“On Camera: Four Local Artists on View at Studio Gallery
Jo Levine, Judy Bonderman, Beverly Logan, and Suliman Abdullah bring unique and interesting photography—and photography-adjacent art—to the Dupont gallery.
LOUIS JACOBSON
JUNE 9TH, 2025
“Sky Lights #1” by Jo Levine on View at Studio Gallery
Kudos to Studio Gallery for squeezing a wide range of interesting photography—and photography-adjacent art—into its modestly sized lower gallery space, with four simultaneous, loosely linked exhibits by D.C.-area artists.
One, Suliman Abdullah, offers photography and collage that harnesses “intentional color manipulation,” often through circular abstractions that layer grainy hues over one another.
“Essence of Place: Tuscany” by Beverly Logan
Another artist, Beverly Logan, seeks to share what she calls the “Essence of Place”—digital collages saturated with hyperreal colors, notably an image set in Buenos Aires that features a vintage station wagon wedged into a weathered alley, in a setting captured by shades of tomato red, mustard yellow, and inky blue. A more obviously manufactured tableau by Logan, but that still offers intrigue, depicts a view from an Amtrak passenger-car window, featuring parallel, receding layers of track, water, a row of yellow-painted homes, a factory wall and a carefree sky.
Like Abdullah and Logan, Judy Bonderman uses photographic manipulation; Bonderman leverages the technique to freeze moments from walks she’s made through the Tregaron Conservancy, an urban green space in Cleveland Park. She acknowledges that her images of aquatic plants, frogs, water snakes, and fish aren’t literal; her approach, she says, “exaggerates and romanticizes” what she sees. While many of Logan’s works are dominated by calming shades of green, her most compelling piece may actually be the opposite: “Rolling,” an abstraction with a blend of deep red hues that suggests the fires of hell.
“Transitions” by Judy Bonderman
The most consistently successful of the four artists is Jo Levine, whose past work at the gallery and elsewhere hasbeen similarly impressive. In the current exhibit, Levine documents a wide array of locations in D.C.; few of the more than a dozen images she contributes are squandered. What ties Levine’s works together is a seamless presentation of overlapping layers. In one photograph, for instance, Levine captures the crisp reflection of the Empire State Building off the smooth hood of a black car. In another, Levine documents a flurry of hanging light bulbs reflected in a window, cheekily suggesting a UFO invasion above an ordinary-looking street scene. In a third image, Levine presents an almost literal kaleidoscopic view of reflections on the mirrored exterior of a building.
While Levine structures many of her photographs around the rigorous lines of modernist architecture, many of them include unexpected buckling, as if the lines were being shaped by some unseen magnetic force. In one image, linear reflections bend into something resembling genitalia; in another, the lines of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building resolve into an hourglass or infinity symbol. In one photograph captured off an exterior window of the Hirshhorn Museum, the viewer simultaneously sees reflections of Henry Moore’s “King and Queen,” a portion of the U.S. Capitol dome, and the winningest portrayal of a brutalist D.C. edifice in recent memory.
Ultimately, Levine’s two finest works may be her most abstract. One of these images depicts the organic, gently undulating surface rivulets of water in pleasing shades of olive and gray. The second captures a view of the Kennedy Center’s REACH; the portrayal brings together a satisfying mix of straight and curved geometric lines, appealing shades of Hopperian blue and gray, and a dreamy, watercolor-like texture that comes from gentle disturbances in reflected water.
Real and Surreal: Coordinated Shows by Judy Bonderman and Jo Levine; Beverly Logan’s Essence of Place; and Suliman Abdullah’s Global Empathy run through June 14 at Studio Gallery. Wednesday through Friday, 1 to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. studiogallerydc.com. Free.”
Review by Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper, June 2025. Thank you!