Artomatic

After gardening with Danya I headed to Crystal City in Arlington and met up with Amy at Artomatic, a giant populist artistic event.   

Essentially, the organization has an entire vacant office building that it turns over to as many artists and other creative types as sign up.  Entry is free -- you get a wrist band that entitles you to a free drink on the tenth floor, so most people start there and wend their way down through the many floors of exhibits below.  The artists have total free rein over their allocated spaces.  There was enormous variety, both in theme and in quality of execution.  Not a high-brow artistic experience by any means, but tons of fun and a great way for lesser-known artists to gain exposure.  Plus, there were no cranky guards telling you not to take pictures of the art.

Shredded newspaper was a very popular medium.  This is one of the better ones:

As far as I could tell, only one exhibit involved decapitated Barbies with giant doll-heads and photographs of small children's faces.  Super creepy.

And then there were the Peeps -- the opposite of creepy.  These are some of the better entries from this year's Peeps Show diorama contest run by the Washington Post:

OccuPEEP DC

The royal wedding

Coliseum

On the far end of the Peeps room was my favorite exhibit:  Bunny Noir Bunny Blue was a series of charming and slightly disturbing images of bunnies in surrealist settings.  For example, bunnies in underground tunnels, where some of the bunnies have owl wings and feet.  Bunnies doing yoga with cats.  And then sleeping bunnies being carried away from their beds by night, over the sea, by giant parakeets.  Loved it!