Nancy Nesvet’s photographs and large-scale oil paintings, on view alongside sculptures by Larry Ringgold in “enDANGERd” through November 16 at Washington, D.C.’s Zenith Gallery, take entirely different turns of portraying the sea. In the paintings, the sea is vast, changing and tumultuous: in the photographs, murky depths pull me to look closely at the details. Those details are both threatening and beautiful, making the photographs look like a coming environmental apocalypse. There is a masterful handle on scale in her paintings. We know polar bears to be substantial, but in Nesvet’s eight paintings, they are microscopic, appearing in the far distance, unreachable and not treacherous at all. The bears are stranded on icebergs broken off from the mother glacier, with strong seas pushing them apart. “If but all the seas rise up,” 48” x 58”, the unending seascape shows two polar bears, … [Read more...] about NANCY NESVET AND LARRY RINGGOLD: ENDANGERD AT ZENITH GALLERY