C4 GALLERIES Two galleries, wild worldviews of summer The rest of “Travelogue”? Elsie by Jessica Dawson
Yoo-hoo! Anyone out there? On these, the shaggiest of dog days, the art world tans (with sunblock) while rejuvenating for a promising fall. Here at Galleries, we anticipate much to dig our fangs into. We’ve got new venues: Arlington’s Artisphere (still can’t get around the name, but it’s better than runner-up “Artopo- lis”); Civilian’s new second-floor digs (above the old space on 7th Street). Old friends return: Hello, Eric Hibit! The Corcoran student of yore shows at Curator’s Office next month. And, happily, some exhibitions on tap that we might like: Phil Nesmith’s collodi- on prints of this summer’s gulf oil dis- aster, on view in September at Irvine; artist and set designer Rebecca Kay’s scheme for returning Transformer Gallery to its original state, an alley- way between two buildings. Watch this space two weeks from now for early returns on the fall’s lat- est offerings. Meanwhile, for the five of you read- ing this, I present a pair of shows le- gitimizing your early departure from the office today. “Travelogue” at Carroll Square Four artists turn in the visual
equivalent of their “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essays, with varied results. Foon Sham — who just gets more interesting as the years go by — did a 2009 artist residency in Hospitalfield, Scotland (couldn’t have made that up), and left with a poetic group of conceptual drawings. For some time now, Sham’s been working with trees and their man- made byproducts. One of his favorite materials is the phone book. (For the unfamiliar: This volume binds thou- sands of tissue-thin pages listing phone numbers and addresses.) At Carroll Square, Sham expands on ear- lier themes while playing the edge be- tween sculpture and drawing, object and illusion, image and text. Several works find Sham beginning with a small wood chip, the kind of- fered as a sample at a flooring store. These squares and rectangles, each a few inches long, are identified with a handwritten label — “elm,” “weath- ered sycamore,” “beech.” For “Yew,” Sham affixed a chip to paper and drew extensions of the wood grain’s striations in pencil. The artist traced the wood’s lines into the concentric circles of the original tree’s ring. It’s as if Sham were returning a hacked-up, retail-ready fragment to its natural state.
Sham also reconstitutes nature from the manmade by using diced-up phone books. In one artwork, he mounted a small section of one old
COURTESY OF FOON SHAM
Foon Sham’s “Yew,” above, uses a chip to pencil a ring, while Polly Townsend’s “Kashmir 6000m” conveys a Hollywood artificiality.
COURTESY OF POLLY TOWNSEND
Townsend creates scenes that appear almost fleshy. Claustrophobic and vertiginous, she packs leathery, weathered rocks into a six-foot expanse.
volume, fanning the paper out from its binding. Sham then drew fingers of graphite extending from each leaf, as if expanding the book to its origi- nal proportions. Of course, Sham’s uncertain, hand-drawn lines look nothing like machine-tooled paper, so his imagined phone-book sheaths end up looking organic. They’re some- thing like a river delta as seen on a map. This exhibition’s other bright spot comes from the paintings of Polly Townsend, who ventures into deso- late landscapes and returns to her studio to paint them. For this series, the British artist trekked a stretch of the Himalayas near Kashmir. Her pictures here, with their high- and low-lights creating a Hollywood- style artificiality, remind me of Will Cotton’s candyscapes, circa 2000. While those Cotton landscapes of sweets-filled Willy Wonkavilles ag- gressed with their glucose overload, Townsend creates scenes that appear almost fleshy. Claustrophobic and vertiginous, a picture such as “Kash- mir 6000m” packs leathery, weath- ered rocks into a six-foot expanse of canvas.
Hull’s pictures taken with a Holga (the cheapie camera with the light leaks that many photographers love) depict family vacations in Mexico but don’t offer much beyond contrived nostalgia. And to artist Ruth Pettus, I must ask: Is it possible to exhibit bat- tered old shoes and not evoke the Holocaust? Though there’s no indica- tion this was her intention, Pettus’s arrangement of plinths topped by shoes, each encrusted with the likes of tar or wax, reads as a Holocaust memorial. According to the gallery, they’re meant to be about travel and memory. I see memory — sad memo- ries. But no travel. Elizabeth Kendall at Cross MacKen-
zie What a Frankenshow. It’s called
“Button Boxes,” but I don’t see any buttons. (Unless you count the black and white, nipple-like discs cascading from the wall?) Instead, I see looming fields of monochromatic poppies blooming from the walls, and hungry- mouthed wall sculptures that might’ve been made from cadaverous skin. Though Elizabeth Kendall intends
her ceramic wall sculptures to look like “dozens of oversized black and white buttons bursting out of their container and showering the floor,” you’d better ignore the press release and bring your own associations to the gallery. Kendall’s Button Box pieces (there are four) consist of three- or four-foot- long steel rods tipped with a few thin discs of ceramic that are anchored by a small circle at one end (the effect is vaguely nipplish). When dozens of these rods protrude from the wall and droop into our space, the effect is that of an immense, sideways field of pop- pies. There’s a wonderfully hallucino- genic quality to the proceedings. Kendall’s other works here — wall pieces featuring bottomless cups and a broken plate, complete with sutures —evoke atrophied tissue, condoms or sea creatures. Slightly erotic and defi- nitely off-putting, they’re just open- ended enough to transcend their ma- terial and ignite our imaginations.
“Travelogue”
At Carroll Square Gallery, 975 F St., NW. Open Friday 8 a.m.-6 p.m., closes today.
www.carrollsquare.com Elizabeth Kendall
At Cross Mackenzie Gallery, 1054 31st St. NW, Saturday noon-5 p.m., Tuesday- Friday, noon-6 p.m., to Sept. 14.
www.crossmackenzie.com.
style@washpost.com
Dawson is a freelance writer.
