Flux Is Us

Brandon Morse & Jackie Hoysted distill the world to white lights; Heidi Fowler & Emon Surakitkoson construct & disrupt. Also Jeffery Hampshire, Julia Reising, Jill McCarthy Stauffer, & Varvar Tokareva

Flux Is Us 

By Mark Jenkins 

May 20, 2025 

The Hemingway line echoed in the title of Brandon Morse's video installation, "Gradually, All at Once," originally referred to personal bankruptcy. Morse's two videos evoke larger forces, suggesting avalanches and lava flows. But the kinetic bits in the generative videos are simply beads of white light that meander, fuse, and disperse, sometimes accumulating into rivulets or seeming to rise like mists. The dots, both delicate and inexorable, are metaphorical yet strongly suggestive of the forces that carve rivers and erode mountains.

Installed in one of the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington's two black-box basement galleries, the D.C. artist's videos are split across, respectively, four or three screens. The larger piece's monitors rest on the floor, while those of the smaller one, "Continental Drift," are mounted high on the wall; both sets of screens are angled away from the wall, giving them a casual vibe. The videos's motion derives from actual satellite data, although the specifics of that observational info are unspecified.

The videos -- and the title of at least one of them -- allude to geological and meteorological processes. But they could be visualizing many sorts of systems, from small to massive. Human society itself could collapse gradually and then suddenly.

The glacial pace of the overall action is underscored by music that drones like computer-generated Gregorian chant. This soundtrack adds to the installation's meditative quality. Morse's videos can be read as harbingers of catastrophe or simply as acknowledgements of change. Deep within the digital abstraction of natural phenomena, constant motion might be the same thing as standing still. 

Where Morse represents system overloads, Jackie Hoysted uses similar technology to extol interconnection. Her "Rudimental" comprises four audio-reactive generative videos and two drawings; all of them depict networks of cells and blips. The Ireland-born and -educated Maryland artist's exhibition is one of three "Spring Solos" at the McLean Project for the Arts, alongside shows by Heidi Fowler and Emon Surakitkoson.

Rendered in blue-tinged black-and-white, or sometimes shimmering white-on-white, Hoysted's work can evoke the microscopic or the celestial, or both. Among her inspirations is mycelium, the fungal root structures that play a major role in decomposing dead plants. This has ecological significance, of course, as well as serving as a metaphor for human society. No woman -- or decaying leaf -- is an island. The use of tiny discrete actions to create a complex whole also echoes computer technology, which the artist studied before getting an art degree at the GWU/Corcoran.

Like Morse, Hoysted heightens the effect of her video abstractions with music that matches the deliberate tempo and motion of the images. The three "Symbiont" videos feature an ambient score by Synapsis & the Mind Orchestra. The slo-mo sounds beckon spectators deeper into the universe conjured by the dancing pulses. But then, in a way, they were always inside it.

Decomposition lurks just beneath the surface of Fowler's collage-paintings, a dozen of which constitute "Detrimorphose." Abstractions that sometimes hint at landscape, the Virginia artist's layered pictures appear bucolic from a distance, but chaotic at close hand. Metal clips, plastic-bag shreds, and text are incorporated into the works, whose inspiration is "brokenness and redemption," according to a gallery note.

As if to emphasize that these artworks are assemblages, all of them are segmented in various ways. One is overlaid by a regular grid with a gilded diamond at the center of each quilt-like section, and another is missing a square panel at its center. Fowler's pictures are built by an additive method, but subtraction can be just as important.

The interlocking curved forms of Emon Surakitkoson's "Crossing Culture" are familiar from the Thai-born local artist's previous shows. But where she once rendered such motifs on rectangular canvases, most of these are on shaped wooden panels, making the pieces as much sculptures as paintings. The ornamentation has become the object.

The artist's standard format is black-and-white, with the white surfaces often cracked. This slightly disrupts the clean geometric lines, which bend and loop in parallel. Just a few of these works add color. The suitably named "Strong Accent" is half red, while the show's title painting is aptly touched by red, white, and blue. That color scheme highlights Surakitkoson's concern with balancing competing Thai and American identities. But her streamlined compositions are as universal as a geometric proof. 

A sense of place, however tenuous, links the work of Jeffery Hampshire, Julia Reising, Jill McCarthy Stauffer, and Varvara Tokareva, University of Maryland MFA students exhibiting in two of the campus galleries. Other concerns shared by most, if not all, of the artists are human interaction with nature and the ambiguity of photographic images.

The latter is central to "This Is a Long Exposure," a showcase for Hampshire and Reising, both members of the class of 2026. Hampshire's photographs of everyday places and phenomena are presented in various forms, sometimes overlaid with filters or screens to confound perceptions and undermine the images's authority. One grid of pictures intersperses physical representations with projected ones, so that they all appear to flicker like hazy memories. Photos don't lie, but they don't tell everything.

The centerpiece of Reising's work is a brief video in which pictures of tiled interiors are inserted into nature scenes. Most of the smaller images include a person -- the artist, presumably -- who holds a pose in emulation of a still photo. Both backdrop and inset can be read quickly as motionless, but in fact the figures move slightly, challenging the sense of permanence. Reising further conflates organic and manmade by covering a branch and a stump with tiles, thus merging elements of the video into tangible objects. The human and the natural meld, but unnaturally.

A few stumps also feature in Stauffer's half of "Substitute Reality," a two-person show by 2025 MFA graduates at the university's Art Gallery. In this impressively elaborate installation, a grove of artificial trees is bordered with heaps of actual dried plant matter. There are no photographs in the piece, but there's a lot of light play. A string of lamps casts shifting illumination on the shadowy mini-forest, and mirrors mounted on the wall reflect glimmers. Most of the mirrors are in the outlined forms of birds, although the stumps too have a few mirrored surfaces. The silver shapes are engraved with text -- a little hard to read in the gloom -- about the artist's interactions with nature. Stauffer's creation compounds natural and personal history, written with words as well as objects.

The personal is pop-cultural in three pieces by Tokareva, who was born in post-Soviet Russia. All the works are derived from Soviet film or TV, notably "Song of the Year," an annual televised music festival that began in 1971. Two still-photo montages offer grids of similar or identical faces, presented in multiples that suggest Warhol silkscreens while employing AI to produce generic visages. The third piece is a looping video in which two mouths duel on opposing sides of a split screen, each silently enunciating what appears to be a single word. These closely cropped faces are also drawn from "Song of the Year," but they could be engaged in political debate. Tokareva's point, however, is that they weren't, and couldn't. The disembodied mouths are singing to conceal the fact that they weren't permitted to speak.