Corson & Anthes, Jakes & Jakes
A huge thank you to Gaby Mizes, who curated both exhibits outlined below!
“Everywhere he goes, Gary Anthes beholds the shapes of humans. Yet living people appear in only two of the nearly two dozen pictures in ‘Figure and Ground,’ the Northern Virginia photographer’s collaboration with sculptor Chris Corson at Studio Gallery. Instead, Anthes offers glimpses of sculptures, mannequins, dolls, dress forms or a set of clothing, the last hanging as if waiting for a person to step into it. These ready-made totems stand in for the people who created them, or the people they were created for.
In the galleries: Life partners focus on the power of women of color
Also: A photographer and sculptor collaborate with evocative imagery, exploring the Pleiades with art and music, an artist’s meticulous digital photo-collages
‘Brickhead Love,’ by Gary Anthes included in the show ‘Figure and Ground’ with sculptor Chris Corson at Studio Gallery. (Gary Anthes)
Photographed on three continents in both urban and rustic locations, the pictures often gaze through windows and doors. These found frames heighten the things within them, turning everyday objects into monuments of a sort. Whether observing a grand winged statue in Europe or modest wooden masks in Japan, Anthes demonstrates how men and women see themselves as the measure of all things.
Interspersed with Anthes’s photos are nine of Corson’s distinctive pit-fired ceramic figures, most of them anatomically correct men. Perhaps most akin to the photographer’s work is ‘Rabbit Hole,’ which positions a sitting man inside a metal hexagon whose interior is mirrored to fracture and yet amplify the figure. Crouching, kneeling or stretching, the local sculptor’s singed bodies are taut and poignantly solitary. Gentler are his ceramic heads of boys placed on stacks of children’s books, suggesting emotional and intellectual growth and not just stark physicality.
‘Rabbit Hole’ by Chris Corson.
Also at Studio, Northern Virginia artist Carolee Jakes takes her large-format prints into new dimensions. Among the woodblocks are swirling waterscapes, sometimes realistic yet often abstract and psychedelic. But the axis of ‘The Seven Sisters: An Exploration of Time and Place’ is a set of seven hanging globes covered with roughly torn and collaged prints.
These evocations of the Pleiades open star cluster, long the subject of myth and lore as ‘the seven sisters,’ are accompanied by Ellie Jakes’s suitably cosmic score, which chimes gently and separately from each dangling orb to produce a shifting counterpoint. The music both connects and isolates the 3D collages, which assuredly stylize natural phenomena. Like her prints of turbulent oceans and swirling skies, Carolee Jakes’s renderings of the stars are lyrical and subjective.
‘The Seven Sisters: An Exploration of Time and Space’ image taken by Anna Jane Storms
Chris Corson and Gary Anthes: Figure and Ground and Carolee Jakes and Ellie Jakes: The Seven Sisters: An Exploration of Time and Place Through Sept. 23 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.”
Review by Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, September 2023. Thank you!