Gone are the days of summer festivals and beach bonfires. The school year has officially started, brining with it the beginning of the fall season and colder days. Nonetheless, Permanent Summer successfully reminds its visitors how much fun we’ve had since the end of springtime.
The gallery highlights a collection of surrealist paintings and silkscreen images, all with some tie to the summer. This theme wavers a bit in its cohesiveness: Some pieces are concert posters from the season, while others simply fit the right color scheme. The variety stems in part from the range of artists that contributed to the exhibit, now on display at Civilian Art Projects. Self-described as “pop psychedelia,” the gallery also contains a host of animated styles commonly associated with graffiti art.
Brain Chippendale, like many of the visual artists featured in Permanent Summer, is also a musician. His pieces show clear influence from his musical endeavors, and, without cliché or redundancy, his multiple works convey the voice and power that come with a youthful infatuation with music.
Influences from rock to retro are woven throughout the musicians’ contributions to the collection. Yet beyond the concert posters, there is no blatant recognition of this theme. Permanent Summer loses cohesion as soon as its pieces venture further. Still, so much is brought to the collection by posters that look like striking stills of music videos. The Arctic Monkeys’ new video for their track “Do I Want to Know?” provides an inverse interpretation of the collection’s posters, envisioning the rise of animated art’s influence on music—rather than music’s influence on visual art.
Street artist from Brooklyn Maya Hayouk also shines as one of the collection’s stronger contributors. Her screen prints are especially vibrant in color, effective at attracting the eye and focusing attention. She doesn’t overdo the catchy color pallet, however. Hayouk’s piece Apocapliss brings cooler colors to balance out hot pinks reminiscent of 70s and 80s fashion.
Multiple pieces of the gallery carry on that same effect. Bright hues and highlighter colors remind viewers of a time that has passed, and not just in the sense of an ending summer. Silkscreen images of pizza and rock artists alike collaborate visually throughout the gallery. With painted floors reflecting color onto prints only available in a limited quantity, the gallery lends all its visitors hipster cred just for walking through it.
Permanent Summer is on display at the Civilian Art Projects gallery in downtown D.C. and will remain open until Sept. 7. The gallery is open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.
