TO SEPT. 25

Over the last decade, photographer Bruce McKaig’s techniques have devolved relentlessly to the bare fundamentals. At first, McKaig—a Washingtonian for the last three years—used negatives to make faint backgrounds on photographic paper. He would then complete the works by laying natural objects or magazine cutouts directly onto the still-unfinished prints before exposing them once again to light. From these dreamy photographic collages, McKaig moved on to even simpler techniques—for instance, capturing the reflection of light off his torso on photographic paper. Finally, McKaig scrapped almost everything, deciding to play Jackson Pollock with chemicals on his light-sensitive papers. Work from each of these phases is now on display at District Fine Arts—an unofficial, but de facto, retrospective of McKaig’s last decade of work. (An untitled piece is pictured.) Ironically, after evolving toward images that exude the ab-ex simplicity of Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, or Robert Motherwell canvases, McKaig is now heading to the Pyrenees to use quintessentially Victorian mechanics—a three-dimensional stereoscopic camera—to record natural and prehistoric locales as part of an assignment for a local museum. It’s not as quite as random as it sounds: Earlier in his career, McKaig experimented with stereoscopic photography after being inspired by a cheap viewer that showed 3-D images of penguins and other animals at the Moscow Zoo. A meet-the-artist reception will be held at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 8. The exhibit is on view from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, to Saturday, Sept. 25, at District Fine Arts, 1726 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Free. (202) 328-9100. (Louis Jacobson)