to july 1

Flip open any introductory art-history textbook, and you’re likely to find every painting that appears in “ReMastered.” Sort of. For the group show at Studio One Eight, area artists were asked to submit “contemporary interpretations” of works by the old dead white men we all adore. This exhausted theme—on any given day, you can be sure that there’s an exhibition like “ReMastered” hanging somewhere in the world—leaves little new territory for the mostly young artists in the show, and too many of the works are merely effortless ripostes. Kelly Towels’ Vermeer Ain’t Got Shit on Me does more than most by slamming the notorious painting that was profaned by endless reproductions in advance of the film Girl With a Pearl Earring—exactly the sort of commercial motivation that you’d expect to set off a graffiti artist. D’metrius Rice contributes a persuasive remix of Schongauer’s Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons. The only artist to completely bypass the narrative of his source, Rice uses all-over drawing and malformed biomorphic imagery to echo the original’s frenzied composition. Taking the opposite tack, Sarah Walor’s Bound, the only photograph on display, finds a whiff of sex in Jan van Eyck’s staid Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife and runs with it. The wife in that painting is not, as she appears, barefoot and pregnant; she’s bunching her dress up according to the contemporary fashion while her shoes idle nearby—gesture enough to provoke Walor’s intimately cropped hotel-room shot. (Laurel Hausler’s Judiths and the Wolf is pictured.) The exhibition is on view by appointment to Saturday, July 1, at Studio One Eight, 2452 18th St. NW. Free. (703) 395-1932. (Kriston Capps)