Girl From the North Country, A Touch of Red, and More Best Bets for Dec. 7–14
The most celebrated “touch of red” in recent artistic history is likely the little girl in the red coat who represented the only dash of color in the otherwise black-and-white Holocaust movie from 1993, Schindler’s List. None of the 27 photographs in the Multiple Exposures Gallery exhibit A Touch of Red approaches that degree of poignance; in fact, in some images, the splashes of red come across as something of an afterthought, as in the depictions of hoses and bollards at a car wash, a man on a sidewalk dragging a suitcase, and the exterior of a door to an otherwise white room. Fortunately, juror Phil Hutinet managed to locate some fine works within a pool of 14 artists: Clara Young Kim’s flat fire engine panel with old-school knobs and dials; Francine B. Livaditis’ wispy red reflection on the curved, metallic panels of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Maureen Minehan’s partially red-painted house set against the blankness of a winter sky and snow-covered ground; Soomin Ham’s locksmith at work, surrounded by an overwhelming but orderly wall of key blanks; images by Minehan and Eric Johnson that experiment with the transformational effects of translucent raindrops; and Sarah Hood Salomon’s depiction of a red-hued memorial bouquet that’s unmoving even as cars zoom around it. The exhibit’s two most intriguing images share a curiosity in how a viewer will absorb and understand three-dimensional space. Minehan photographs a rotary phone set on a dusky beige ledge that resolves into a nearly flat background, while Kim deconstructs a tree, merging a wall shadow of its trunk and branches with a three-dimensional outreach of leaves that overlays the shadow. Notably, in neither image is red, or any other color, crucial to the photograph’s appeal. A Touch of Red runs through Dec. 31 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson