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)
