Washington Post
Thursday, January 2, 2003—Page C05 (Galleries)

Art in an Experimental Groove
Decatur Blue Gives the Flip Side of Mainstream Some Extended Play

By Jessica Dawson
Special thanks to The Washington Post

A long time ago, when people listened to music on black plastic platters, bands released 12- and 7-inch singles. In some cases, they were special not for the sure-fire hits etched into side A but for the shadowy fare on their flip sides. In the expanse of grooves opposite “Rock the Casbah” or “Happy When It Rains,” bands stowed their experimental fare—previously unreleased tracks, perhaps, or a song recorded live. To aficionados, the B side presented both a treat and a challenge.

In the spirit of those quirky tracks, alternative-art collective Decatur Blue, in conjunction with Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran, put together “DB Sides.” Curated by the seven-member Blue crew, the show is something like an area-wide compilation album, bringing together work by 12 local artists, three of whom operate collectively. Like most indie ventures, this one was a community effort. WPA\C put up some cash (and required Decatur Blue to choose artists from its slide registry “ArtFile”) and Molly Ruppert proffered her venue, Warehouse. (Decatur Blue lost its most recent space last summer.)

The DB crew sees artists here as creating work outside mainstream art culture. It looked for people who weren’t duplicating the latest Big Trend out of New York or London. Hence the metaphor borrowed from the music industry. As founding member Jose Ruiz says, “This is a B-side city and we’re a B-side gallery.”

The show doesn’t hypothesize or prognosticate. The few trends of note, ironically, are also major themes of the art world at large—the dearth of painting, the use of mass-market materials as art media and the preponderance of video.

Let’s start with the paintings, which don’t look much like paintings in any traditional sense. Isabel Manalo applies acrylic to her canvases so sparingly that her photo-based landscapes (three hang here) of near-apocalyptic scenes leave most of the white ground exposed. A bare-bones application of color delineates form. It is as if the photographs are so overexposed that detail is obliterated and images are distilled to their essence. While a good idea grows among them, Manalo’s canvases underwhelm.

Maggie Michael’s paintings, themselves minimal affairs, fare much better. Alongside several of her “clone” pieces (each features a pair of near-identical latex paint blobs), Michael shows two better, more interesting “Extended Clones.” One of these pictures has paint piled on so thick that it’s nearly three-dimensional, as if a swatch of latex had been attached to the Plexiglas ground. The sculptural quality of the paint lends the piece real oomph.

Michael’s black latex paint blobs remind me of trash bags, which just happen to be the stuff her husband, Dan Steinhilber, used to make his untitled sculpture here. Reprising the oversize inflated garbage bag orb he showed at Signal 66 last month, Steinhilber produces a disappointing variation on a theme. Here, black bags and some partially inflated green balloons stand in marked contrast to the artist’s usually inspired, exuberant work. The piece is just too big and too dark for the wood-beamed room it’s stuffed into.

This affection for mass-produced materials is echoed in Anita Walsh’s installation made up of hand sponges. She laid white oval hand sponges on the floor in a 10-foot long oval. With five-petaled flower shapes repeated throughout, it looks something like an oversize Easter egg. Although the artist doesn’t milk the sponginess of her material as much as I’d prefer, I like the piece all the same.

Multimedia work is generally the show’s strongest. The best of it comes from artist Brandon Morse, who installed a trio of four-inch monitors broadcasting computer-generated images that, while abstract, evoke things like jittery animated cigarettes and heart monitors. Even the little screens themselves, shorn of their cases with their metal and wire insides exposed, are compelling objects.

Bridget Sue Lambert inserted a pair of small monitors into a photo-based diptych that layers drawings cribbed from first aid booklets over a photograph of power lines in a landscape. I like the appropriation of the CPR demonstration—here a man resuscitates a woman—for its connotations of smooching and rescue. In Lambert’s case, the little monitors embedded in the picture plane (they broadcast some folks cavorting at the beach and waves lapping the shore) distract from an otherwise clever idea.

The art collective Team Response (Jason Balicki, Justin Barrows and Matt Sutton) constructed the most elaborate work in the show. You can enter and explore “The Mountain,” a white plywood and AstroTurf construction. On opening night, the trio holed up inside, where they’d created a mini-clubhouse complete with video games and beer. They sent out a live video feed and cast out wads of balled-up paper as a metaphor for artistic practice—the artist stuck in his own world, sending out occasional missives to the masses.

As for the rest: Christine Carr’s color photographs, perhaps because of their small scale, get lost. Geoff Johnson’s dramatic shots inside the Tivoli Theater, Columbia Heights’s old Mediterranean revival movie house, would make spectacular archaeological documents—if it weren’t for the gratuitous, zombie-like nudes he insisted on posing inside.

Since “DB Sides” emphasizes spare, graphic work, Joan VanSledright’s installation, with its tactile and sensual elements, seems out of place. One closet-size cubby houses three photographs of kids with their mouths taped shut; these pictures hang just above three tiny outfits cut from rough, woven fabric; from another cubby hang wax-coated letters (they smell sweet). VanSledright’s ode to the vulnerabilities of childhood belongs in another show entirely.

DB Sides, at Warehouse, 1019 Seventh St. NW, Thursday 6-9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday noon-5 p.m., 202-639-1828, 202-332-0785, to Jan. 12.