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By Louis Jacobson © Washington City Paper Thursday, August 18, 2005. In the Fraser Gallery Bethesda’s summer group show featuring roughly two dozen artists (F. Lennox Campello’s Salome is pictured), the gallery’s old standbys provide worthy material, but a few less-familiar faces offer the real surprises. In the former category are two oil paintings by the ever-incisive Cuban artist Sandra Ramos, two photogravures by the darkly eccentric Viktor Koen, a pair of lushly brush-stroked oils by David FeBland, and a sextet of sepia barn photographs by Maxwell MacKenzie (though with less detail than viewers of his work might have become accustomed to). Among the newcomers, John Winslow and Andrew Wodzianski offer confidently limned oils: Winslow’s theater-inspired piece features several zoot-suited musicians dancing around a projection screen that shows a more modern-looking electric guitarist, and Wodzianski paints a pair of masked Mexican lucha libre participants. (Or they are at least pseudo-participants: The guy in the shark mask is wearing a business suit, which suggests a point more metaphorical than descriptive.) Tim Castine contributes two understated photographs of ice on frozen Lake Champlain, one looking like chalk-lined felt and the other with an oddly angelic cast. Sculptor and performance artist Mark Jenkins (not the Washington City Paper writer) offers a centaur and a rifle-toting boy fabricated from packing tape, the latter with an appropriately black smudge at the end of the barrel. The standout, though, is Michael Fitts, who resurrects the eclipsed art of trompe l’oeil by using oil paint on metal; his renderings of a folded dollar bill and a wrinkled piece of paper are convincing indeed. The show is on view Tuesdays through Saturdays from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., to Wednesday, September 7, at the Fraser Gallery, 7700 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. Free. (301) 718-9651. (Louis Jacobson) Louis Jacobson © Copyright 2005 Washington City Paper |
