Not Featured at the Corcoran Biennial

Tuesday night at the Corcoran Biennial turned out to be more party than preview (at least for me), so I'll be going back on Saturday to take notes and reacquire the sharp impressions that I bartered for martinis at the Perry's afterparty. (Where, for reasons not entirely clear to me, I was told upon entering by my friend Allison that I should give the name "Mark." Yes, Mark would love some sushi. No, Mark probably should not have another drink. —Oh, but you know Mark.)

As a way of talking around my forthcoming review—and the show is better than I expected, with a strong stable of District aritsts and only a few gaffes throughout—let me say that I could have assembled a compelling District edition of GawkerForum had I trotted out my camera. There were photographers taking pictures throughout (which I'd love to see, and who-knows-maybe-post, if any parties in the know are reading).

I was happy to meet Vesna Pavlovic for the second time. She's not in the show, but recently I had a chance to see some of her photographs (she's represented in DC by Fusebox) from a series she did several years ago in the former Yugoslavia, and the images are some of the strongest I've seen in an arts-intensive few weeks. A document of hotels designed in the strength of Yugoslav socialist rule, the series finds the heavy presence of decay and relic—she doesn't alter the locations and susses several time-frozen artifacts that seem as if they have been hidden in the open. That in itself is an interesting but rudimentary aspect to this style of post-political photography; more distinctive in Pavlovic's work is the dignity that she offers to the viewer. I didn't find any of her works to be condescending (something I'm sensitive to in works by many of her American contemporaries, who troll the South in search of the anachronism of a self-serious cowboy or the romance of an abandoned gas station).

Vesna Pavlovic, Kasina Hotel, Majdanpek, 2001. C-print. [Can't get the diacriticals to work—sorry!]

Now that I've given her work something of a gloss, I should mention again that she's not in the show—I'll be keeping tabs on where she shows next. Also not showing at the Corcoran was Brandon Morse, whom I met for the first time and who has a new home at Conner Contemporary. Nor could Valerie Soles or her main squeeze be found exhibiting, though it was her birthday, damnit. Jason Gubbiotti was to be seen afterward and promised to send me new images, so his name's on this list too. Everything you need to know that doesn't concern the Biennial.