At Target Gallery on the ground floor of Alexandria's Torpedo Factory, a fascinating little show titled "5 x 5 Exposed," caught my eye. This was is an exhibition of small photographic works (in a tiny 5 x 5 inches format) by 46 artists from around the country, Iceland and Australia. The show was juried by the amazing Kathleen Ewing, considered by most of us to be one of the most influential persons on the planet when it comes to photography.

She writes that:
"At a time when in some circles of the photography art world bigger is better, it is fascinating to view the remarkable range of photographs which have been produced to fit the relatively small dimension of 5 x 5 inches. The photographers in this exhibition have accepted the challenge of a limited format within which they have succeeded in expressing their personal vision. Not only did they print small; they let their imagination create small images. I found an unanticipated diversity of subject matter in the photographs submitted for this exhibition. It was a refreshing experience to view images where size is irrelevant and content is paramount. By the very nature of their intimate scale, the visitors to this exhibition will need to get up close and personal to fully experience the creativity of these artists and the magic of the photographic process."

I agree, and it was refreshing to see the anti-thesis of Teutonic-sized photography, most of which follows the Dali maxim of "if you can't paint well, then paint big." You can view the selected photographs here. I particularly liked Missouri's Ann Dinwiddie Madden piece titled Fishing, one of those Seinfeldian photographs about nothing that seem to capture a lot in the image. That is until we get drawn closer and closer into the tiny image and discover the man to the right and the reason for the title.

I also liked all of California's Therese Brown's tea toned cyanotypes on fabric and the pinhole C-print as well as Florida's Joseph Mougle's purposefully and vastly overexposed series. Even in this tiny format and in spite of the urban subject, Mougel's entries almost show like modern icons. The exaggerated contrast delivers an unexpected elevation of the subject from the mundane to some sort of unexpected sublimation of almost saint-like status.

The major surprise to me was to find five very elegant architectural photos by the DMV's own Deb Jansen, a fiber artist who now shows remarkable facility with the camera as well.

Overall, this is quite a satisfying show and well worth the trip to Old Town Alexandria. If you are a fan of the early Sally Mann, you will also like Iceland's Agnieszka Sosnowska's very strong entries. If you liked Joyce Tenneson's most recent work with dead flowers you will love North Carolina's Joel Leeb's intelligent exploration of this subject.

Ohio's Savitri Maya Sedlacek's work falls in the fan of Chan Chao's portrait work category, as Sedlacek offers a strong and powerful selection of portraits of India's Kolkota School children.

And since I've let the Washington Post's erudite chief art critic Blake Gopnik influence my words in the above couple of paragraphs, I think that Gopnik would approve of California's Sky Bergman's series on Japanese subways. They offer an intimate view of the denizens of the subway, capture their boredom, or attempts to pass the time, but always in a manner that seems to make the act of taking their photo illicit somehow. Only the lady to the right of the dude checking for reception in his cell phone seems to have caught Sky in the act.

My absolute favorite in the show? Virginia's Hugh Jones Vie de Boheme, a gorgeous nude which is illustrated by words projected onto the body. If you know my own work, then you know why I would love that tiny, sexy image with writing on the body. The unachievable and fantasized critic objectivity flies out the window with this photo; well done Hugh!

Tiny masterpieces also showcased the walls of the Art League Gallery a few steps from Target. Selected by Emily Conover, who is an adjunct professor of art at the University of Maryland, where she teaches drawing and painting, the Art League's Small Works show, and much like the Target Gallery's 5x5 show, proves that if the talent is there, size doesn't really matter in art.

Conover awarded the Eleanor Boudreau Jordan Award to "Untitled I" a very cool silver gelatin print by Andrew Zimmermann. The Second Place Award went to a superb oil titled "Playing with Dandelion" by Kim Stenberg. She also passed Honorable Mentions to the entries by Diane Blackwell, Kathy Clowery, Marcia Dale Dullum, Avis Fleming, Janice Sayles, Jean Schwartz and Xiaolei Zhang and from the 530 works of art entered, she accepted 158 for the show.

In this show I was once again floored by the technical ability of Wendy Donahoe, whose entry titled "Haley" is a breath-taking small graphite portrait that jumps out of its tiny environment because of the artistic prowess of Donahoe. The woman doesn't just draw well, she draws spectacularly well and then she manages to go beyond being simply a talented hand and also manages to cross the line into the realm of solid composition and that psychological "it" that is so hard to capture in a portrait.

The tiny monumentality of Xiaolei Zhang's "Single Pear," a gorgeous little oil painting that you can pick up framed for $80, underscores the fact that most good painters know: a tiny, small oil can be just as difficult and challenging to deliver well as a large painting. In fact you can even make the case that it is even harder because of the scale. Zhang's pear succeeds because Zhang knows how to paint and now the challenge becomes delivering with skill on a small scale. It is a success in this case.

I also liked T. Pham's "Beach Season Begins," a brilliant little pastel that crams a lot of visual information into one very small piece. Even up close hanging on the wall, it has the feel of a large work, not an easy trick to accomplish in such a small scale. I also liked U. Dehejia's gorgeous employment of wet on wet watercolors to submit an impressive flash of color in this tiny landscape. And I have no idea how H. Rodkin's diminutive photograph "Mist Of The Potomac" manages to come across like a giant Thomas Cole painting, but it does.

 

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