Review | In the galleries: A show that’s almost a scavenger hunt

Boone-McCreesh’s funky collages are strung partly with discovered objects, and Sarah Knobel makes incongruously elegant images of trash, akin to a trio of cardboard beverage containers, tied along with blue twine and leaking pastel-colored smoke. There’s additionally a misty high quality to Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s wall sculpture, however its seemingly mushy contours are lower from shiny, hard-edge metallic. The climate-change-inspired piece is inset with tiny squiggle-shaped mirrors that deliver the viewer’s face into the combination.

The maker reasonably than the spectator is a part of Helina Metaferia’s and Michael Dax Iacovone’s contributions; each embrace movies that reveal their creators in motion. Metaferia’s video exhibits her in efficiency, carrying the patchwork tapestry that hangs on an adjoining wall; the black-and-white quilt is made of cloth items silk-screened with images of the civil rights motion. Iacovone sketches large geometric figures within the soil of Utah and Nevada deserts and paperwork the short-term drawings in images and movies shot from a drone.

Dramatically stark landscapes characteristic as properly in Jerry Truong’s two monochromatic triptychs, rendered realistically with charcoal and one different ingredient: incense ash from a Vietnamese ancestral altar, thus infusing these empty vistas with private historical past. Brian Michael Dunn’s “Pool Aspect” activates a special kind of shock materials: What seems to be a rumpled towel is definitely a rectangle of creased, folded and painted metal. The perplexity right here is just, splendidly playful.

Perplexity Via Dec. 10 on the Kreeger Museum, 2401 Foxhall Rd. NW.

In 2002, Transformer opened in a tiny storefront close to 14th and P streets in Northwest Washington. The nonprofit gallery continues to be there, however it’s utilizing a a lot bigger house for its anniversary present: “Transformer 20” fills the GW Corcoran’s imposing atrium with textual content, artifacts and works by almost 100 artists. A lot of the contributors are native, and quite a lot of are Corcoran alumni. However the exhibition demonstrates the gallery’s attain with an antic, semi-traditional portray of a ship by Ryota Unno, one of many individuals in a Transformer-sponsored 2012 survey of Japanese artwork impressed by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

There’s comparatively little abstraction on this array, and all kinds of portraiture. Yacine Tilala Fall depicts herself in communion with the earth in a black-and-white nonetheless from a efficiency. In his drawing of a person’s face, David Ibata employs pastel and Conté crayon to convey wealthy Black pores and skin tones. Ryan Nelson renders upswept hair with exactly inked traces in his depiction of a lady that focuses on her bouffant. Alessandro Giannì paints crystalline shards that partly sever portrayals of heads seemingly lifted from Renaissance canvases.

Extra surreally, a human head is only one ingredient in Nilay Lawson’s drawing of a bowl of black beans and rice that additionally features a tree, automobile and snake. Different views of nature are numerous in idea and media: Johab Silva’s flowers are animations that dance on a video display; Chandi Kelley’s black-and-white pictures distill the moon to round glimmers; and Naoko Wowsugi’s “New Moon” is an orb fabricated from soil and seeds for wildflowers that maintain pollinators. Like so many of those artworks, Wowsugi’s piece matches a big imaginative and prescient right into a compact bundle.

Transformer 20 Via Dec. 10 at GW Corcoran Flagg Building, 500 seventeenth St. NW.

Though Méné is a graduate of prestigious artwork colleges in his native Ivory Coast, his most vital instructors could also be prehistoric cave painters. The artist can’t know what these precursors meant, in fact, however he does reinterpret their model and motifs in a recent mode. The photographs in “Shaping Goals,” Méné’s present at African Artwork Beats, have been painted in acrylics on canvas, but seem folkloric and timeless.

The exhibition’s title is echoed by the names of a number of particular person footage, which regularly check with goals or the celebrities. Each themes trace at Méné’s intuitive method, which entails opening himself to reverie or, maybe, cosmic forces. The imagery is usually summary, however suggests animals, vegetation or geologic varieties. Densely dotted patterns, paying homage to Australian Aboriginal artwork, check with scarification, the standard African apply of slicing everlasting adornments into human pores and skin.

The boldest colours in Méné’s work — utilized with fingers, twigs and carved items of wooden in addition to brushes — are brilliant and infrequently appear unmixed. But the pigments are generally utilized in layers, and contrasting hues can present by way of the highest degree. The impact evokes strata of earth and rock, but in addition eras in time. Someplace underneath the floor, symbolically a minimum of, is the primeval artwork on which Méné builds.

Méné: Shaping Goals Via Dec. 13 at African Art Beats, 3501 Lowell St. NW. Open by appointment.

Indigenous rock carvings are among the many inspirations for Jesse Raine Littlebird, an Albuquerque artist of Laguna and Kewa Pueblos heritage. But the three massive work on show as “A Fragmented Exodus,” made whereas Littlebird was in residence in November at Eaton Home, are modern in look and references. The artist makes use of oil stick to stipulate the bottom, mountains and folks in his multi-panel landscapes, and fills within the colours with hot-colored spray paint, demonstrating a stylistic affinity for each graphic novels and graffiti.

Two footage have been accomplished when this author visited, whereas the third was in progress. The completed works depict rugged, high-desert vistas, however the place one is basically unpopulated, the opposite is full of individuals, many in buffalo-like masks. The horde in that portray is headed towards the near-empty expanse of the primary image, the artist stated, including that the 2 landscapes are in dialogue.

One other dialog the work illustrate is between everlasting and fashionable. Sketched and scrawled within the open sky above the multitude are symbols, together with ones derived from petroglyphs, and feedback written by individuals in a workshop Littlebird led. One phrase is from the artist himself: “the lithium age.” The gadgets that promise the long run are powered by parts clawed from historic land.

Jesse Raine Littlebird: A Fragmented Exodus Via Dec. 10 at Eaton House, 1203 Okay St. NW.