went out of business a few years ago. Smith Farm split the store, and the environmentally friendly Greater Goods moved in to two-thirds of it, while the gallery was set up in the other third, helped with a hefty grant from the D.C. Commission on Arts and the Humanities. In keeping with their earth-loving vision, the space is quite serene. Visitors are greeted by a hanging wall of succulent greens, which help oxygenate the room. Beautiful Brazilian cherry wood makes up the floor and "floating" cloud-like sections give a place to hang lighting while keeping an airy opening feeling in the space. Smith Farm has grand plans to renovate the back end of the building, with a small courtyard in between (where some artists are already envisioning installation work). The artists aren't required to sell their work, but if they do, Smith Farm's commission goes towards their artist in residence program.

Work by Michael Janis at the Healing Arts Gallery

Their current show is Figurative/Narrative: Memories of a Presence, featuring Michael Janis, Billy Colbert, and Paul Andrew Wandless. The three use very different media, but come together well under the theme (with a hat tip to in-house curator Lillian Fitzgerald). We've written about Janis before, and in fact one of his pieces from the Glass3 show is in this exhibit (pictured left). His most interesting glass sculptures are three works of tall, shallow square boxes, sitting next to each other on a wall shelf, technically separate, but they work well as a series. Unlearning History features glass spines running down the right side, as a ghostly face appears, from his sgraffito technique that fuses glass dust into delicately drawn images. Together with drawn floor plans for a variety of swank houses and tiny baby doll parts, the box radiates with a classic Flowers in the Attic-type fear.

On the other end of the row is Social Engineering, with creepy mosquitoes looming above overhead photos of a freeway interchange, and another of a crowd of shadowy pedestrians, while white-dust images of what could be DNA chains run along the sides of box. While some of Janis' pieces fare less well -- a large glass panel of non-plussed faces hanging in the gallery window evokes too many circumstances to be intriguing -- his boxes are tight universes of few possible outcomes, begging the viewer to lean in for more clues.

Billy Colbert's multi-media, large scale collages bring the color into the exhibit with bright pastels from across the spectrum. Most feature black outlines of old-timey characters -- British style detectives and dapper young boys in britches -- that, together with the comforting colors, welcome you into the scene with the hands of an old favorite blanket or your baby photo album. Sometimes images remind you of stickers you might have slapped on your Trapper Keeper, "Alfa Romero" or a fluttery bird drawing, but within there's always something more sinister. The Day I Stopped Believing (pictured top right) evolves from the detective's quaint search for clues, to fragments of deep loss embedded out of his sight. Snippets of text, "space shuttle burst...," "Darryl Strawberry not playing...," "boy lost his sense of trust...," as a rat crawls near the bottom of the scene, leave you reeling from that moment Real Life crashed in on the innocent world of your childhood. Some, like The Ballad of Bruce are more subtle, as a referee blows his whistle and funny-looking gnomes bounce in the foreground, angry swirls of blue are painted above like storm clouds.

Paul Andrew Wandless works in clay sculpture, making figurines of heads and torsos like modern artifacts. He uses the clay bodies as a canvas in themselves, sometimes for hieroglyphic type text, sometimes for what seem like tattoos on the figure itself. Prize Fighter is a dark painted head with hands painted over the eyes that look like wings. The lips are a cherry red, and its spiked hair is adorned in a thorny crown. On the back of its neck is a "tattoo" that says "It's all black to me," next to a series of ladders that reach from the bottom, where its back would be, up the back of its head. The symbolism that each of Wandless' sculptures have is at times provocative, and at others far too heavy-handed.

The Healing Arts Gallery is located at 1632 U Street NW and open Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Figurative/Narrative runs until August 28.