TO OCT. 1

If the motto of modern-day academia is “Publish or Perish,” there’s little chance that Corcoran School of Art professors are going to be perishing any time soon: The Corcoran’s faculty show completely fills the spacious Hemicycle Gallery and then spills past the front door. Works (Lynden Cline’s Several months before you were born, I married a man who wasn’t your father is pictured) run the gamut from painting, sculpture, and photography to video art, furniture design, and found-object installations. Stylistically, the show’s paintings are bookended by Lee Haner’s understated geometrical acrylic in green and gray, Ashes Along the Nooksak, and Anne Chandra’s fiery Ode to Orange, a seeming anti-homage to Van Gogh’s infinitely cooler Starry Night. For visual ambiguity, it’s hard to top the side-by-side pairing of Bruce McKaig’s Untitled and Leslie Exton’s Calla Lilies: McKaig’s abstract, sepia-toned photograph of diaphanous forms looks like a painting, while Exton’s floral oil painting looks sharp enough to be a photograph. Contemporary quilt designer Patricia Autenrieth cheekily offers a modern-day picnic blanket that features printed images of Big Macs, six-pack rings, and the text from a lawn-pesticide warning sign. Standout sculptures include Bill Suworoff’s art-nouveau furniture piece made from blond poplar, and Christina DePaul’s paired geometrical forms made from aluminum and copper. The show’s most oddly affecting work is Paris Bustillo’s stop-motion digital video, Cuchara y Cuchillo. Punctuated by vivid sound effects, the video stars two sculpted and disembodied heads of clay trying to simultaneously eat from a proffered spoon (cuchara) and avoid an ominously spinning knife (cuchillo)—a spookily comic meditation on death, we think. The exhibition is on view from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays to Mondays and Wednesdays; and from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays to Tuesday, Oct. 1, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. $5. (202) 639-1700. (Louis Jacobson)