Art Capsule Reviews
Orly Cogan and Elizabeth Huey Tiered white cake, sprinkle-sotted doughnuts, whipped meringue, cakes erupting with perfectly spherical maraschinos, crosshatched apple pie, cupcakes beckoning with a bright confetti of fixings. Orly Cogan makes pretty pastries from doilies, macramé, ribbons, pom-poms and yarn, all with the impeccable presentation of a perfectionist home-ec-teacher-cum-pastry-chef. This table of inedible treats is the physical centerpiece of her exhibit Sew Good. Cogan’s tapestries line the room — and there float lithe naiads, pneumatic cherubs and colliding lovers, their faces articulated only by slender lines of pastel stitching. Elizabeth Huey’s The Conservatory is a series of paintings in which histories intersect in an eerily detached wrinkle of warped time: Papal rites and baptisms transpire among bathing nymphs and congregating pilgrims, and a marbled brook runs through an American wilderness colonized by English Tudor-style houses. Huey presents a deliberately confused and fractured suspension of the grade-school Euro-American storyline. Through Oct. 27 at the Bryon Cohen Gallery, 2020 Baltimore. (Ashley Brown)
Ethos and Idiocracy: The Busts Sculptor E. Spencer Schubert doesn’t claim to have multiple personalities, but these 32 unique faces suggest otherwise. “Some of them could potentially be a part of me, a part of my personality,” he admits, laughing. “I am a twin, so maybe there is some duality there.” The majority of the stone characters depict people by profession, such as “The Barrister,” or by expression, as in “The Lost.” Schubert hopes that viewers will also reflect on their own thoughts and experiences as they gaze into his cast of characters. Through Oct. 20 at Arts Incubator, 115 W. 18th St., 913-638-6634. (Lisa Horn)
Lisa Grossman This show is about clouds. Clouds in the morning. Clouds at dusk. Clouds by moonlight. Cloud streaks. Cloud squares. Lisa Grossman applies her acrylics deftly on large canvases and has created a set of watercolor miniatures. But she’s not always convincing. In the acrylic “White Lines on Blue,” a few white streaks of cloud in an otherwise unblemished sky appear a bit blocky and heavy — we become too aware that there’s a painter at work. In “ASU Moon,” Grossman captures the fading dark-blue light of the early evening sky, but a concentration of white light in the center of the painting is confusing — is it the moon or the moon’s reflection? For the most part, however, Grossman is successful in re-creating the puffy forms. Her triumph is the large painting “From Above — Cloud Streets,” which depicts clouds seen from the window of an airplane. Through Sept. 29 at the Dolphin Gallery, 1901 Baltimore, 816-842-5877. (Santiago Ramos)
William Rainey With bright reds, yellows and greens, and with shapeless zigzags, spirals and swirls, William Rainey tries to capture the essence of various slices of Americana. The names of his paintings evoke nostalgia for childhood: “Small Town Fourth of July,” “Messages From High School Yearbooks,” “Kaleidoscope.” Although each painting is purportedly about something different, many are redundant, with Rainey’s otherwise energetic style devolving into a sort of early-’90s Trapper Keeper design. Through Sept. 25 at the Blue Gallery, 7 W. 19th St., 816-527-0823. (Santiago Ramos)
Colby K. Smith There’s a phenomenon called apophenia, defined as the mistaken detection of patterns within random data. This is how the Virgin Mary miraculously appears in the texture of flour tortillas. It is also a tool for interpreting the mixed-media artwork of Colby K. Smith. For his current exhibit, he deploys such construction materials as plaster, drywall tape, studded rubber mats and wire mesh to create works in which infrastructure aspires to be landscape. “Street Side” is a crisscross grid of plaster and rubber, “Straightscape” a graceful sweep of plaster evoking a horizon. Other pieces, such as “Grid #9” (a regimented sequence of black plastic end caps on a plaster background) and “25072” (a matrix of black rubber panels outlined with plaster and drywall tape), elaborate on the visual language Smith constructs but don’t come with a Rosetta stone. Through Oct. 4 at the Late Show Gallery, 1600 Cherry. (Chris Packham)
