“Emergence” by Sophia Belkin, part of the three-artist show “Belkin Caldwell Shull.” (Hemphill Artworks)
Review by Mark Jenkins
The three-artist show at Hemphill Artworks features several things associated with the decorative arts: flowers, butterflies and embroidery. Another essential element, however, is decay, which makes “Belkin Caldwell Shull” a bit edgier than its nature motifs might suggest.
Sophia Belkin is a Baltimore artist who prints wetlands-inspired compositions on fabric, outlining certain portions with stitching. A former local resident and a longtime Hemphill artist, North Carolina’s Colby Caldwell makes camera-less woodland photographs directly with a digital scanner. Randy Shull, who divides his time between North Carolina and Mexico, hints at butterflies (“mariposa” in his Spanish-language titles) with sections of partly unraveled hammocks painted in vivid hues.
The show’s largest piece is Belkin’s “Cloud Garden,” whose shapes and colors evoke botanical forms but are far from naturalistic. Although inspired by swamps and marshes, the artist appears just as concerned with the innate character of fabric. Much the same seems true of Shull, whose arrangements of pigmented mesh call attention to the tactile qualities of the drooping, mangled strings.
Caldwell offers the most realistic flowers, but many of the blooms are warped by computer glitches. The artist has experimented for years with digitally corrupting images into utter abstraction, and sections of these pictures are simply jagged rainbows of distortion. The scans, from a series titled “Garlands,” match soft natural pinks with liquefying pictorial details. Caldwell’s career indicates his affinity for the outdoors, but his recent work elevates computer-generated randomness over nature’s more fruitful anarchy.
Belkin Caldwell Shull Through Aug. 24 at Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW. hemphillfinearts.com. 202-234-5601.