Michele Mattei "First Ladies" - DC by Design

Michele Mattei’s “First Ladies” at Cross MacKenzie

January 10, 2017 

Rebecca Cross, the owner of the fabulous Cross MacKenzie gallery in Georgetown, had hoped this opening would come on the cusp of a woman moving past “First Lady” status and owning the President title. ‘Twas not to be.

“We are celebrating other very high broken ceilings nonetheless,” she told me.

She’s talking about French-born fine art photographer Michele Mattei, who’s photographed an impressive group of women who’ve reached the tops of their games. The collection was first exhibited in DC at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, and selected works are now coming to Cross MacKenzie, where they’ll be on display starting this Friday.

“These activists, writers, politicians, teachers, doctors, and artists fought against the entrenched patriarchal systems to be recognized for their individual achievements, and in so doing opened doors for all the women who followed,” the gallery description reads. “First Ladies” will open with a reception this Friday from 6-8 p.m.

Ned Riley, who curated the show for Cross MacKenzie, wrote me an e-mail with his thoughts on working with such powerful images of powerful women. “Even without the added celebration of our first female president, our hope is that this show will illuminate all the progress that has already been made, and serve as a reminder that there is plenty still to accomplish,” he said.

“We feel that the selection of these eminent ladies provides a wonderful range of the achievements that have been made throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to promote the equality of women across industries and cultures,” Ned added.

Read more here.

Max MacKenzie - Georgetown Dish

Famed architectural photographer Maxwell MacKenzie's most recent exhibit, Going Deep, has been selected as one of the "The Ten Best Photographic Exhibits in DC for 2016" by Louis Jacobsen of the Washington Cty Paper.

Not surprising, MacKenzie has made the list five times. Shooting decaying architecture on the Great Plains is a subject this photographer has been exploring for more than three decades.

At Georgetown's Cross MacKenzie Gallery, in a space he owns with wife and gallery director Rebecca Cross who conceived and curated the show, the photographer focuses on the effects of time and weather on old structures in rural Minnesota, the place where he was born. 

Finding approximately a third of its old buildings deserted, MacKenzie was moved by their melancholy beauty, and began photographing the sagging barns and empty houses set in expansive stretches of prairie that were once home to thousands of settlers from Sweden and Norway. 

The result of these efforts was the seminal exhibition and book titled, “Abandonings.”  After multiple museum and gallery shows and two more books, this show includes a selection of those photographs. American artist Andrew Wyeth said, “Pick a subject and go deep.” MacKenzie took this to heart as he documented the vernacular architecture of his beloved native plains over the last 35 years.

Read more here.

For more information or to purchase any of the photographs, visit Cross MacKenzie Gallery at 1675 Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Tel: 202.337.3970

Porcelainia - Washington Post In The Galleries

Porcelainia: East Meets West On view through Dec. 8 at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. 202-337-7970. crossmackenzie.com.

The subtitle of “Porcelainia: East Meets West” can be read several ways. Porcelain began in China, so the four Western ceramists in this Cross MacKenzie Gallery exhibition are heirs to an Asian practice. The show, curated by Leslie Ferrin, was inspired by the Sackler Gallery’s “Chinamania.” It features two large pieces by Walter McConnell, who’s also in this grouping. He and the others have all worked in China.

They’re not traditionalists. McConnell builds stupa-like structures from dozens of ceramic figures of Western pop-culture ready-mades; his largest piece arrays Elvis, E.T., Lincoln and Winnie the Pooh, all in white. Paul Scott updates actual 19th-century British tableware with contemporary rural vistas; the color scheme is the standard blue-on-white, but the scenery features intrusions such as power-generating windmills.

Steven Young Lee’s pottery is classical in form and ornament but breached by intentional holes. He puts the image of the crane, which in Asia symbolizes longevity, on a vase whose fractures suggest precariousness. Sin-ying Ho’s piece incorporates what appear to be shards of conventional blue-and-white pottery, but they’re integral parts of the bulbous, ungainly whole. Unlike the imported ceramics that sparked “Chinamania” in Victorian Britain, the work in this show is suspicious of beauty. Not so suspicious, however, as to reject entirely porcelain’s graceful form and alluring sheen.

Read more here.

Architects' Drawings - Washington Post In The Galleries

Architects’ Drawings On view through July 30 at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. ­202-337-7970. crossmackenzie.com.

Landscapes feature in some of the renderings in Cross MacKenzie Gallery’s current show, but they’re secondary to the man-made. These are “Architects’ Drawings,” after all, and the more than 30 contributors include such noted landmark makers as Richard Meier, Michael Graves and Frank Gehry.

The pictures are not all sketches for planned structures. Some of the most appealing are fastidious studies of venerable buildings in St. Petersburg (by Rob Krier) and Italy (by Dhiru Thadani, who curated the show with Mark McInturff). The other work includes Gehry’s near-abstract print of piled-up squiggles, James Smither’s watercolor of a seaside village and Ben Van Dusen’s urban hives, ideal dwellings for big-eyed anime characters. There’s even a cartoon about Washington’s World War II Memorial by Roger Lewis, who writes “Shaping the City” essays for The Washington Post.

