Katrina Keane

Decartography

We have grown up in a culture that pursues advancement through maps, charts, and diagrams. We strive to understand, and to some extent control, the world around us. If we look deeply enough, we see the world pushing back. For our exhibit “Decartography” we look at our efforts to map the stars. Each culture has its own historical legends and sky-drawings. The big dipper has been a plough, it has been a coffin with mourners, it has been a great many things. It was not until 1930 that the International Astronomical Union standardized the constellations into 88 puzzle-piece sections of sky. Although the constellations are now formed by astronomical borders rather than somewhat arbitrary lines connecting stars, when we look up at Orion we still see the hunter that the Greeks saw in the sky. What happens, though, if we move so far into the future that the constellations (as connected lines between stars) shift into something quite unrecognizable to us: where one of the Gemini twins has a neck so elongated that his head is now at his twin’s foot? Where once recognizable forms become abstract compositions? The world we know, that we might assume has always been roughly the same, continues shifting–completely undaunted by our attempts to describe it. For this exhibit, we start by looking at star charts and drawing the constellations as pictorial, linear connections between stars corresponding with the IAU constellation names. We also assign each constellation a unique color with Prismacolor color pencil. Next, using planetarium software, we shift these drawings 90,000 years into the future in a universe that is constantly moving and redraw these new forms. We see what has happened to our attempts to map the stars and what our familiar sky has become. We are, in a sense, mapping the inevitable unmapping of our designs.

Radio Sebastian is an artmaking collaboration between Corwin Levi and Yumiko Blackwell based in Washington, DC.

Visit the Radio Sebastian’s website at www.radiosebastian.com.

Energy of Wire

The wire material that Rosa Spina uses to express her creative energy becomes the protagonist of her artwork. With the gesture of painting and filamentous material, the artist combines two main ideas: casual gesture and informal material. She proposes a new way of interpreting the reality of wire, which is released from the wire’s common utilitarian use, instead using it to looking outside the instrumental meaning. Spina is inspired by the de-collage process of the artist Mimmo Rotella, which leads her to de-weave her canvases in an act of restoring the primacy of the work. She uses this “de-weaving” process to create dense networks of colorful symbols that become joyous explosions of life.

Italian artist Rosa Spina, was born in Sicily but grew up in the Calabria region. She currently lives and works in Catanzaro, Italy where she teaches “pictorial disciplines” at the School of Art. She is considered a pioneer of experimentation in Italy’s contemporary Fiber Art scene, an artistic movement that spread to the United States and northern Europe in the late sixties.

PORTICO

Objects found, the discarded
are resurrected
as forms to be considered, to be reconstructed

things noticed from the periphery
are extracted directly from nature
or sidewalks

I have a penchant for elegance, a sense of order,
to investigate pattern and geometry
the essence of the natural state

it involves a process of subtraction
of stripping down to the thinnest layer
to be rebuilt, altered and situated

poised for reflection
or simply to notice

then again, continue to transform into further entities

Within my work I examine visual relationships and transformations found in nature. I am interested in elements from nature that communicate the passage of time and illustrate cyclical occurrences in life. I continuously explore the concept of the ephemeral. Drawing is an essential element to my work. I experiment with alternative approaches to drawing in order to investigate line. The process that I choose or often invent to create a piece determines the work, which attempts to straddle the line between sculpture and drawing. Recent works based on lace patterning and natural formations incorporate the practice of traditional sewing with contemporary drawing techniques.

Visit Agati’s website at www.nancyagati.com.

HALF WILD

responses to black and white photographs of mountains covered in snow, with a focus on rocky faces and folds. Others are dissections of the layers and construction of islands and blue mountain horizons.

Fawna and her father built all of the frames by hand. All prints are one-of-a-kind, no editions.

Fawna Xiao is a printmaker and artist based in Washington DC. She first taught herself to screenprint after hitting the mini-jackpot at a New Zealand casino, and then went on to get a BA in Studio Art with a concentration in Printmaking from the University of Maryland College Park. Fawna continues to show regularly in various solo and group exhibitions in the Washington DC area.

Visit Xiao’s website at fawnaxiao.com.