Two up-market art spaces in the Mount Vernon area offer exhibits that have a way of seducing the eye and intriguing the mind.
"Line of Site," at C. Grimaldis Gallery, offers visual journeys at once abstract and personal.
Chul Hyun Ahn, the South Korean-born artist based in Baltimore, is known for his striking light sculptures that address the infinite, using LED lights and mirrors to create what appear to be unending vistas.
Some of the recent pieces in this exhibit are quite geometrical, such as "Five Hexahedra," with a central cube-shape and four offshoots; from some angles, the image suggests a cosmic thresher machine. At close range, the reflections within the work become all the more mesmerizing.
A deceptively simpler item, "Horizon #2," makes an even bigger impact. Here, the lit object within the structure is a single, slightly wavy line that crosses the center of the black surface. As you get nearer, the reiterations of that horizontal line suggest a calm sea of endless possibilities.
There is a mix of stillness and motion in Cheryl Goldsleger's drawings from 2015. The Georgia-based artist has created sepia-toned designs that seem to be beautifully realized abstracts, flecked with various geometric components and grid lines. Gradually, they reveal something more concrete and meaningful.
Goldsleger has used maps as the basis of her drawings, and not just any maps. These are military ones from World War I, which gives the imagery a kind of haunted context, even a kind of animation.
The artist's titles are taken from Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points that became the basis for the armistice in 1918. The work "Acid test…Good Will," for example, refers to a line in Point 6: "The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will." (Talk about freshly relevant art.)
You don't need to know this much background to appreciate the depth of Goldsleger. The art speaks quite eloquently for itself.
The intimate venue of Randall Scott Projects features a collection of bold photographs from the past decade by Julia Fullerton-Batten. Born in Germany and based in London, the artist has enjoyed a successful career in commercial and art photography. Her rich sense of color and structure yields images that can startle or amuse.
Fullerton-Batten has done several series of narrative works, starting in 2005 with "Teenage Stories," which looks at the cusp between girlhood and womanhood through a lens of fantasy and surrealism. The subjects become giants, photographed on finely-detailed miniature sets. Examples in this exhibit include the whimsical "Chewing Gum" and almost disturbing "Bike Accident."
In "Dining Room Standing," from the 2007 series "School Play," girls in identical pink gingham uniforms holding lunch boxes stand rigidly alongside cafeteria tables alongside a wall laden with portraits of male deans. This picture is worth a thousand gender issues.
The artist tackles the subject of relationships in her "Testament to Love" series, which crams a lot of ideas and possibilities into each brilliantly colored photo. "The Runaway" suggests a fleeing flight attendant, "End of the Affair" a lover abandoned at a deserted gas station.
Photos from "In Between," a series that picks up from "Teenage Series," include wonderful imagery of young women who seem to float or fly. And in the extraordinary "Unadorned" series, Fullerton-Batten confronts today's obsession with thin female shapes by doing exquisitely composed and lit portraits of decidedly overweight women — in the nude.