These folks know how to throw an art salon.
Clarendon-based nonprofit Art Outlet stages events that connect regional artists with the community. When it unleashes FLUX this evening, boredom won’t be option — sensory bombardment is guaranteed.
Sharing the menu with fresh and vintage produce from 50 artists will be alternative entertainment to rock all the senses. There’s local music — blues, avant-garde jazz, indie pop and electronica. Aerial dance, which addsvertical motion to the traditional horizontal paths via apparatus such as trapezes, bungees and trampolines. Fire dancing, an eye-dazzler drawing inspiration from native rituals to circus side-shows.
Want more? Art Outlet organizer Henrik Sundqvist promises interactive video, sound and theater performances.
Back to the art: The diverse collection of sculpture, paintings, prints and photography spans figurative to abstract, accessible to over-the-edge. Fresh concepts include Emily Greene Liddle’s oil-on-canvas renderings of intriguing 17th -19th century New England tombstones; look closely at “Crossbones I.”
Candace Keegan conjoins innocence and knowing with a trio of oils. Alternative “Objects of Desire” assume the forms of a pancaked frog and chubby wind-up skeleton. In her sly, wry “Blue Lolly-POP,” observer and observed become one.
Nancy McIntyre turns back the clock with “Ray’s Cafe,” a silkscreen preserving a former Little Tavern in Clarendon. Sundqvist’s graphic chops empower an etching/intaglio of the skull of a steer whose eyes lock with the species that sealed his fate.
Supporting FLUX players include Walnut Street Development, artdc.org, Arlington Independent Media and DC Conspiracy, which is hosting the free DC Counter Culture Festival from 4 p.m. to midnight today at Dr. Dremos (details at dcconspiracy.com).
The $5 suggested donation for FLUX will help fund future events. Be assured, you’ll get your money’s worth of sensory overload. Get lucky in the art raffle and you’ll even take home a little Flux-ery.
