Reviews: Pazo Fine Art, Benign Aggressors

Katherine Markoski, East City Art, July 28, 2025

At Pazo Fine Art, Benign Aggressors is the gallery’s fourth annual summer exhibition dedicated to artists who live and work in the Washington and Baltimore areas. This smartly curated show brings together contributions from Enise Carr, Alex Ebstein, Maggie King Johns, and Anne Clare Rogers, spanning painting, printmaking, mixed-media work, and sculpture. Although the gathered works are formally wide-ranging, they share a simultaneous commitment to the languages of abstraction and a world beyond the aesthetic. Indeed, throughout the exhibition, we see the selected artists variously infusing non-representational form with the materials, systems, and rhythms of our everyday lives, pointedly drawing out the complexities that regularly run through them.

 

On entering the gallery, we first encounter Alex Ebstein’s Stargazer (2024), one of the show’s most arresting works. Within this vertically oriented composition, we find a mini-compendium of modes of abstraction—the languages of the grid and the gestural appearing alongside the biomorphic. Yet Ebstein quickly sets her project apart, both materially and conceptually. Eschewing paint on canvas, her mixed-media work is primarily composed of differently colored and shaped segments of yoga mats that have been slotted together. As we recognize this, our focus begins to shift from the realm of the pictorial to that which we inhabit. We become attuned to the physicality of the cuts standing behind the work’s parts as well as to the tactility of the knobbed surface and the embodied labor supporting the whole. It is even tempting to see the work’s juxtaposition of forms as akin to a yoga flow; the dimensional teardrop shapes as sweat generated by maneuvering the body—not unlike like Stargazer’s component pieces—into proper positioning. The most pointed yoking of the aesthetic and the everyday occurs in the upper right corner. Grounded, as it were, in art history, Ebstein stitches shooting stars into the mass-produced mat to remind us that the work and the world are inextricably knitted together.

 

 

Where Ebstein’s work weds abstraction with bodily presence through a turn to the wellness industry (the yoga mats), Anne Clare Rogers’ sculpture Tube (I lost) (2019), her most complex in the show, directs attention to systems of care through the assembling of cast-off materials. Although non-representational, the sculpture’s form evokes medical equipment and, due to its scale, also conjures a body being treated. A cool, metal pole rises from a Herman Miller base, its lower portion sheathed in warm, if riven, driftwood and paint applied towards its top. Extending horizontally from that pole is a vaguely triangular, welded steel element, seductively weathered and gleaming in areas yet also guillotine-like and suggestive of menace. Attached to this metal arm is a found cardboard tube of aluminum foil, heavily marked by wear, but still visually compelling. The work’s force resides in these contrasts—warmth and coldness, reward and threat, fragility and resilience—and their ability to prompt reflections on the potential and pitfalls of larger medical infrastructures and our movements in relation to them.

 

Abstraction’s enduring ability to absorb the everyday is given equally powerful form in Enise Carr’s excellent Triptych (2024). This work consists of three vigorously painted panels overlaid with twine and other collaged objects. On either side of the central canvas, the twine coils into a whirlpool-like vortex, seemingly capable of pulling in its surroundings. At Triptych’s outer edges, the twine then becomes a loose grid. Net-like, it looks at once secure enough to contain the work’s energy—at points, even wrapping around the canvases’ sides—and porous enough to allow the outside in. Carr’s paint handling intensifies this in-and-out dynamic. Though black dominates, bright passages of color burst forth from beneath, rendering the whole field vibrant. Dimensional elements, such as cotton balls, blue tape, and pipe cleaners, further amplify this sense of outward extension as they visually and physically inch into the viewer’s space. It is as though Carr aims to catch hold of the rhythms of lived experience—its rises and falls, surges and retreats—so as to re-present them in a new form.

 

 

Maggie King Johns examines how such rhythms often serve to shape identities. In the brightly lit Bleached Earth (1)Tablet Tile Arrangement (Rectangle) (2025), Johns used hydrocal plaster and acrylic paint to create twelve pastel-toned tablets marked with gestural impressions, which she then arranged in a rectangle. A play of light and shadow animates their indented surfaces, hinting at the possibility of a spiritual component within the highly tactile work. The importance of this duality—the immaterial and material—is then further intimated by the incised line dividing each tablet into two segments, marked as distinct yet bound. Yet, Johns also appears intent on interrogating notions of spirituality and our lived relations to them. According to the gallery’s press release, the tablets relate to the Virgin Mary, and by organizing them as if a page of text, Johns seems to position the divine as emerging through the stories we tell. Her stereotypically feminine palette operates similarly, pointing to how gendered identities are gradually constructed rather than innately cohesive. In another work, Bleached Earth (1)Tablet Tile Arrangement (Flower Pictogram) (2025), the artist makes the latter point more directly, if with slightly less visual punch, as its arrangement of casts (and title) makes the bodily reference more overt. Still, in both works Johns makes a persuasive case for abstraction’s ability both to be imprinted by and to probe the world.

 

Ultimately, Benign Aggressors is perhaps most striking for its precision—of its installation, certainly, but especially of the individual objects on display. In keeping with the exhibition’s title, the artists’ deep familiarity with and respect for the previous century’s many threads of abstraction is apparent throughout, and their interventions within those traditions feel sharp and thoughtful. As these four artists seek new ways to metabolize our daily condition through abstraction, they also remind us that our histories remain a renewable resource, ever open to powerful revisions, reimaginings, and retrievals.

 

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