Washington City Paper

City Lights: Stella Maris

By Michael O'Sullivan
January 19, 2007


At first glance, it looks as if Curator's Office is showing the work of an introductory graphic-design class—and the students aren't exactly gifted. Artist, critic, and independent curator J. W. Mahoney’s current show of ink jet prints, "Stella Maris," appears hobbled by technical difficulties. Each fuzzy print combines a few disparate images and texts on a neutral ground and is presented unframed, attached to the wall with a few small magnets. Many of the images have pixilated edges; Quality in Motion has long horizontal streaks, suggesting a print cartridge giving up the ghost, midprint. Strange color shifts abound: one formerly black-and-white photo bleeds sickly shades of pale green and mauve. Of course, none of this is accidental: Mahoney has deliberately cultivated this look, often digitizing and re-digitizing images in order to lower their resolution, making pristine, hands-free objects look more handmade. The words and pictures he's brought together in these posters are wide-ranging—snippets of everything from Tibetan symbology to Victorian photography to the occasional jpeg of Condoleezza Rice. The names of Southern streets and businesses—Beam Boulevard, Harvest Grill—adorn these pictures in blocky serif typefaces. Impossible as it might seem, none of these choices are random; every fragment has obscure personal associations for the artist—all of them leading to his deceased mother. Mahoney makes the viewer work for those associations, imposing additional distance with his distortions. Luckily, Mahoney’s a clever puzzle master, and his strategies of inversion and obfuscation nicely mirror the strange, imperfect workings of human memory. "Stella Maris" is on view from noon to 6 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday, to Saturday, Feb. 17, at Curator’s Office, 1515 14th St. NW. Free. (202) 387-1008. (Jeffry Cudlin)