In the galleries: An inspiring annual student showcase of art and media
Also: Landscape interpretations, a focus on threats to the blue crab, delicate renderings of artifacts and visual artists and musicians render nature into sound.
Curren & Klagsbrun
“As a species, the horseshoe crab is more than 425 million years old. Local artist Elizabeth Curren wants to grant the arthropods more time by calling attention to their threatened status. Her Studio Gallery show, ‘Blue Bloods: North American Horseshoe Crabs,’ uses paper models of the creatures and their environments, as well as paintings of some of the birds that feed on the crabs’ eggs.
Details from Under the Full Moon by Elizabeth Curren.
As might be expected, humans are the principal menace to horseshoes. In an installation, Curren attaches paper crabs to bottles filled with blue liquid to illustrate the use of the animals’ distinctive blue blood in medical testing. Harvesting their plasma endangers the crabs but continues despite an effective man-made alternative. If the show’s message is foremost, the artist’s use of pencil, watercolor and handmade paper is as artful as it ardent. Curren’s principal weapon is beauty.
Also at Studio, Micheline Klagsbrun’s ‘Anchors of the Heart’ includes some of the boatlike found-wood sculptures that have featured in her recent shows. But most of the space is devoted to delicate ink and colored-pencil drawings of such artifacts as a diary, broken porcelain, a wooden chest and a shofar (a ram’s horn used for Jewish religious purposes). Rendered in a bleary style that connotes distance and loss, the artworks evoke the Holocaust-era flight of the artist’s father from Lisbon — whose harbor is also pictured — to Glasgow. It’s a story that Klagsbrun can’t stop portraying, and that gains depth and nuance with each telling.”
Cloud Boat by Micheline Klagsbrun.
Elizabeth Curren: Blue Bloods: North American Horseshoe Crabs and Micheline Klagsbrun: Anchors of the Heart Through May 20 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW.
Review by Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, May 2023. Thank you!