SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E5
She underscored the movement
by positioning her camera at an
oblique angle so the flame
slashes across the picture as a
dramatic diagonal. Such canny
compositional gambits enhance
many of the visual anecdotes in
“Two Stories,” Toensing’s show at
Photoworks.
The first of the tales is life on
the New Jersey shore. This
includes pictures of grim tract
housing near the ocean, but
focuses primarily on beach and
boardwalk denizens. Among the
indelible images are a pair of
young women in bathing suits,
framed by headless nude male
torsos in the foreground, and a
trio of old friends in the
glimmering surf, an immersive
shot of immersion.
Toensing has traveled the
world as a National Geographic
photographer and a
documentary filmmaker. One of
her themes is widowhood as
lived in traditional patriarchal
societies, primarily but not
exclusively in South Asia. The
photos from this series include
such purely visual attractions as
milky light, fractured sunbeams
and powdered pigment
suspended in midair during Holi,
the Hindu festival of colors.
More sobering are an
intentionally blurred picture of
desperate widows seeking the
three-rupee fee promised for
singing scripture at a temple, as
well as several studies of widows
in isolation, whether in an open
yard or an enclosed space.
Toensing's compositional flair
conveys perpetual solitude as
deftly as it does beachfront
bustle.Amy Toensing: Two Stories
Through May 22 at Photoworks, Glen
Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd.,
Glen Echo, Md,Lizette Chirrime
Mozambican artist Lizette
Chirrime makes art by stitching
together scraps of secondhand
fabric and other found materials.
Although this sort of patchwork
is usually considered humble,
Chirrime’s themes are heroic and
even cosmic. Among the pieces
in her Morton Fine Art show,
“Rituals for Souls Search,” is
“Somewhere on Earth,” in whichIN THE GALLERIESBY MARK JENKINSThe bold framing, perspective
and other compositional
techniques of Japanese
woodblock master Utagawa
Hiroshige make his prints
appear cinematic — even though
he died in 1858, almost four
decades before the Lumiere
Brothers exhibited the first
moving picture. The artist’s
continuing influence on
cameramen and -women is the
crux of “Exploring Hiroshige and
His Influence on Social Media” at
the Japan Information and
Culture Center. The exhibition
matches classic Hiroshige prints
with contemporary photographs
posted on Instagram.
The photos are by
Washington-area residents, but
many portray Japan, where
Aaron Webb and Alexis Rose
found striking downward
vantages on, respectively, an
Osaka train station platform and
a cat on a Nagasaki roof. The
images, which include a few
views of D.C., are displayed in
thematic pairings and arranged
to demonstrate visual affinities
to the 20 Hiroshige woodblocks,
all from American University’s
collection. The show also
includes a tutorial on the
hallmarks of the printmaker’s
compositions, including
symmetry, S-curves and
unusually low or high horizon
lines.
These strategies allowed
Hiroshige to depict everyday life
as a sort of theatrical production,
rich with lively details and
staged for maximum impact. The
artist made multiple series
documenting various routes and
locales, many of which feature
grand landscapes. But he often
focused on ordinary objects or
activities, whether by themselves
or foregrounded to establish a
human presence amid towering
crags or crashing waves. The
show’s photos, made mostly in
urban areas, lack the epic natural
backdrops yet follow the
printmaker’s lessons well. Like
Hiroshige, the photographers
frame their vignettes so each one
appears to be a self-contained
universe.Exploring Hiroshige and His
Influence on Social Media Through
May 13 at Japan Information and
Culture Center, 1150 18th St. NW.Boundless
The title of the Korean
Cultural Center’s “Boundless” isA 19th-century Japanese
master’s influence on
contemporary images
the Seoul native came to study
that prompted her landscape-
evoking ceramic vessel.
Text, often multilingual,
features in pieces such as Hyun
Chough’s robust, partly
sculptural collage, whose two
inset rectangles are filled with
fragmentary blocks. A reaction
to the pandemic, June Yun’s
mixed-media piece arrays small
blocks of reversed text from the
New Yorker magazine in a grid,
over which she has painted
yellow flowers. Delicate and
diaphanous, the blooms signify
rebirth, even if only tentatively.Boundless Through May 16 at the
Korean Cultural Center, 2370
Massachusetts Ave. NW.Amy Toensing
A fire eater is a vivid subject
for a photograph, but for her
portrait of one, Amy Toensing
didn’t simply shoot straight-on.KOREAN CULTURAL CENTER
“ Sanctuary” by Jean Jinho Kim conjures the idea of home.textile strips coalesce into a sort
of globe. Most of the narrow
ribbons flow from one side of the
tapestry to the other, but the
ones that approach the circle
bend into an orbit as if warped
by a black hole’s pull.More typical of Chirrime's
compositions are those that
center on human figures, in two
cases identified as single
mothers. One of the solitary
matriarchs is positioned above a
photo of a woman's face and
outlined in multiple series of
roughly parallel red stitches.
Equally expressive is “The Boy
Who Stopped the Snake,” in
which the child who clutches a
brown serpent is a silhouette of
hot-colored tatters against a
backdrop of blues and greens.
The poses in these tableaux
are meant to be celebratory, and
reflect the artist’s overcoming
her traumatic childhood. “I
literally ‘restitched’ myself
together,” explains her
statement. The use of castoff
materials is an ecological
statement and the imagery is
often spiritual, but the essence of
Chirrime’s art is
autobiographical.Lizette Chirrime: Rituals for
Souls Search Through May 17 at
Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No.- Open by appointment.
LIZETTE CHIRRIME/MORTON FINE ART
“Somewhere on Earth” by
Lizette Chirrime uses textile
strips melded together to form a
globe-like image.EMBASSY OF JAPAN“Osaka Station, Osaka, 2011,” by Aaron Webb in the Hiroshige exhibit.
an overstatement, yet not by
much. The show presents the
work of no less than 46
participants, members of the
Han-Mee Artists Association of
Greater Washington, a Korean
American group. Many of the
highlights are sculptures, but the
selection also includes paintings,
prints and textile works.
Among the better-known
contributors is Jean Jinho Kim,
whose sculptures have been
getting leaner and more potent;
her “Sanctuary” conjures the
idea of home merely with two
aluminum pipes, powder-coated
in contrasting colors and bent
into elementary outlines of a
house. Utterly different in look
and feel yet thematically linked
is Sookkyung Park’s cloudlike
hanging assemblage of curved
paper pieces, inspired by her
paper-walled childhood home.
As for Ara Koh, it was the
absence of buildings in the
Upstate New York town where