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KLMNO
FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 2010
WJLA moves up morning newscast More reviews by Emily Yahr Months after three local Washington
stations debuted 4:30 a.m. newscasts, WJLA is joining the super-early news party, the ABC affiliate announced Thursday. “Good Morning Washington” will
start at 4:30 a.m. beginning Monday, with “GMW” newscaster Alison Star- ling in the anchor seat. “Basically, we want to serve the early
risers,” station manager Bill Lord said. “When you look at how many people are awake and watching television that time of day, it is shocking.” The move comes as no surprise to the other three stations, all of whom launched 4:30 a.m. newscasts in
March: The CBS affiliate WUSA moved to 4:25 a.m.; Fox’s WTTG and NBC’s WRC moved to 4:30 a.m. just weeks af- terward.
All three stations saw time-slot in- creases in the May “sweeps” ratings among predawn viewers, and the num- bers have remained higher: Last week, WRC averaged 35,300 viewers for “News4 Today,” compared with the 18,400 watching at the same time last year.
WUSA’s “9News Now” garnered
30,300 viewers as opposed to 18,800 for the same week in 2009. “Fox 5 Morning News” had 17,800 viewers — a slight in- crease over 17,500 the same week last year who were watching “Cops” at 4:30 a.m. Lord said that the Allbritton-owned
WJLA has wanted to launch an earlier newscast “for, literally, years,” but that contract issues with ABC previously prevented the move. WJLA now airs “America This Morn-
ing” at that hour — an ABC network news program that offers a mix of busi- ness, weather and sports programming and averages about 16,700 viewers. Lord said the half-hour show, anchored by Vinita Nair and Rob Nelson, will move to 4 a.m. The early-morning news trend is a
“good thing,” Lord said. He added, “I think particularly in a
city that has long commutes, and feder- al workers out there with flexible hours, we’re finding people out there to watch.”
yahre@washpost.com New ‘Avatar’: It’s longer, but is it better? by Rafer Guzman Is eight or so extra minutes of “Avatar”
worth $20? Fans will decide Friday, as “Avatar: Special Edition” hits theaters. Featuring added scenes set on the fictional planet Pandora — and, reportedly, a little more intimacy between Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington as the blue-skinned Na’vi — the film is showing only in 3-D and IMAX 3-D, which generally means high- er prices. The studio, 20th Century Fox, seems to be hoping that new and repeat view- ers will add to the movie’s record-break- ing ticket sales of $2.7 billion worldwide. It’s rare, however, for a longer or re-
vamped version of a well-known movie to resonate strongly with audiences. Generally, the first impression is the strongest. Even when directors cry stu- dio interference and release a so-called director’s cut, the results aren’t always noticeably better. Director James Cameron isn’t even calling “Avatar: Special Edition” a defini- tive work, only a response to audience demand for “more of Pandora.” Fans, meanwhile, are getting smarter at tell-
ing the difference between a genuine im- provement and a mere cash-in. Here are five landmark films whose reissues met with mixed reactions over the years: “The Exorcist” — William Peter Blat- ty, who wrote the original novel, wasn’t entirely pleased with the final cut of this 1973 horror classic. Decades later, in 2000, director William Friedkin author- ized a release closer to Blatty’s liking. Not all the changes seemed necessary, but one welcome addition was the now- famous “spider” scene, in which a pos- sessed Linda Blair crawls down a stair- case face up. “Star Wars” — Although perhaps one of the most beloved films of all time, 1977’s “Star Wars” has been frequently tweaked by creator George Lucas. When Lucas embellished it (and its two se- quels) with computer-aided special ef- fects in 1997, purists groaned. After all, the original film’s charm lay precisely in its old-fashioned, hands-on feel. Never- theless, Lucas might revamp them again —in 3-D. “Apocalypse Now” — Did Francis Ford Coppola’s two-hour, 33-minute epic about the horrors of Vietnam really need to be 49 minutes longer? New sequences
in 2001’s “Apocalypse Now Redux” in- clude Martin Sheen’s surreal visit to a French-Cambodian plantation and a brutal epilogue to the famous Playboy Bunny scene. The 1979 original remains the definitive version. “Blade Runner” — Fans of Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece have long been fascinated by its many versions, partly because they differ so dramatically. De- pending on which one you’re watching, Harrison Ford’s voiceover might dis- appear, the ending might not be so sun- ny, and the central character’s very iden- tity might change. Scott’s “Final Cut,” re- leased to home video in 2007, appears to be the only one over which he had com- plete creative control. “The Lord of the Rings” — The mas- sive popularity of the film and its follow- ups, released between 2001 and 2003, made them ripe for new versions with extras and bonuses. Warner Bros. re- leased lengthy “Special Extended Edi- tions” on home video that received largely positive reviews, and some critics called them an improvement. But direc- tor Peter Jackson — perhaps mindful of his fans — diplomatically refrained from labeling them “director’s cuts.” —Newsday
Turn to Weekend for reviews of all the movies opening today, including:
Takers BB Engaging moments, but caper’s cast is too large and its story too thin. W29
Lebanon BBB1
⁄2
A gripping look at war through eyes of four young Israeli soldiers. W29
Mesrine: Killer Instinct BB Vincent Cassel’s charisma is a bright spot in cliched gangster story. W31
The Last Exorcism BBB
Classic horror with a clever twist. W30
Also reviewed: Animal Kingdom W31 Soul Kitchen W32
RATINGS GUIDE
BBBB Masterpiece BBB Very Good BB Okay
B Poor 0 Waste of Time
To view movie trailers, read more reviews and buy tickets online, go to
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