E16 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
Hyattsville, Md,Mullins and Pettigrew
The two painters paired in
Adah Rose Gallery’s “The Beauty
of Solitude” are
representationalists but not
exactly realists. Nathan Mullins
and Emily Pettigrew flatten and
streamline such subjects as a
baseball outfield and a stark
bedroom, respectively, as ways
to ponder form, space and
texture. Yet if abstraction
informs their work, so does the
real world.
Baseball players and parks
appear in many of Mullins’s oils,
which are derived from
broadcast-TV images from the
1980 s and ’90s. The Mississippilocation is Melissa Malzkuhn —
whose statement says her art
manifests “my love-and-hate
relationship with D.C.” In one of
four prints with unprintable
titles, the upward thrust of the
Washington Monument is
mirrored by an arm and hand
with outstretched middle finger.
Indignation is not the only
element in this series, which
takes its style from Russian
constructivism and its two-color
scheme from the Risograph, a
Japanese duplicating machine.
Malzkuhn gives an art history
lesson while she blows off a little
steam.Exploring Deaf Geographies
Through Feb. 27 at Pyramid Atlantic
Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St.,NTID’s Dyer Art Center and
divides her time between the two
regions. According to her
statement, Hyattsville, Md. — the
location of Pyramid Atlantic Art
Center in particular “is
becoming a hub for the Deaf
community.”
Two of the artists make
abstractions that can be read as
landscapes. Open regions and
citylike grids appear in Laural
Hartman’s prints, the most
dynamic of which centers on an
abstracted flower arrangement.
Aaron Swindle makes collages,
sometimes augmented with
paint or colored pencil, whose
grainy textures and metallic
tones convey primal earthiness.
The only participant who
responds directly to her currentpersonal or symbolic spaces
conjured by the five deaf
contributors. Youmee Lee and
Yiqiao Wang, for example, evoke
childhood with images of
animals and girls. Lee’s delicate
etchings, often keyed to a single
dominant color, suggest
illustrations for a lyrical
children’s book. Wang cut beasts
and flowers from red paper, and
painted a boldly hued and
patterned portrait of her young
self with a toy dragon on a stick.
There are geographic links
among the five artists. All live in
or near D.C., home to Gallaudet
University, or Rochester, N.Y., the
site of the National Technical
Institute for the Deaf (NTID).
Tabitha Jacques, who curated
the exhibition, is the director ofMIKE DU JOUR B Y MIKE LESTERbe supportive, but wouldn’t keep
the news to himself.
I want to spend all my energy
healing, and this diagnosis is for
something so easily treatable
that they will probably never
even find out. I’m inclined to
keep this news between me, my
husband and my doctor, but I’m
open to hearing alternatives.
— Should I Share?Should I Share?: Not telling
them sounds smart — and
strangely gratifying.
Credit to them, though, for
how comprehensively they
represent how not to support
someone sick. Blaming the
patient, check; burdening the
patient, check; sick-splaining,
check; blabbing, check.
Anyway — I have only two
suggestions. First, make sure
secrecy doesn’t create even more
emotional work for you. It seems
straightforward, but once you
have to come up with neutral
responses and keep track of
what you tell whom, it can feel
like extra work, which can get
heavy. Not to say you should tell
them just for this reason — it’s
just something to watch for. You
can always tell them later (and
let your husband screen them
fiercely) if that becomes easier.
Second, and more important:
Make sure you empower your
husband to get the support he
needs. He’s there for you, and
you’re so lucky to have him;
caregivers do their best work,
though, if someone outside the
circle is there for them. Locking
information down too tightly
can limit or cut off his options
for relief, so make sure he has
the outlet(s) he needs.
Take care, and fingers crossed
your prognosis is on the mark.Write to Carolyn Hax at
[email protected]. Get her
column delivered to your inbox each
morning at wapo.st/gethax. Join the discussion live at noon
Fridays at washingtonpost.com/live-
chats.cares if she “ignores any terms I
have,” because your terms are for
you and you will live by them no
matter how badly she takes it
when you leave her in the
kitchen talking to herself. You
can be available to her again, to
have a relationship again, sure.
You just won’t be there to listen
to her [stuff].Dear Carolyn: I recently got a
cancer diagnosis, and I don’t
want to tell my family. My
husband knows, and he’s being
just what I need at this time.
My mom is in her 1980s mind-
set, where anybody with cancer
created their bad reality. One
sister panics, and I don’t want to
spend my energy taking care of
her. The other sister’s version of
support is telling long stories
about what people she knew did
in the same circumstances and
giving tons of unsolicited advice.
My brother is great and wouldunsolicited advice or diagnoses,
their standing to criticize
notwithstanding.)
Since your sister is going to do
what she wants and climb over
all your fences and you can’t
stop her, your fence won’t be
effective unless it’s about your
behavior.
So, “I will not discuss my
parenting with you.” It’s a tiny
rephrase with a massive effect. I
will not discuss. I.
Because that, you can control.
She can criticize you as usual,
every day, alll dayyy, and in
response you can: change the
subject, ignore her text, delete
her email, hang up the phone,
leave the room, put in ear buds,
crank the TV, practice your
kazoo, start speaking in tongues.
You can employ whatever means
you have available to ensure
she’s talking to herself.
Bliss. Right?
This is disrespect-proof. WhoDear Carolyn: I
have repeatedly
asked my sister
not to discuss
certain topics
with me because I
find her approach
offensive and
insulting. For
example, she has no children of
her own, but she often criticizes
how I parent my children and
tells me what I’m doing wrong.
