In which our art critics highlight their favorite works on view.

There are the familiar elements of a Cliff Evans video collage: the camera zooms forever inward, objects move across the screen, borrowed imagery combines with constructed elements. His looping three-minute video, “Drones in the Garden,” on view at Curator’s Office to Dec. 20, demonstrates a relationship between military, trade, and labor as it plays out amid a picturesque landscape.

The camera moves through a borrowed pastoral setting that could have come from the Hudson River School. But similar to Stephen Hannock‘s modernized revisitation of Thomas Cole‘s 19th-century painting “The Oxbow,” Evans has imposed several human elements within the landscape.

Cows linger in the pasture: some from the source works, some invented in 3-D software. Drones flutter about like flies and birds. Their final destination is a cluttered mass of white buildings that resemble stadiums and airports. The scene seems to serve no definable outcome—-only a constant progression.

The exhibit is on view to Dec. 20 at Curator’s Office, 1515 14th St. NW.