Mid City Artists' Open Studios Weekend
Last weekend, over 30 local artists opened their studios to the public to show and sell their latest work. These Mid City Artists are a diverse and extremely talented group centered in the Dupont Circle area. Eagle writers visited some of the studios to describe highlights of the show.
Marc Monteleone 1752 Church St. N.W.
Marc Monteleone is a Swiss artist who moved to D.C. last year. Since arriving, he has been working on a series of small acrylic square paintings. Each work features a close-up shot of exterior architecture on buildings in D.C. Some are more recognizable than others, like the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. Other pieces appear to be collages of rectangular shapes that resemble stained glass.
Truly inspired by architecture downtown, Monteleone says that D.C. is "maybe the most European-looking American city." He also finds reflections that buildings make in other buildings interesting and worthy of artistic exploration.
Upstairs in his Dupont studio/home, Monteleone showed larger paintings of Turin, Italy, and some city paintings still in development. For a European artist that has been showing for two decades, his first collection in America is modest but promising and interesting.
-JOSH KRAMER
Kristina Bilonick 1829 14th St. N.W.
When contemporary artists are placed in the uncomfortable position of being asked to verbalize the aesthetic style of their work, the term kitschy doesn't frequently come up. Indeed, being called ugly or garish might be more welcome. However, Kristina Bilonick doesn't mind calling her latest works just that; that's the rhinestone-studded point.
Her latest collection seeks to examine modern culture's fascination with travel, and more importantly, the preconceived notions and visions of the places people long to visit. To achieve this, she has combined her formidable printmaking ability with found objects to make pre-vacation souvenirs, creating seemingly nonsensical collages and images that borrow both Dadaist absurdity and cultural relevance.
To Bilonick's credit, her kitsch is a more recent manifestation; with a keen sense of vibrant colors and a sharp eye for design, she has proven herself as a worthy jewelry and clothing designer and an even more incisive print and collage maker. While she might tout her love for all things lame, Bilonick's previous work shows she's just as in tune with what's modern and hip.
-BENJAMIN LOZOVSKY
Betsey Karasik 1718 P St. N.W., #508
Betsey Karasik, a lawyer until 1998, paints mostly small, bright acrylic paintings of animals and objects. "Acrylics have a luminosity," says Karasik, who covers most of the wall space in her 17th Street apartment with her works. Her paintings are interesting because of the bold, detailed figures, which look like they sit on top of marble or granite, and a distinct trompe l'oeil style not often evoked by contemporary painters.
In "Butterflies," three life-like butterflies are on (not in) a beautiful, barely cloudy sky, each with what would be called a Photoshop drop shadow. Karasik also rarely uses frames, because she feels that they compete for attention with the painting. Instead, she opts to paint the four border sides of the painting, sometimes going into great detail.
Her detailed and simple depictions can sometimes speak volumes. One work, portraying a kitten and a beach ball, was haunting. In the six years since she finished art school, Karasik has clearly developed an interesting style.
-J.K.
Anne Marchand 1413 17th St. N.W.
Anne Marchand is a well-respected, long-time private artist and community muralist in the D.C. area. She has shared her Dupont gallery with Angela White and Freya Grand since 1996. Marchand's recent series of abstract oil paintings of various sizes evokes intense emotion. Textures of the paintings range from bubbling to flat and broad strokes unleash explosions of color. The smaller paintings are packed to the border with different colors and lines, while the larger canvases employ long, thick lines that easily guide the eye.
Each painting brings the viewer into a different world, which is what Marchand says she was trying to achieve. Drawing upon pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, Marchand wanted to capture the energy and motion she saw in the interaction of star clusters. Marchand also recently completed a mural with students in Takoma Park.
-J.K.
Mark Parascandola 2002 15th St. N.W.
How does one turn the mundane buildings in D.C.'s lackluster downtown into grandiose architectural statements, full of excitement and confusion? Through an innate flair for the dramatic and a penchant for eerily absorbing saturations of tonal light, photographer Mark Parascandola has done just that. With equal enthusiasm, he transforms the magnificent into the even more magnificent, like converting the District's oldest and most important gothic revivalist masterpiece, the Luther Place Memorial Church, into an even more menacing figure, towering below a moon and an opaque sky.
Perhaps it was his collegiate studies at Cambridge or his work in Public Health as an epidemiologist that led Parascandola to realize that even the most brilliantly rich saturation has its own saturation point. His latest work has led him to the south of Spain, and it marks a departure from that past style. His new approach is more like a treatise in super-realism and microcosmic minutiae, as he examines many of the deteriorating yet still iconic fortresses and castles that are spread out across the region in an equally re-inventive way.
-B.L.
Angela White 1413 17th St. N.W.
Angela White tells her art students that she "walks the talk." She means that in addition to teaching full-time at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, she also shows and sells her art professionally.
That's not to say that White makes conservative, "art-teacher art." For her current work, White says she was inspired by an athletic rock-climbing friend's body and asked him to put on black paint and press himself against paper. She recently had a one-woman show of "Body Print," featuring smaller pieces on metallic-colored backgrounds, which help to immortalize her friend's body shape. The works focus on the natural shapes and contours in the human body and do much in the way of combating the famous view that the female body is a work of art and the male body is strictly utilitarian.
Now, she's taking the work farther by dipping smaller versions in encaustic wax. "There's always a story," says White. To her, art is about finding and representing that story.
-J.K.
Freya Grand 1413 17th St. N.W.
"I don't paint people, I don't paint animals. I'm not interested," says Freya Grand. Instead, she creates soft, captivating nature scenes. Her active brushwork creates a texture for sprawling oil paintings that make fantastic use of light and perspective.
For inspiration, Grand takes pictures, sketches and notes of places like the Andes Mountains. Ultimately, she's not interested in recording the exact look of a place but rather the feel of a place. One of her paintings depicts an epic and dynamic red mountain scene. She warned that the place the painting was based on was not actually red, but that was best way she could evoke the feeling of it in her work. In addition to the large canvases, Grand also creates interior murals, painted screens and triangular painted snapshots.
One small triangle painting, equally defined by the white space in the canvas as it is by the actual paint, showed a small shadow-laden patch of the forest floor. On a general scale, Grand's work is equally subtle and impressive.
-J.K.
