Metro Weekly

Gallery: ‘Movements, Moments’ at Torpedo Factory Arts Center

Themes of repetition, ritual, and resilience predominate in this mixed-media exhibition

art
Sweta Shah, It’s Me, 2020.

Referred to as a hybrid digital and in-person exhibition, Movements, Moments features a mix of video works and still imagery by 20 artists, half of them from D.C. and the greater Baltimore-Washington area, currently on display at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory Arts Center. Themes of repetition, ritual, and resilience predominate in the works, in ways that speak to our current era in multiple ways.

“The stories behind these artworks span time greatly from the primordial to the now and the soon,” writes the exhibition juror, queer interdisciplinary artist Eames Armstrong. “In this shifting space of light and shadow, there is pathos, there is rage, there is bliss. And powerful, unwieldy forces are harnessed, tethered to the moment.”

Highlights include Jilian Abir MacMaster’s Beatifica 2, a scanned and smeared self-portrait of the Frederick-based artist, whose distorted visage reflects her history with “the predatory behavior of Catholicism,” and the glass sculpture Eruption by Bethesda’s Janet Wittenberg, featuring layers of glass contorted by heat to represent our own continuous transformation as a result of natural and human-made events.

Also notable are a four-minute video work entitled Mayfair Witch by Baltimore’s Alexander D’Agostino, a jockstrapped, fabric-twirling artist who aims to cast an exterminating “video spell” using witchcraft, and Matthew Borgen’s Horizons, a five-panel comic strip from the Philadelphia-based artist in which we see only one image, of a bobbing head above water looking out into the distance, repeated four times.

On display through March 7 online and in Studio 2 of the Torpedo Factory Art Center at 105 North Union St. in Alexandria. Call 703-838-4565 or visit www.torpedofactory.org/target. For the virtual exhibition tour, visit www.youtube.com/user/TorpedoFactory.

still from Mayfair Witch
Alexander D’Agostino, still from Mayfair Witch, 2020 copy
still from We’ve Always Been Here
LaRissa Rogers, still from We’ve Always Been Here, Like Hydrogen, Like Oxygen, 2020. 7.33 minutes two-channel video copy
Beatifica 2
Jillian Abir MacMaster, Beatifica 2, 2020. Scanography, archival inkjet print.
still from Kirogi
Josephine Lee, still from Kirogi (the wild geese, high in the clean, blue air, are head heading home), 2020. copy
Eruption
Janet Wittenberg, Eruption, 2019

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