Artomatic final floors! ...a week too late

I'm pretty sure nobody was waiting on my review before checking out floors 4-6 at Artomatic, but if you were I apologize because well, the show ended last week. These floors had plenty of great individual work but I wasn't captivated by an entire exhibit the way I was by Chris Peloso and Tracey Lee on my first trip or Heather Bartlett and Patrick Wilson on my second. But there was still plenty of art that interested me:

John Pack had a whole series of mouth-watering food creations made entirely of sea debris. The ice cream and toppings were various corals and the cone was a seashell. Elizabeth Lundberg Morisette put together my favorite installation in 1,584 Bottles of Beer on the Wall (I've had my share). It was a testament to her grandfather "Sarge" who gave up drinking cold turkey at age 60 (saying "I've had my share") and who left her two coffee cans full of nails which were used to nail 1,584 not-necessarily-beer bottle caps to the wall (several were from my favorite IBC root beer)

I previously joked that BRASH was putting a poem up for every artist. I believe I have to revoke the joke. As far as I could tell, by my final trip on closing weekend BRASH had left a poem for all 1,000+ artists. Amazing. Congratulations. One of my favorites was her interpretation of Sabrina Cabada's Outside Looking In. I believe it was a fairly different interpretation than what Sabrina intended, but it made the piece for me. BRASH also had a great poem for another of my favorite pieces called Roadmap to Spring by Susan W. Holland. The trunk and branches of the tree are all made by exposing the bottom layer of the painting to reveal a map of the DC area.

For the most part I don't tend to be a fan of abstract art. Kay Layne and Pilar Jimenez's work was an exception for me. I think I liked Kay's work because the titles gave me a concept I could grasp onto. The subject of her painting was a simple red square (or should I say Krasnaya Ploshad! yukyukyuk). In the case of Corralled there were some circles surrounding the red square and as you can see on the left, here the red square is Waiting in Line. I have no idea what appealed to me about Pilar's work but it did. Maybe the background reminded me of a photo I had just accidentally taken of the concrete floor? Nope I have no idea.

While I wasn't sucked in for quite as long as I had been upstairs, two artists did have a number of different works that appealed to me. JD Yezierski had a series of photographs of nudes "painted" with projected images. I love the three-dimensionality that this gave to Mona's eyes. Other humorous ones included Ass on Ass with a projection of Rummy, and Jerry Fal-well endowed which I imagine you can also picture. Finally Nancy Daly had a broad range of fun pieces: from her commentary on men and women with strategically placed hearts, to a rolling office chair made entirely of post-its, and from a "Support our oops" photo of a burned out neon sign, to a blue bower bed with clever story which asks the question "Are good things a good enough replacement for good genes?"

Looking back, the highlight of the show for me was Tracey Lee's Refused: Return to Sender which used several pieces to tell the heartbreaking story of her relationship with her alcoholic parents. What I may remember most from this Artomatic experience though was getting so much feedback from the artists to my first blog post, and especially finding out Joseph Merchlinsky had made my favorite piece from 2004. Now if I can just figure out who made the Converse sneaker color study from the year before...

While I begin the wait until the next Artomatic and Darren and I continue to debate our mantle options I'll be keeping my eyes open for a glance like Cristin's...