By Louis Jacobson for Washington City Paper
August 14, 2024
A three-artist exhibit is an atypical format for Hemphill Artworks, but you can see how it came to be. Textile artists Sophia Belkin and Randy Shull and digital photographer Colby Caldwell share a large format and an appreciation for abstraction. Of the three, Shull’s work is the most different. He creates hammocks like those typical of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where he spends much of the year; he then paints the hammocks and lets them “cure” in the sun...
The Baltimore-based Belkin, for her part, uses dye painting, embroidery, and textile collage while Caldwell continues the technique he has used in recent years of deploying a flatbed scanner as a camera. The works by both Belkin and Caldwell walk the line between abstraction and realism, but Belkin’s careful stitching contrasts with the seemingly random glitching of Caldwell’s scanner patterns. What elevates Caldwell’s works is the interaction between his floral subject matter and the cubist-adjacent geometries created by the scanner glitches. In one noteworthy image, yellow flowers alternate with electronic defect patterns that suggest sharp daggers; the image becomes a fruitful pairing of beauty and danger.
The last day to see BELKIN · CALDWELL · SHULL at HEMPHILL is Saturday, August 24, 2024. Please stop by the gallery to see the exhibition before it closes.