A personal note is sounded by a drawing of a proposed project by Eason Cross, the late father of gallery proprietor Rebecca Cross. The design was never built, but the idea survives as a edifice of lines.

Read more here.

Carole Bolsey "New Paintings/New Waterfields" - Washington Post In The Galleries

Carole Bolsey: New Paintings/New Waterfields On view through June 3 at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. 202-337-7970. www.crossmackenzie.com.

There’s a lot of water in Carole Bolsey’s “New Paintings/New Waterfields” at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, and very little of it is blue. The Massachusetts artist (who once lived in a Maryland house dubbed Waterfields) depicts the gentle action of ripples and currents, which correspond to the movements of her brush. Even more important are the reflective qualities of a watery surface, which can borrow the greens of nearby land or the orange of a sunrise. Capturing the moment before such hues arrive, “Dawn/Wooden Boat” is mostly silvery gray.

Many of Bolsey’s paintings include rowboats, sometimes in great detail but more often as elemental shapes in the manner of the barns that occasionally punctuate her landscapes. Interestingly, the humble crafts generally bob near the top of the composition, drawing the eye upward. That suggests the artist is just as interested in sky as in water, even if the former appears mostly as a mirrored image.

Read more here.

Book Hill Galleries Open for Spring Art Walk, May 13, 2016

Cross MacKenzie Gallery
1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Paintings by Rafael Torres Correa

In partnership with the Cultural Service of the Embassy of France, Cross MacKenzie Gallery will host an exhibition of paintings by the Cuban-born French national Rafael Torres Correa. Originally from Havana, this international artist has widely exhibited his work in Mexico, Spain and France and with Cross MacKenzie in 2014.

Correa creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases. His paintings evoke memories — symbolic and emotional—and conjure imagined experiences of water and floating islands with their shifting imagery and fluid execution, using washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors, a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

Read more here.

Maxwell Mackenzie- washington POST review

Maxwell Mackenzie- The city paper

January 15, 2016. The Washington Post Review: John Blee and Nicole Gunning.

Veteran D.C. painter John Blee calls his recent paintings “The Orchard Series,” a reference to a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that exclaims “we want to ripen.” Another influence on the color-field abstractions, at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, is a childhood spent mostly in India. The subcontinent’s heat radiates from Blee canvases that favor red and orange.

The paintings feature squares and rectangles, loosely and thickly rendered, on expanses of a dominant color. The juxtapositions range from subtle to brash, as when a lime-green block infiltrates the mostly scarlet “Anton’s Orchard.” One thing these pictures don’t evoke literally is an orchard, with its splashes of fruit colors against a leaf-green backdrop. That would be too pastoral for Blee, whose compositions have an urban energy.

Also at Cross MacKenzie, Nicole Gunning is showing the next generation of ceramic nudes — life-size, but headless and armless — modeled on her own body. There’s one example of the previous iteration, whose earthy tones suggest something ancient. But “The Nickie Warriors” are in such shiny hues as aqua and violet, and sometimes covered in syrup-thick glazes. The local artist doesn’t idealize the female form, and her technique also celebrates imperfection: The figures slump in various ways, and a few have conspicuous cracks. These mock relics may be brand-new, but they didn’t come off an assembly line. - Mark Jenkins

Read more here.

December 15, 2015. The Georgetowner Review: John Blee at Cross MacKenzie

For John Blee, painting is poetry and color is its language.

“Color determines the voice of each painting,” he says. “It can never be exactly repeated. So when I find the right colors in the process of painting, they are like keys that open the works for me.”

His recent work, on view at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW, expands his “Orchard” series, which began in 2007. These lush, atmospheric environments of color and delicate shapes are a sensory envelopment, recalling the painterly geometric abstraction of Hans Hofmann and the alluring garden scenes of Pierre Bonnard.

Yet Blee finds much of his inspiration in poetry. The origin of this series is connected to the late French poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, specifically his collection “Vergers,” (French for “Orchards”).

Regardless, his paintings are for those among us who adore the secret life of paint itself. They are for those who lean in close to explore the trails of the brush, tracing its path and listening for the echo of colors scratched gently across the taut canvas. For this writer, paintings do not get much better. These are paintings I would like to live with. - Ari Post

Read more here.

September 25, 2015. The Washington Post Review: Walter McConnell

Photo: Opening night at the Katzen

The Washington Post

IN THE GALLERIES:

Three painters and a ceramicist, all in their early 20s, are the “New Talent” of Cross MacKenzie Gallery’s current show. Their work is linked less by style or theme than by vigor and high spirits.

