Review | In the galleries: An invitation to step inside the internet

The fanciful schematic has each figurative and precise depths. It contains digital prints which are collaged into the entire after which partly painted over, in addition to drawn and painted particulars that seem to drift above, or sink beneath, the closely labored floor. White ribbons curl throughout the composition, their free kinds in distinction to the tightly overlapping circles produced by a mechanical plotter. Rays emanate from a black gap close to the piece’s middle, suggesting a single origin level that lots of the different particulars sprawlingly contradict.

If this isn’t actually what the net appears to be like like, it does evoke what digital hyperconnectivity feels like. The image is overwhelming but intimate, confoundingly concerned but spangled with bursts of illumination. Schissel’s metaverse is just too flat to be entered, however nonetheless beckons the viewer in.

Whereas Schissel offers impersonal structure a subjective really feel, two different artists exhibiting at VisArts anchor their multimedia work in autobiography. Baltimore-based Sughra Hussainy recounts her personal saga utilizing conventional artwork strategies realized in her native Afghanistan. Rex Delafkaran, a Washingtonian, makes use of video and sculpture to precise what her assertion calls “my Iranian American queer id.”

Many of the works in Hussainy’s Widespread Floor Gallery present, “Are We within the Story or Is the Story in Us,” are derived from her manuscript about her life, illustrated within the fashion of classical Persian miniatures. Serene moments alternate with scenes of conflict, represented by such symbols as an airborne army drone and a lion with explosives strapped to its torso.

Some items are collaborations with Hussainy’s brother or different kinfolk. A photograph of the exultant artist upon commencement from artwork faculty was become a embroidered tapestry accomplished by three girls after they fled to Pakistan. One of many two movies observes Hussainy’s black-clad niece, an aspiring artist, sitting at an vintage stitching machine that symbolizes the Taliban-decreed return of ladies to conventional roles. In broadening her memoir to incorporate her prolonged household, Hussainy has made it richer and darker.

The substances of “Scorching Crop,” Delafkaran’s Concourse Gallery present, embrace video, ceramics and the verse of Rumi, the Thirteenth-century Persian-language mystic poet. There’s additionally an sudden ingredient: warmth. Three of the assemblages incorporate electrical heaters of assorted sorts, together with one which dangles threateningly over 4 beeswax tongues that, in keeping with the piece’s title, have “little or no to say.”

Video screens show the artist in efficiency, utilizing such props as a cinder block (representing the development of id) and a Persian carpet. Lots of the references are personal, and certainly Delafkaran appears unsure about the opportunity of wider discourse. “Mistranslation and Magnificence” consists of phrases translated by pc software program from Farsi to English and again once more, rendered in faint textual content and edged in orange spray paint. The phrases are central but practically indecipherable, a visible metaphor for thriller and miscommunication.

Amy Schissel: Auto-Bio-Geographies; Sughra Hussainy: Are We within the Story or Is the Story in Us; and Rex Delafkaran: Scorching Crop Via Jan. 8 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville.

First-time guests to a strip-center gallery in an outside-the-Beltway suburb would possibly moderately anticipate to come across modest landscapes and nonetheless lifes painted by native artists. Nepenthe Gallery has these, but additionally much more. This eclectic and bold venue, which opened this spring a couple of miles north of Mount Vernon, is exhibiting numerous work by greater than 50 painters, sculptors and photographers.

The featured artist in December is Ann Sklar, who makes good-looking near-abstract landscapes, with blocks of vivid hues and robust horizon strains. However the Maine artist’s distilled vistas fill solely a small part of a wall dominated by an enormous triptych by Monique Rollins, an Italy-based American painter. Summary but additionally suggestive of panorama, her exuberant image is solid largely of tans and browns, punctuated by patches of blue that evoke sky or water.

Close by are anguished collage-paintings by Ukrainian American artist Ola Rondiak, whose patchwork components discuss with her ancestral homeland’s turbulent historical past and current. A lot cooler in tone are Nathan Myhrvold’s blue-tinted close-up {photograph} of a cabbage, glistening and veiny, and Maremi Andreozzi’s small work by which white strains curve and zigzag throughout brightly coloured patterns. The Northern Virginia artist has typically proven her portraits of faceless girls whose tales are instructed by their clothes and environment, and these modern footage supply a variation on the identical technique: emptying the foreground to spotlight the backdrop.

Group present Persevering with indefinitely at Nepenthe Gallery, 7918 Fort Hunt Rd., Alexandria, Fairfax County.

Maybe crucial pairing in “Binaries,” Qais Al-Sindy’s present at Joan Hisaoka Therapeutic Arts Gallery, is of conflict and peace. Among the many Baghdad-born and -educated Californian’s vigorously gestural work are scenes of deserted tanks, resting in destroy as unintentional monuments to fight. Equally stark is an outline of bones, piled collectively as what seems to be one other type of unofficial memorial.

The artist’s expressionist footage all the time mix softly mottled colours and roughly sketched kinds, however some are extra reasonable than others. A symbolic scene of a person carrying his horse on his shoulders is comparatively crisp, though the areas across the central picture are scarcely outlined. Different work are a lot looser, verging on cubism or that includes meaty flesh rendered within the method of Francis Bacon. Considerably gentler are the near-abstract “Harmonious Binaries,” spattered with white paint, and “The Final Take a look at the Homeland,” by which a lady appears to be like over her shoulder. The theme is wistful, however the image’s crimson backdrop is daring and speedy. Such dynamic juxtapositions are important to Al-Sindy’s dualistic strategy.

Qais Al-Sindy: Binaries Via Jan. 6 at Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, 1632 U St. NW. Open by appointment.