Art wrap

Art Runneth over at Artomatic

By John Blee

June 2009

Sister

If you want to see it all, or perhaps more than you might want to see, then go to Artomatic (55 M St. S.E., at the corner of Half Street; Navy Yard Metro stop, ballpark exit) for its tenth anniversary. There is something amazing in the amount of creative urging in the eight floors of this unfinished 275,000-square-foot office building near the Nationals Stadium. I went through it all, and it was not fair to try to take in all the efforts of so many in one view. It features over 1,000 visual artists and 600 performing artists. It was dizzying!

Included are not just painting, drawing, sculpture and photography but visual and installation art, theater performances, dance and comedy, three music stages and street performances such as fire dancing and drum troupes. Workshops and seminars are held all month long.

Among the many: Elizabeth Floyd paints some good garden variety still life; Samuel Scharf has a strong tree-formed sculpture that easily transforms space in and around it; Zachary Vaughn’s lightly lyrical abstraction is subtly splashy; Gregory Garecki has some sure hits in his photographs; Kreg Kelley pushes the limits of his collages; Cedric Baker has an incredible achieved simplicity in “The Drinking Fountain” and Lori Anne Boocks paints with passion and depth after a hiatus of writing poetry that perhaps infuses the extra depth and energy in her work.

The incredible ten-year-old Heather Boocks’ strong interest in photography has led her to achieve a series of lovely works; Paul Sikora can make you a convincing Calder for lots less; Andrew Zimmerman’s photographs balance the lights and darks terrifically and impress with technique; Megan Maher is a master of scribble; Paul So is precise in his abstract notation with each work having an individual right; Daniel Venne makes lyrical eros in small and subtly beautiful drawings with wash; there is an intensity in the genuine funk of Chuck Baxter; Andrea Sherfy Cybyk re-makes color art in fresh decorativeness and Suzan Finsen has a sense of fun and invention and can make color work.

Dennis Crayon hits it in “Blue Seltzer Bottle,” where the marble and bottle all light up; Sean Lundgren’s architectural clay sculpture became magical in the afternoon light; Richard Braswell has a cache of extremely beautiful photographs; Jorge Caligiuri used texture and color to fuse into purpose and bravo to Noah Armstrong for letting one work speak!