Louise Smith’s large, bustling mixed-media paintings are partially collages, with pigment atop assembled paper and cardboard shards. Maida Monaghan’s red-heavy pictures are partially representational, but they juxtapose pictorial elements in unexpected arrangements. While Cooper MacKenzie depicts hostile nature in paintings of a sinkhole and a tornado, the vibe turns cosmic and perhaps contemplative in his striking “Enso Triptych,” with star-like spatter on space-black backdrops. (In Zen ink painting, an “enso” is a quickly rendered circle, symbolizing enlightenment and the universe.)

Although Nicole Gunning’s life-size figures intentionally suggest the multitudes of Xi’an’s ancient Terra-Cotta Warriors, these are not minions of some emperor. The “Nickies” are all self-portraits, autonomous and unflinchingly nude — albeit headless and armless. Where the Chinese figures are clearly part of set, Gunning’s are personal and individual, and thus entirely contemporary.

Mark Jenkins

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-anything-but-simplicity-in-these-drawings/2015/07/02/9af2d232-1e86-11e5-aeb9-a411a84c9d55_story.html

Washington City Paper

"Blast Off!" At Cross MacKenzie Gallery

Cross MacKenzie Gallery evokes both ancient mythology and modern technology with “Blast-Off,” its latest group show, which focuses on themes of flight and air travel. David Favrod, one of seven artists in the show, offers a photograph of a Japanese soldier wearing Icarus-style wings, reinterpreting his Japanese grandparents’ role in World War II. Montana-based painter Philip Slagter compares two flying forms, hummingbirds and cutting-edge aerial drones, while other artists look back to the iconic 20th-century rocket form: with ironic cheerfulness in the hands of Biddle/Frankel (a collaboration between husband and wife Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel) and with doughy, flabby drabness in the hands of sculptor Matthew Courtney. But the exhibit’s biggest treat is seeing the work of two longtime D.C. favorites—painter Trevor Young, who provides a dramatic, nighttime homage to a taxiing airplane, and photographer (and gallery owner) Maxwell Mackenzie, whose aerial image of planes dotting an expansive desert landscape calls to mind some of Young’s own fine portrayals of creamy, industrial-gray tarmacs a decade and a half ago.

Louis Jacobson

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/47037/blast-off-at-cross-mackenzie-gallery-saturday-april-4/

Washington Post

IN THE GALLERIEs:

On one side of Cross MacKenzie Gallery, a long bench holds more than 50 objects, which clay artist Zimra Beiner calls “Tools for No Purpose.” Some of them have knobs, tines or other parts that make them look vaguely functional, but others appear more organic, suggesting gourds or cones. To add to the perplexity, the so-called tools are all made of red-tan clay, but coated with a glaze that has been sandblasted to a seemingly creamy finish, suggesting cream-cheese icing. It’s as if the artist raided the kitchen drawers of a psychedelic cartoon.

In the front window are two hulking clay blobs — “blob” is the gallery’s term for them — whose contours look soft and random but whose surfaces are hard and glossy. These are the only standalone items. The other, smaller pieces are carefully arranged so that they look like a series of miniature pavilions or 3-D glyphs, spelling out some unreadable word. The blend of organic and faux-functional continues in one set of silver-gray objects that might be roosters in the process of turning into pitchers, or vice versa.

The show also includes a few drawings, mostly in gray and black but sometimes with smears of yellow. These works also jumble tool shapes and architectural motifs for purely whimsical aims. Whether employing clay or lines, Beiner crafts stuff whose only purpose is play.

Mark Jenkins

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-looking-at-nature-from-both-sides-now/2015/03/19/28248f46-cc03-11e4-8a46-b1dc9be5a8ff_story.html

The Washington Post

In the galleries: 

Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei famously attacked cultural heirlooms with Dada-inspired impiety, dipping Han and Qing Dynasty pots into vats of industrial paint. It’s not clear whether artist Hyun Kyung Yoon was delighted or distressed by Ai’s antics, but she’s responded with some splattered ceramics of her own, now on display at Cross MacKenzie Gallery. “Why, Ai Wei Wei?” features a dozen newly made off-white jars, seemingly dripping with brightly stained glazes. The result is less provocative than Ai’s work, but more beautiful. Rather than acts of vandalism, Yoon’s color-splashed vessels are an elegant merger of the American pop-art palette and the Asian aesthetic known in Japanese as “wabi-sabi” (rough simplicity).

The show also features Yoon’s “Indeterminate Lines” series of wall-mounted ceramic squiggles. The artist, who divides her time between Richmond and South Korea, compares these 3-D gestures to calligraphy, but they also resemble vines or sprouts. Some of the twisting strands end in pod-like shapes or bristling spines, while others culminate in forms that look a bit like shower heads. Made in a range of subdued colors and a variety of finishes, the ceramic brushstrokes look less drawn than grown. Yoon’s “lines” are as distant from traditional pottery as the vivid hues that embellish her Ai-style jars.

Mark Jenkins

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-images-of-history-in-black-and-white-from-a-german-photographer/2015/02/05/de709d6c-aaf7-11e4-ad71-7b9eba0f87d6_story.html