Friday, August 8, 2003; Page WE61
Weekend: On Exhibit
Dog Days Get Some Bite at Signal 66 Show
By Michael O'Sullivan
LIKE late-summer gardens after too much rain, the group exhibitions that typically spring up during the slow August gallery season are rarely without weeds. That being said, the 16 artists of Signal 66's "Summer Show 2003" offer a bouquet -- if not an efflorescence -- of work to satisfy the eye.Local stalwart Bill Hill, known mainly for largish, exuberant paintings that can call to mind the meditative color-field abstractions of Leon Berkowitz (only shaken, not stirred), has been exhibiting smaller, quieter works of late. Like those he showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art's recent "F'abstraction" show, Hill here offers a suite of medium-size paintings, each a kind of haiku compared to the artist's more epic expressions of raw emotionalism. And speaking of epic, Arash Mokhtar's amusing "Come See the Fighting Fish Fight" manages to incorporate both classic drama (by quoting John Singleton Copley's "Watson and the Shark," a popular favorite at the National Gallery of Art) and pure pop aesthetics (the painting's title appears in neon above the canvas). It's garish if mindless fun.
True to its name, Kurt Godwin's "Inventory of Everything in the Universe" is equally busy, with a crazy quilt of cartoonish objects -- thimble, windmill, feather, etc. -- painted in pell-mell fashion. The futility of the artist's attempt to include "everything" in a single painting seems at first glance lightweight irony, until learning that the work arose out of Godwin's struggle to deal with his wife's death last year. Perhaps it's the painting's underlying emotion, an attempt to make sense of senselessness that feels both frantic and antic, that gives the work its curious potency.
Lisa Bertnick and Lee Haner each contribute worthy -- and, for different reasons, oddly sexy -- work. Belying his slick, flat surfaces, Haner's reductive paintings (still lifes, you might call them, with such wry titles as "Final Funnel," "Dry Dock" and "Plumb Bob as Perpetual Sex Object") suggest variations on the plug-and-socket style of adolescent humor. They're both decorative and slyly subversive. Bertnick's black-and-white paintings could be abstractions, or simply close-up portraits of cleavage. Evocative of derrieres, breasts and other parts of the body where flesh meets flesh, they have a calligraphic elegance in addition to a lusty heat.
Other artists worth taking note of include sculptor Mary Early, whose array of triangular pillow forms grace the entrance with an organic minimalism; Thom Flynn, who creates large decoupaged works that are half sculpture, half painting from bits of scavenged billboards and street posters; and sculptor Sarah Wegner, whose skeleton shedding its skin is, despite its grotesqueness, a virtuosic example of the sculptor's craft.
"Summer Show 2003" may not be the most provocative or the liveliest exhibition ever mounted in a space known for liveliness and provocation. In a month of slim pickings, however, it's a bumper crop.
SUMMER SHOW 2003 -- Through Sept. 2 at Signal 66, 926 N St. NW (rear) (Metro: Mount Vernon Square/7th Street-Convention Center). 202-842-3436. www.signal66.com. Open Fridays 5 to 8, Saturdays noon to 5 and by appointment. Free.