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Some interest, disappointment in Trawick winners show

Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo ‘‘Island Moon,” Jiha Moon’s painting on silk, attempts to address themes of opposition between East and West, and the imagined and the representational, in a landscape-like composition. Click here to enlarge this photo Complex structure and an extensive variety of media make Denise Tassin’s ‘‘Perpendicular Dialogues” among the most interesting works in the exhibit.

This is not to say there is nothing of interest in this exhibit. Of the four winners of the $14,000 in prize money, probably the most intriguing are the work of third-prize recipient Denise Tassin and the Young Artist Award winner Michele Kong.

Tassin’s ‘‘Perpendicular Dialogues” is an extensive Fluxus-style multimedia installation, only part of which could be accommodated in the space at Creative Partners. Comprised of a myriad array of small bits, it employs media of literally every kind: twist-ties in foam rubber, paintings on candy wafers and black tire repair disks, strings of colored pompoms, drawings on musical staff paper, tiny structures made of pills, burnt manuscript pages and a wood drawings chest full of more urban flotsam. These, and a pink child’s chair, may suggest a more childlike mode than the adult ‘‘conversations and interactions” with other artists Tassin mentions in her statement. Perhaps that’s the point: The artist retains a childlike delight in exploring and manipulating things. Yet what separates Tassin’s work from much of the rest is that its complex structure visually initiates a critical dialogue with the viewer — without need for the artist’s statement to tell us what we are ‘‘supposed” to be seeing.

Overall, the problem with the provided verbal infrastructure is a real issue here. While the viewer certainly may benefit from explanation of various conceptual levels of intended meaning or other artistic intentions, written statements extraneous to the work itself should not be a necessary bridge between viewer and object. Too many works in this group, particularly the extremely banal work of second-prize winner Dean Kessman, seem to depend on this kind of accompanying didactic text. Kessman’s digital prints of the sides and spines of art magazines are supposed to call to mind all sorts of concerns having to do with the ‘‘re-presentation of bound reproductions of contemporary art and culture.” This would be interesting if any of it were perceptible in the work on its own. It’s true that the magnification of the scan allows us to see the ‘‘dot pattern from the printing press,” but the abstract banding in these compositions seems to reference weaving or architectural drawings if anything at all. Indeed, the closest referent I can think of is a Vietnamese technique of weaving old newspapers and magazines into strips to make baskets — with similar effect.

Michele Kong’s delicate net sculpture ‘‘Indra,” made of monofilament and jewel-like dots of hot glue, floats attractively from the ceiling like a giant spider web, although its catenary lines are, according to her statement, intended to ‘‘capture a space of emptiness” and thus imply a ‘‘cosmic matrix.” Still, Kong’s work also stands out for its intriguing mix of science, mathematical structure and the fluid line of her ink drawings. That undulating line, as in ‘‘Crystalline Flow,” has a distinctly Asian feel to it, a real sense of the merging of Eastern contemplative techniques and Western objectivity.

This last recalls the similar aim of Jiha Moon, winner of the $10,000 top prize. It is of some interest that a painter should win first prize among widespread critical opinion that painting, per se, is dead, or at least moribund. Although it has been said that painting expired around 1970, there is much evidence of its subsequent resurrection and continuing evolution. Technically, Moon’s work reflects a new exploratory element in contemporary painting. Working on silk, rather than canvas or linen, Moon uses a combination of ink (a traditional Asian medium) and acrylic (a relatively recent Western invention) to paint landscape-like fantasies which — and this is the interesting part — ‘‘pursue the dynamics of the relationship between abstraction and representation.” The idea, while not new, is an important one in the current discourse on painting, which has experienced a significant shift toward figuration in the recent past. Moon is interested in opposites: East vs. West, nature vs. culture, the imagined vs. the physical, and these themes are, to some extent, evident in her work. Ultimately, however, the paintings look too much like pastiches of late 19th century Japanese prints superimposed with abstract forms — despite the artist’s elaborately articulated intentions.

Many of the artists seem interested in an underlying theme of opposition. A ‘‘critical dialogue between painting and photography” is the stated object of the work of Bernhard Hildebrandt, but the work fails to carry this out to much effect. On the other hand, Jason Zimmerman’s video ‘‘The Demolition,” about home vs. ‘‘career and capital desire,” succeeds where others fail. Uncannily topical, the video shows, with eerie sound, the mechanical destruction of a house. The sadness it produces is phenomenal. Without words, it seems to convey the destruction of the American Dream, the family and all the rest.

The exhibit is at Creative Partners, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda, 301-951-9441, through Sept. 30.