By Cinya Burton

“I’m walking down the street and, you know, I see a turquoise van with a yellow stripe parked next to a red truck and I’m like whoa, and I take out my notebook and jot it down,” said artist Jason Gubbiotti. 

On a lush cherry blossom-filled spring morning at Hemphill Fine Arts Gallery in downtown DC, Gubbiotti is explaining his latest acrylic painting entitled, “Folk Biology and The Return of Oxytocin.” 

“Oxytocin is a chemical released in the brain after an orgasm or breast feeding… when it is sprayed, people become more trusting and cooperative,” said Gubbiotti. 

Gubbiotti comfortably slouches in a plastic chair; his stylishly crumpled white dress shirt matches his youthful content. He breezes through discussion of high art with words like “awesome,” “cool,” and “amazing” and has just the slightest twinge of a French accent.   

“Jason’s titles are always wonderful and add another layer of mystery to the painting,” said Kristen Hileman, assistant curator at the Hirshhorn Museum. 

Gubbiotti is just one of many new artists participating in the Colorfield Remix project, a citywide collaboration between more than 30 museums, galleries, and organizations celebrating the Color Field visual arts movement and the Washington Color School.  

In the mid-1950s an abstract style emerged called the Color Field movement, characterized by large stripes, washes, and fields of solid color. The style exploded in the art world in the mid-1960s when six DC artists were grouped together under the title of the Washington Color School. Their paintings displayed bright, saturated colors, symmetrical shapes and flat surfaces. 

“DC has an incredibly strong visual arts scene and has ever since the Washington Color School,” said Kimberly Graham, director at Hemphill Fine Arts.  

Hemphill Fine Arts has three new exhibitions on display as part of the Colorfield Remix project. Including one of the most significant contributions to the Washington Color School, “The Cathedral Series” by Leon Berkowitz. 

“It doesn’t have religious implications,” said Jessica Lawrence, assistant curator at the Hemphill Gallery. “I think it is the verticality of the paintings,” she gestures with her arms above her head, her motion is parallel with the thick stripes that make up each painting. She says the extremely colorful large-scale series has not been exhibited since the 1960s. 

On the other end of the Color Field spectrum is Gubbiotti, the youngest artist featured in the exhibit. In his early thirties, his latest work “Wrong Way To Paradise,” focuses on surfaces, support, and space.  

“His work plays with traditional notions of presentation, placement, and behavior of artwork,” says Graham. “Each one reveals how paintings are built.” 

Gubbiotti’s work is characterized by bright, saturated colors, relationships of space, and clusters of symmetrical shapes, which he refers to as “improvised beehives.” His exhibit includes “The Fear of Dogs,” his début in sculpture as well as “Bees Do It Too,” an acrylic painting on wall. He describes the two pieces’ relationship as giving the exhibit a bounce. Curator Hileman agrees, saying that while the sculpture moves itself into the room, occupying space, the wall painting collapses that space. 

“I wanted it to feel like a shallow swimming pool, like you’re up to your ankles,” he said. To produce this effect he painting the display room’s floorboards black mirroring the gallery’s floor.  

When asked if he would ever consider creating an installation piece, Gubbiotti replied,

“I don’t like the idea of it only existing in that space and afterwards it can’t exist anymore. I need my art to have some relationship with the space but it doesn’t rely on that space.” 

Unlike Gubbiotti, artist Portia Munson does not have any quarrels with installation work, her latest piece “Pink Project: Contained,” is the final exhibition currently on display at Hemphill Fine Arts. The installation is a mass of pink plastic objects, most of them found in the trash or the Salvation Army by Munson. The piece includes lipstick, My Little Pony dolls, a hula-hoop, fabric softener, part of a dollhouse, combs, a deflated air chair, Barbie’s Dream Car, and a straw hat. Layer upon layer of these various shades of pink objects are contained against a plexiglass wall.  

“Portia comes out of 1970, 1980-ism. Politics, feminism, and consumerism are an important part of interpreting her work,” said Graham. 

Graham believes one cannot help but think of the social and gender issues infused in the installation through the mass of saturated pink plastic. 

“I have a niece and she is completely in her princess phase,” she says. “This reminds me of her.”  

Gubbiotti says the shapes give form to the color. He believes this idea aligns the three artists under the Color Field umbrella. For him, Color Field is about being visually generous. 

“That’s why I make art,” he says. “I don’t want to say I don’t trust words but if I could say everything in words then I’d write a book.”