The stylistically versatile Koibito is among the most playfully audacious of the contributors. The artist confines a Teletubby within a threatening circle of flame, places a crown of thorns on a clown’s head and updates a traditional Jesus with a Hello Kitty eye mask that includes the cartoon cat’s trademark bow. Abraham Mascorro Morales’s linocut of an elaborately decorated cowboy is all in close shades of gray, which nearly disguises that one of the decorations depicts Pikachu, the electric-mouse Pokémon. Gibrán Turón depicts the Grim Reaper astride a winged cartoon horse that’s pink, one of the most common hues in these candy-colored pictures.
The prints can be as simple as Zyanya Arellano’s outline drawing of an angel cat, outfitted with halo, wings and a familiar-looking pink bow. Equally uncomplicated if more symmetrical is Mary Lechuga’s visual ode to a taco, accented in yellow and, yes, pink. But the selection also features Nando Murio’s expressionist portrait of the artist as a young smudge, his face barely there, and Asdl Manzano’s bare-breasted Madonna, her body modeled and shadowed to yield a realistic fleshiness.
The show’s affordably priced prints are not limited editions, and many are in fact individual pages from zines and comics. Produced by five publishers, most founded since 2017, the artworks share a pulpy vitality and an appealing irreverence. The artists may borrow from Japanese anime, American comics and British TV, but their sensibilities are distinctively their own.
Destinos Through Aug. 18 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. 301-608-9101.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann
Washington painter and collagist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann usually works on a large scale, filling entire gallery walls with murals that layer renderings of the natural world imagery atop free-form abstraction. But her latest project couldn’t cover the available surface at a 1-to-1 ratio. Mann’s “Potomac River Shen Series” had to be enlarged 400 percent from the originals to span the approximately 375-foot-long space in Union Station’s waiting room.
The mural is divided into three vast lengthwise panels that were printed on vinyl and installed above the train gates. The picture began the way Mann’s artworks usually do, with pours of ink and paint. The artist then added realistic renderings of aquatic plants, some derived from photographs she made at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens. All three sections are colorful, but the final section, representing spring and summer, is the greenest.
The triptych is “a love letter to the Potomac River,” said Mann while leading a tour of the piece. Yet the mural, like most of the artist’s output, is also an homage to her Chinese artistic heritage. The horizontal format invokes East Asian scroll painting, and each panel centers on a “shen,” a shape-shifting clam-monster from Chinese myth. Shen supposedly can generate mirages, so the billowing, fluid imagery can be seen as a magical illusion just as much as a tribute to the actual river that runs through the region.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann: Potomac River Shen Series Through Aug. 19 at Union Station, 50 Massachusetts Ave. NE. amtrak.com/artatamtrak.
Genesis Project
An exercise in artistic accumulation, “The Genesis Project” began in September with an empty gallery at Brentwood Arts Exchange. Since then, five teams of two artists each have expanded the collective undertaking, often in reaction to their predecessors’ contributions. All the participants maintain studios near the venue but work in disparate styles and media.
Nature imagery is most common, providing an ironic counterpoint to the gallery’s location in a light-industrial zone. Trees, flowers, birds, butterflies and rabbits, rendered with varying degrees of realism, populate the walls. Ellen Cornett’s detailed drawings portray creatures that appear human but sport animal heads. Wayson R. Jones’s draped fabric piece became part of the trunk of an elephant extrapolated by Kay Lee. One wall, the responsibility of Becky McFall, is dominated by vine-like hanging fabric forms in mottled colors; the others bear the marks of multiple artists.
The juxtaposition of 3D and flat imagery is one of the most effective aspects of the multi-artist improvisation. Lee daubed raindrops below Erwin Timmers’s glass clouds, and Laurel Lukaszewski contrasts her black ceramic crows with painted ones. The fifth and final team to tinker with “Genesis” consisted of Lukaszewski and Jodi Ferrier, who stacked the bottom of one wall with piles of rough near-circles. They suggest cobblestones that anchor the entire composition, yet were among the last things added. That’s a suitable ending to an edifice constructed purely by whimsy.
Genesis Project Through Aug. 17 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. pgparks.com/facilities/brentwood-arts-exchange. 301-277-2863.
Terry La Rue
The eerie scenarios of Terry La Rue’s “Frames Between the Pain” recall early-20th-century surrealism, but where his predecessors were inspired by dreams, La Rue evokes a waking nightmare: chronic pain resulting from his decade-old skateboarding crash. The pictures in the Seattle artist’s show at downtown D.C.’s Leica store feature oblique angles, silhouetted figures, spidery tendrils and seemingly fragmented bodies. There’s even a melting clock, an apparent bow to Salvador Dali.
La Rue makes his black-and-white pictures with a monochromatic digital camera, which captures a world “free from color,” according to his remarks in a short video projected at the store. The artist then transfers the images to metal plates he uses to make the finished prints, giving the process a physicality unusual in post-film photography.
While many of La Rue’s compositions are posed and unnaturalistic, he’s quite good at capturing everyday moments that happen to appear strange or ominous. In one, a hang glider is barely visible amid a cloud-choked sky; in another, a man stands next to a cascade of water whose droplets glisten like crystal daggers. The picture reveals a world that’s both lovely and incurably shattered.
Terry La Rue: Frames Between the Pain Through Aug. 22 at Leica, 977 F St. NW. 202-787-5900.
