Alisios (Westerlies Easterlies), 2024
Kreeger Museum Washington D.C.
In This Little Bay; Celebrating 30 Years at the Kreeger Museum. Curated by Kristen Hileman.
The hand-painted fabric is hung along a window separating one of the Kreeger’s galleries from an interior courtyard. Zinny’s intervention softens and animates the precise geometries and hard materials of the modernist museum building designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster. By implanting acrylic pigment into the mesh of the fiber structure, the work reminds us of our transcontinental shared residues or particles, as the ones carried by the Trade Winds or Alisios. At first glance, Dolores Zinny’s exquisite drawings seem a microscopic enlargement of a detail in one of the paintings by Claude Monet in the Kreeger Museum collection. In just a few square inches of meticulously accumulated pencil marks, she concentrates diffused light and a soft spectrum of color. Like Monet contemplating his gardens at Giverny, Zinny meditates on places that are intimately familiar to her—the skies of Rosario, Argentina, the city in which she was born, and Baltimore, Maryland, the city in which she now lives. However, in juxtaposing atmospheric views of these far-flung places across her series, Zinny addresses the dispersion of people in the twenty-first century and hints at the geo-dynamics. With slow and close looking, her rectangles of color are revealed as energetic fields conveying skies that are aggregates of vapors and currents, of human inhalations and exhalations, and of sustaining and toxic particulates.
The reflective, undulating surfaces of Juan Maidagan’s Artifact-Built 1 complicate the precise
naming of its form. The object has both a shape, akin to a column, and a quality of movement, approaching a fold, turn, or spiral. Its title locates the object in the human-made world and produced from bronze, it speaks to the bronze architectural fixtures throughout the Kreeger building.
Photo credits Danbi Co
