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Once you’ve been to more than a few art openings in D.C., you start to recognize a regular cast of characters. There’s the tatted-up white girl with a sunny smile, the Asian guy in hipster glasses with a camera around his neck, the attractive young power couple, the well-dressed Washington City Paper fine arts critic.
And then there’s Georgie Payne and Julia Young (above). The two 24-year-olds—both staffers at Transformer—have teamed up as YOUNGPAYNE in a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the mainstays of the local art scene: a collection of coloring-book portraits. “Any arts community needs to keep the playfulness and fun involved, and not let ourselves get too involved in the elitism of what it could become,” says Young. As such, jabs at the stuffy jargon of artists’ statements abound—in a press release that doubles as a piece in the show, Payne and Young frame a vacation in elegant terms: “YOUNGPAYNE expanded their practice during a brief residency in Costa Rica exploring the limitations of the sun in the performance What it is to Burn—later expanded upon during a residency on Bald Head Island, NC.”
Close friends who met in middle school, Payne and Young are showing “Color Me Collaborative” at Pleasant Plains Workshop through June 14. But it’s not an exhibit that’s confined to the walls—there’s a coloring table and plenty of crayons for doodling on the art. Will you know whose face you’re drawing devil horns on? Test your name recognition skills—-answers at the bottom, no cheating allowed.
