While passers-by gawk and whip out cell phones to snap impromptu photos, Director Annie Gawlak and her cohorts sit across the street in G Fine Art and watch through their window in amusement. Giant disembodied heads sit in the open commercial space like the contents of so many baskets of French royalty after the Revolution. It’s not a funeral home for the oversized though…or, perhaps it is, in a way.

It’s Ledelle Moe’s exhibit, sponsored by G Fine Arts in collaboration with Metropolis, owner of the commercial space where it’s installed. Memorial (Collapse) contains three enormous heads hand-sculpted with steel and concrete. They lay haphazardly in the otherwise empty space, like relics one has stumbled upon in a once-great, but now deserted city. Perhaps a great capital city like our own, hundreds of years from now when the people have fled from some great catastrophe or massive political upheaval, and wanderers drift among the fallen heads of Lincoln and Jefferson.

Moe’s sculptures reflect some unknown devastation; their undersides have been broken so the bare steel supports show, as if from a long fall to the ground. Gawlak imagines them from fallen empires and, certainly, the sculptures fill the exhibit space with a sense of dissipated majesty. The South African artist’s last exhibit at G Fine Art, Congregation, was a room filled with tiny heads attached on the walls nearly floor to ceiling. The cold grey faces brought to mind mass graves, while a closer look at each head’s hand-crafted expression brought them to life in the form of a crowded city square. Memorial is a combination of these elements — the humanity and the majesty.

Memorial (Collapse) can be seen at 1520 14th Street, NW, all day, everyday, until September 20.

Photo by Adrian Parsons