Organized by local artists Kirsty Little and Becky McFall, “RightNOW” is a crowdsourced reaction to what the project’s website calls the dismantling of women’s rights in the United States.
In response, Little and McFall have organized an exhibit of photographs of people — mostly but not entirely women — who have uploaded their pictures to the website. The photos are segmented into five rectangles that display the full height but only half the width of participants’ bodies. Each bisected subject is matched with five blocks of the flip side of another person, so together they constitute a single, if cut-up, entity. The goal, according to the duo, is “to symbolize that women are not fully represented in society and not in control of their bodies.” New montages are being assembled on an ongoing basis and will be added as they’re finished to represent the deep ranks of supporters of women’s rights.
In a sly reference to the usual purpose of shop windows, each 10-photo set is hung on a wooden hanger, like a garment offered for sale.
At one end of the array, an electronic scroll shows alarming statistical nuggets about the status of women worldwide. (The same data streams on the website.) But the exhibition’s most arresting element is its steadily growing parade of hybrid photos. Little and McFall hope to involve 1,000 people in the display before it concludes. That won’t rival the size of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, but in today’s Friendship Heights, it’s quite a crowd.
D.C. multimedia artist Robin Bell is best known for political actions, notably projecting anti-Trump slogans on the facade of what was then the Trump International Hotel. That and other ideological endeavors are reflected in “Studio,” Bell’s installation inside the mostly desolate Chevy Chase Pavilion. But the principal drive of the show is autobiographical.
The show simulates, on a larger scale, the Mount Pleasant studio that Bell had to flee in 2022 because of a chemical leak. On one side are two walls of artifacts, including posters — one advertises the artist’s long-ago stint at a club’s turntables under the tag “DJ Noskilz”— and artworks by Bell and his friends. Among those are a photo of Bell as a teenager taken by his art teacher, noted D.C. artist Michael B. Platt, who died in 2019, and graffiti artist Borf’s version of Eddie Adams’s famous photo of a point-blank execution of a POW during the Vietnam War, in which the two figures are covered with happy faces.
The other side of the space is in flux, but it includes plants growing in 3D-printed pots and projection gear that, on a recent Saturday, was dappling the room with dots of multicolored light. Bell is known for projecting accusatory words, but sometimes he’s content to paint the world with beautiful flickers.
RightNOW Through April 30 at 5510-5530 Wisconsin Ave., Chevy Chase.
Robin Bell: Studio Through March 31 at Chevy Chase Pavilion, 5335 Wisconsin Ave. NW.
No single style or motif unifies “Variety Show: A Photo Ensemble,” a Gallery B exhibition that showcases Creative Platform, a local photography group. The nine members’ work is mostly in color but contains some black-and-white pictures. The show includes street photography as well as Leslie Kiefer’s and Jo Levine’s elegant studio close-ups of vegetation arranged before striking backdrops. Most of the standouts, though, are rustic scenes that freeze the fluid interplay of light and water.
Among these are Ann Benjes Steele’s engrossing pictures of what one title calls a “Sky Mirror.” These multilayered scenes capture intricate, overlapping reflections on watery surfaces while also partly revealing what lurks below. Similarly, Barbara Southworth’s “Green Bog” depicts a diverse landscape but is keyed to areas of shimmering water. Leslie Landerkin’s “Spring Fog” has less depth, but that’s intentional: It focuses on thin branches that are crisply defined in a forest mostly softened by mist. Tana Ebbole’s landscapes include one inhabited by geese, rare nonhuman fauna in this flora-heavy show.
Washingtonians will easily recognize some of the locations. Kevin Duncan made a long-exposure shot of “Wisconsin & M,” and both Landerkin and Barry Dunn photographed the National Gallery of Art, although the first chose the West Building and the second the East. Less identifiable is the seemingly Old World setting of Jim Coates’s vignette of a small crowd on a partly flooded street. Like so many of these photos, the picture channels the mesmerizing power of water.
Variety Show: A Photo Ensemble Through April 2 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave., #E, Bethesda.
Life is some sort of cabaret in “Hidden Light,” Deb Furey’s Foundry Gallery show. Furey’s paintings and drawings often depict people in masquerade, during performance or amid transformation. The subjects’ mutability echoes the local artist’s slippery style, which incorporates collage and shifts easily from realism to expressionism.
The majority of the pictures are small oils, sometimes with collaged elements, in which two or three costumed people face the viewer. Their visages are indistinct and can be nothing more than ovals of blotchy paint. In one, a probably female figure has a photographic image of a flower for a head. Such blooms recur, this time as backdrops, in two more realistic portraits. These striking works center on modeled, black-and-white countenances in front of flat blossoms, also monochromatic but sometimes overlaid with color.
Collage may indicate motion in Furey’s work, as in two pictures of dancers whose bodies are covered in patterns, whether more flower photos or rendered with line and daub. Also included are large charcoal drawings in rich shades of gray, one of which is accented with splashes of red and blue paint. These pictures, too, portray people in costume, their identities concealed or in flux. They appear as ready to transfigure as Furey is to switch artistic mode.
Deb Furey: Hidden Light Through March 26 at Foundry Gallery, 2118 Eighth St. NW.