Tom Olson

Tom Olson

Tom Olson

Tom Olson

Tom Olson

April 6-29, 2018

Truer than True

the absurd, by spending countless hours drawing hundreds of pages to arrive at a profound six seconds. With titles like “The Beast and the Lightning Bolt,” “How the Sun Becomes the Moon,” and “What Maps Do When Nobody’s Looking,” Olson manages to weave together whimsy and high-minded ideas in seamless fashion.

Olson created his flipbooks decades ago in a bygone era of New York, before launching a successful career as an attorney in Washington, DC, where he continues the practice of law today. These recently discovered pieces still feel just as fresh as they did when they were first created. He is, for the first time since 1979, sharing his old treasures again and making brand new work. This will be the first showing of these small treasures in the artist’s own part of the country.

www.truerthantrue.com

April 6-29, 2018

The Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors

“The Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors”, presented in partnership the Embassy of Switzerland in the United States of America and the Gamaraal Foundation, is a powerful exhibition of photographic portraits and video interviews that give voice to the women and men who built a new life in Switzerland after surviving the Holocaust.

The exhibition centers on large-scale photographic portraits and video interviews of some of the last remaining survivors of the Holocaust. They give a personal dimension to Holocaust history and preserve it for future generations. Those portrayed have family roots in various European countries and today live in the German, the French or the Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland.

The Gamaraal Foundation was founded in 2014 with the objective of giving financial support to poor and needy people, in particular to the few remaining Holocaust survivors living in need.

www.last-swiss-holocaust-survivors.ch

March 2-31, 2018

Indexical/Aura

The framework of “Indexical/Aura” takes a close look at the ‘index’ and the ‘aura’ in order to reflect how each of the artworks addresses the theme of allographic mark making. The work uses the galleries existing architecture, lighting, and the intervention of objects and paintings to create a situation for a drawing to occur.

Using Walter Benjamin as a point of departure, Hensley has created individual units of gilded bars and burnished graphite and has installed them on the gallery walls in a way that interacts with the artificial light to make a mark on the wall–using the existing elements of the room to complete the drawing. The work questions the true origins of the auras and presents them in a new manner to leave a new mark. The new mark seems to be fleeting and subordinate to the whole of the architecture and shape of the supports on which it relies on. The ego and unique personality of the mark becomes suppressed in favor of the mind and calls more attention to the material relations than that of the mark as a singular event.

Jeff Hensley is interested in how we emotionally, intellectually, and physically connect to materials around us, and the structures in place that guide these responses. He lives and works in the quiet mill town of Oella, Maryland where he teaches and maintains a studio. Jeff was recently an artist in residence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Artcroft Creative Center in Carlisle, KY, and The Jentel Foundation in Banner, WY. Jeff is an Ed Taylor Fellow and has exhibited his work at the National and International level.

www.jeffjensley.com

March 2-31, 2018

Ubiquitous

Sarah Jamison considers the internet to be a unique vessel for culture to exist, evolve and be archived simultaneously. In this digital space, information intertwines in such a way that we often have little separation between current events, internet vernacular, memes and humorous content, celebrity gossip, images, and fact and fiction. We contribute to and consume this content in an unending loop – interacting instantaneously with endless information is unprecedented in our history; and yet, it is our societal norm.

These intersections have inspired Sarah’s current body of work, which investigates the constant feed of images and data through digital devices. It is her belief that through our perpetual media engagement, there is a universal language where everything from cat videos to Kim Kardashian “Breaking the Internet” is immediately understood. She seeks to reorganize and reinterpret these images, selecting a variety of recognizable or notorious images and phrases and reassembles them to create a homogenous piece. Sarah carefully renders these drawings in colored pencil at the exact size of an iPhone screen, juxtaposing the traditional fine art media against the pop culture imagery. Sarah’s intention is to create artwork that is at once spontaneous and serious, vapid and complex, emulating our culture’s relationship with social media down to the last detail. In her artwork, she hopes to blur the lines of “high” and “low” art – to marry unconventional themes with traditional practice. Sarah wants to create pieces that are both snapshots of and commentary on our culture, presented in a way that allows the viewer to consider familiar concepts through a new lens.

Originally from small town Virginia, Sarah moved to Washington, DC in 2006 to attend the Corcoran College of Art + Design where she graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2010. She continues to live and create in the nation’s capital.. Sarah is a member of the DCAC Artists Collective, Sparkplug.

www.sarah-jamison.com

March 2-31, 2018

To Bend/To Fold

Architectural and enigmatic, the linear structures of Anne Smith’s work challenge the first glance. Their precision and economy are upset by the strange logic of their construction. Smith presents a world in which these structures exist precariously, at the edges of balance, tension and symmetry.

In her drawings, Smith inscribes silvery, graphite lines into a dense and velvety ground of charcoal. Line by line, she builds luminous structures that fit just inside the boundaries of their environment. In the large drawings, faint lines and hints of color pulsate behind the structures, alluding to the horizon or swirling patterns based on the artist’s physical reach. The tension is physical and visual: as one moves in relation to the drawings, the graphite images appear and disappear, changing with the reflection of light. From certain points of view, the linear structures embedded show brightly, while from other points they recede into the depths of their ground. The images elude stability.

Through abstraction and memory, Smith taps into what she sees as a lifelong challenge and call: to trust in uncertainty, to expand against perceived limits, and to find strength in the ability to bend.

Anne Smith (b. 1985, Syracuse, NY) is a visual artist based in Washington, DC. Her art practice spans disciplines of drawing, sculpture and printmaking to study elastic boundaries, paths, and divisions of space. Her subject matter has included her childhood home, the side of the road, and other spaces entirely made up or imagined.

Smith is a Teaching Artist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and works in the studio of Master Printmaker Lou Stovall, from whom she learned silkscreen printmaking. In 2017, she served as Master Printmaker on a large-scale silkscreen book edition by Louis M. Schmidt at George Mason University’s Navigation Press in Fairfax, VA. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, and the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA. She received an MFA from George Mason in 2015, a BA in Studio Art from Williams College, Williamstown, MA, in 2007, and has studied woodworking at the Penland School of Crafts in Bakersville, NC. Her work is included in private collections, as well as the US Department of State, Capital One and the Kala Art Institute. She is represented by Adah Rose Gallery.

www.annecsmith.com