Press & Publicity
WETA Arts April 2023: Get to know aerialist, weaver, and installation artist Kirsty Little at her Mt. Rainier, MD studio
In the galleries: Pop-up installations with purpose and substance
Review by Mark Jenkins March 24, 2023
Store windows along Wisconsin Avenue showcase art with a message
Perspective by John Kelly, March 21, 2023WETA Arts and host Felicia Curry return after a summer hiatus! Meet Reginald L. Douglas, learn about the challenges facing studio artists in the Gateway Arts District.
WETA Arts September 2022Washington artists help Ukraine: Americans continue to help Ukrainians affected by the war. The heroines of our story decided to support the Ukrainian people with the help of art.
Russian Service of Voice of Americagolosameriki.com July 6, 2022
In the galleries: Reimagining thresholds as frontiers
Review by Mark Jenkins, January 27, 2023Simpler, at least in ingredients, are Kirsty Little’s “Surging,” a parted sea of curved wires tipped with wax in aquatic colors, and Sarah Stefana Smith’s “Threshold of Dissent No. 1,” a woven hanging funnel that’s tightly knitted at the top but unraveled at the bottom. According to their makers’ statements, the first piece echoes “the trials and repetitions of daily life,” while the second “proposes a portal of dissent from dominant belief systems.”
In the galleries: Artists deliver unique perspectives on found objects: Natural and man-made materials illustrate an invigorated, future-facing mindset
Review by Mark Jenkins, June 3, 2022Among the man-made materials are the black wires that Kirsty Little twists into dynamic forms and tips with colored wax, and the extruded plastic filament that Liz Lescault weaves into netlike hangings.
A self-portrait by Camilla Angel, a recent Howard University graduate awarded a three-month residency at Otis Street, is mostly painted but includes a cellphone represented by shards of compact discs. The silvery surfaces literally reflect the picture’s viewer, and symbolically reflect what the artist called her “self-construction” in a recent chat with a gallery visitor.
Among the things the “Fresh” contributors discovered in found objects is themselves.
In the galleries: Stable’s spaces make room for lots of art and much conversation
Review by Mark Jenkins, February 28, 2020One of many contemporary female artists who’s reconceiving “women’s work,” Kirsty Little does embroidery, once the task of ladies, with steel rebar wire, customarily used by construction workers. The half-delicate, half-industrial wall pieces in “Peculiar Feminine,” the British-bred local artist’s show at Northern Virginia Community College, combine regular and ruptured forms.
As suggested by titles such as “Frayed,” orderly grids come apart at the edges or the center. “Constrained” partly resembles a punishing corset, and “Torn’s” metal strands end in blood-red wax tips. The insinuation of violence is intentional. According to the gallery’s note, the pieces respond to “women’s exploitation at the hands of men.”
A former circus aerialist who now works in multiple media, Little is also showing ceramics and assemblages that include animal bones. The “V” series consists of vulva-like porcelain sacks, adorned with wire, wax and ribbons. The gentlest piece is a peace symbol made of porcelain flowers in which two blue butterflies shelter. They must rest uneasily amid Little’s compositions in knitted metal.
EAST CITY ARTNOTES — Kirsty Little: ‘REFUSE? REFUSE 35B+’
By Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D. on July 17, 2019While investigating plastic pollution in the oceans, artist Kirsty Little was amazed at her results. The numbers were staggering. Americans, alone, use approximately 35 billion plastic bottles and containers each year. Since its invention, which completely transformed consumer culture, we have only increased our plastic footprint, particularly since major plastic production began in the 1940s and 1950s.
The change began when three giant polymer-based products appeared: Saran Wrap (polyvinylidene polyethylene), Tupperware (low-density polyethylene) and Lycra (polyurethane). (Yes, it’s in your clothes). Plastic is everywhere. And it never biodegrades. It just eventually degrades into millions of nano plastic bits that are virtually invisible to the human eye but are eaten by plankton and other microorganisms in the ocean, and, through the food chain, end up on our plates. (Yes, it’s in your food.)
We need to do something about this now, and Little is trying to draw our attention to this inalterable fact by creating a work that calls the viewer to recognize the problem.
Dance Review: ‘Air(realist)’ by Air Dance Bernasconi with Kirsty Little at Theatre Project
Posted By: Genean Hines Grobe on: June 27, 2017Laughter. Lamenting. Affectionate professions of love and honest confessions of struggle. Against this audio backdrop, you take in a living, breathing sculpture, shaping, shifting in real time before your eyes. Just what is this peculiar, yet profound experience of art you’ve become a part of?
‘Air(realist),’ by Air Dance Bernasconi with Kirsty Little provided a feast for the eyes through a combination of performance art and aerial dance, a fluid, suspended style of dance that appears to reject gravity and succumb to it all at the same time (Think modern dance in three-dimensions.). Using a variety of apparatus such as silks and trapeze, this company of aerial dancers wielded their bodies in this show to portray themes of humanity’s pleasure, pain, potency, and potential.
Little’s performance set the tone for the evening’s journey, as she had a uniquely candid way of connecting to the audience through physical language. Carey Nagoda’s enchanting aerial performance of “Sweet the Sound” featured guitarist Dallas Jacobs, and in lyrical synchronicity, the two depicted the sweet pleasures of relationship.
With impeccable coordination and balance, Kirsty Little called out our environmental responsibility through an in-your-face commentary, “Toxic Poison Pills,” accompanied by vivid video imagery and use of exaggerated plastic props. My personal favorite, “Breathe,” was particularly moving.
With profound transparency, Kirsty Little presented the struggle of being stuck or feeling bound that many of us experience throughout life’s challenges through an artful binding and unraveling of her body with silks. By the end of the piece, I exhaled.
In the galleries: Bodies that are more than flesh and bone
By Mark Jenkins, July 22, 2016Once a crucial part of a visual artist’s repertoire, the figure study is far less important in the photographic era. All 40 artists in Hillyer Art Space’s “Flesh & Bone II” may have mastered life drawing, but few of them demonstrate the need to prove it. Representing the human body is essential to pieces such as Ghislaine Fremaux’s outsize drawing of a male nude, glistening not with sweat but with resin. It’s tangential, though, to many more of the works.
Kirsty Little’s wood-and-wire sculpture suggests just a pair of eyelashes. Kevin Quiles Bonilla’s wispy photo-derived faces are secondary to the 100 small circles of recycled paper that contain them. Ambience trumps corporeality in photos such as Gabriela Augero’s diptych of a person at a window and Armaghan Mehrabian’s study of a shrouded woman in a darkened space. Ashley Smith’s female seminude is mostly a photograph, but with fabric in place of pubic hair. In Yikui Gu’s collage-drawing of American archetypes, the human presence is a grimacing Dick Cheney.
For all press enquiries, please contact Kirsty Little here.