Washington D.C., y'all. Mary Jeys

I was recently in Washington D.C. Most of these shows are closed now, but it's always nice to document in the written word.

G Fine Art, 1515 14th Street NW
Blasts, curated by Paul Brewer
Quote from the gallerist: "[The show] ends up being anti-war without being didactic." Interesting. I didn't find any hint of anti-war-ness in the show, save perhaps Louis Cameron's Warfare Riddim (version 2) digital piece showing a fake newsperson in front of cinematic imagery of buildings being blown up in a faux news show. The rest sort of seems to be about explosions. Heide Fasnacht's drawing, Three Buildings shows one of the three in the process of demolition. Something that I personally think is taboo regarding explosions is their beauty. A specific example is the visual beauty of buildings being blown up, even dare I say, the World Trade Towers. I think the beauty that we can not speak about does not rise from the symbolic destruction of a superpower, but rather in the ordinary way that we like to play with games and toys like Jenga. It's fun to watch things topple over. It's actually kind of beautiful to watch something hard and concrete end up to be a pile of rubble in the end. For me the show was a revelry in watching rubble happen.

Numark, 625 E St. NW
A City Paper "pick". The show is sort of the polar opposite of "Blasts", titled "An Empire of Sighs". This was a really delicate show that kind of reminded me of some of the more irritating parts of the art world. The fascination with delicacy and preciousness. At its best, I can be a participant in the fineness of this group show, like Michele Kong's Pores, made of hot glue and mono filament in a precious display of latticework. Sadly, the rest of the work left me uninterested either because it wasn't twee enough, or because craftmanship left something to be desired.

Fuse Box, 1412 14th Street NW
An installation by Kendall Buster, Model City is made from tent-like materials and is suspended from the cieling. Who lives in this model city? Why are they living in blue tents painted to look like brickwork? How is it a city when clearly all there is outside of any individual "tent" is another individual "tent"? None of these questions kept me from liking the work.

Conner Contemporary, 1730 Connecticut Ave. NW
Julee Holcombe's one person show was at first a witty trickster playing with notions of painting and image in photography. It becomes deeper as you notice the careful slowness with which her imagery is constructed. I'm constantly on the lookout for work that whispers or hums, not shouts. Holcombe's work melodically hums without you noticing that you've picked up the tune yourself.

Found Sound, Various locations around DC
I only got to three of these installations. Harry Shearer's ipod shuffle with ambient street sounds in the wake of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Brandon Morse's street sound installation that mixed traffic noise with prerecorded sounds constantly mixing in a parabola, and Joseph Grigely's non-sound piece about not wanting girls to hear one pee. All three were fun, and the kind of thing cities are good for. That is, communal experiences. To have a large community involved in sound awareness can only spell good for those of us who are acutely atuned to improper cell phone usage and unnecessary honking incidents.

D.C. had a lot more than I expected. And the Spy Museum rocks a whole lot.