When I try to establish
boundaries, she blows them off,
and tells me I have to accept the
way she likes to talk about
everything. And she will
psychoanalyze me, telling me I
have mental problems.
I didn’t ask for her advice on
my parenting and certainly did
not ask if I have mental
problems.
I’ve stopped communicating
with her because I simply do not
know what to say. I love my
sister and want to reconcile, but
she ignores any terms I have,
and yet is requiring me to accept
her terms. We are at a standstill.
How do we move on from here?
— Standstill
Standstill: Your boundaries
aren’t working because you’re
setting them for your sister,
when they need to be for you.
This is a common
misconception. It’s natural to
think of boundaries as a kind of
fence we put up to keep people
out. “Here is my new fence,” we
tell people. “Do not go over it!”
You want to keep your sister out
of certain topics, so you built
your fence and told her to stay
on her side of it.
The thing is, we can’t make
people stop saying what they
want to say. Your sister keeps
teaching you that the hard way.
Some people will be polite or
respectful enough to drop a
subject on request, sure, but
they’re not the ones we really
need our boundaries for; they
have and respect their own
regardless of what you do. (As in,
they don’t go around giving
H ow to respond to a critical sister who shoots her arrows over your boundaries
Carolyn
Hax
NICKGALIFIANAKISFOR THE WASHINGTONPOSTIN THE GALLERIESartist, who has an MFA from
American University,
emphasizes the solitariness of
athletes of color. This reflects
partly how the men were framed
by the TV camera, but also their
treatment as “second rate
citizens off the field,” Mullins’s
statement notes.
Lone figures, often framed by
spare structures, also are
common in Pettigrew’s pictures,
some of which depict historic
sites observed during a
residency in Ireland. Wherever
the scene, the artist gives it a
beguiling out-of-time feel.
Pettigrew credits her style to a
Maine childhood and her
current life in the rustic
Catskills, but it’s an aesthetic
choice as well. Mullins and
Pettigrew simplify their images
to concentrate their essence.Nathan Mullins and Emily
Pettgrew: The Beauty of Solitude
Through March 2 at Adah Rose
Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave.,
Kensington, Md.Irene Pantelis
The copiapoa cactuses that
grow in Chile’s Atacama, Earth’s
driest nonpolar desert, are both
hardy and delicate. The starkly
lovely drawings in “Cactus of the
Sands,” Irene Pantelis’s Studio
Gallery show, emphasize the
delicacy. This expresses the
precarious existence of
vegetation that finds
“sustenance in just fog and
sunlight,” according to the local
artist’s statement. It also hints at
the environmental threats to the
flowering cactuses, which are
imperiled by poaching, lithium
mining and climate change.
The drawings verge on
abstraction, yet are clearly
derived from nature. Most were
executed with black ink on paper
whose low absorbency allowed
the pigment to pool and
occasionally separate, yielding
subtle gradations in color. A few
of the pictures are highlighted
with brown colored pencil, bits
of mesh and, in one case, acrylic
paint. That blue-accented
picture represents a satellite
view of remaining cactus
mounds, but Pantelis produces
just as an expansive view of
nature by focusing on a single
plant.Irene Pantelis: Cactus of the
Sands Through Feb. 26 at Studio
Gallery, 2108 R St. NW.BY MARK JENKINSIn one of the older pictures in
Anna U. Davis’s “Reality Check,”
a woman’s nude body — its parts
labeled as cuts of meat —
reclines amid a heap of chops,
roasts and sausages. 2016 s
“Shark-cuteri” is perhaps the
most assertive feminist
statement in the show at IA&A at
Hillyer. It’s also an embodiment
of the Swedish-born D.C. artist’s
technique. Employing her own
brand of pop-cubism, Davis
builds heavily stylized, mosaic-
like cartoons that have become
increasingly three-dimensional.
The artist has long divided her
drawing-paintings into small
bits that give the sense of being
assembled like stained-glass
windows. She incorporates cut-
paper collage and applique
textiles to represent such things
as flowers and clothing.
Recently, she’s begun adding
rough textures by combining
pumice and pigment, a mix
that’s molded into backdrops
that can fill much of a picture’s
territory. In “A Fragment in
Time,” a girl swings toward a
blue sky across a mottled white
expanse, while “Biosphere”
places a woman inside a jar
bounded by chalky space. There
also are two pictures topped by
blocks of pumice-embedded
black that look as oppressive as
the white areas seem free.
Davis’s protagonists are gray-
skinned “Frocasions,” multi- or
post-racial people partly
inspired by her interracial
marriage. These characters are
often portrayed under stress,
looped by chains or lifting heavy
bricks — or displayed to leering
male eyes. But they’re also
shown at rest or coiled in loving
embrace. A set of small paintings
offers portraits of three dozen of
the artist’s fanciful subjects in a
variety of poses and skin tones.
They’re diverse yet unified, like
the pictures Davis constructs
from squares, circles and
triangles — and from crooked
mouths, off-center noses and
akimbo limbs.
Anna U. Davis: Reality Check
Through Feb. 27 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9
Hillyer Ct. NW.
Exploring Deaf
Geographies
The title of Pyramid Atlantic
Art Center’s “Exploring Deaf
Geographies” refers primarily to
Solo figures, spare structures provoke thinking about form, space and textureADAH ROSE GALLERY
“ He Could Go All the Way” by Nathan Mullins reflects his e mphasis on the solitariness of athletes of color.