full circle

Tonight at Curator's Office (a Wednesday opening on 14th Street? Novelty!) you should attend the opening of Jiha Moon's new show, An Exact Place.

Moon is a formerly D.C.-based artist and 2005 Trawick prize winner; I reviewed her 2005 show at C.O. (mostly favorably) here.

I also did include her in my post on "that painting"--a post that seemed to strike a nerve, but did nothing to stem the tide of decorative postmodern mashup pictures, which continue to clutter galleries and stream out of MFA programs unabated, presumably just to spite me.

Okay, so she makes that sort of painting. But unlike a lot of other practitioners in the genre, Jiha makes paintings that are imaginative, playful, and exquisite...and, if you've met Jiha, or heard her speak about her work, it's hard not to sense that the work has a certain integrity.

I also tend to think of Jiha as the quintessential Curator's Office artist: producing larger pieces, too, but mostly associated with a lot of smallish works on paper--perfect for a micro-gallery--that project skill, pop culture savvy, and humor. I don't want to speculate about Andrea's future at 1515, but given Annie's departure and the escalating rents there, this show does feel oddly like it could be an appropriate end to an era--or at least an address.