Dave Curtis’s ‘Tao Emoji’ Wins Juror’s Choice Award in ‘Faces & Figures’ Show

At the meet-the-artists gallery reception for the opening of Falls Church Arts’s “Faces & Figures” show Saturday evening April 19 at 700-B, W. Broad St., exhibition Juror Teresa Oaxaca named Washington, D.C. native Dave Curtis’s “Tao Emoji” the Juror’s Choice awardee for the new all-media arts exhibition “focusing on faces and figures,” running through June 1.

Curtis’s award-winner – an acrylic, 24” x 24,” painting conveys a Taoist Yin and Yang of “Life/Death/Rebirth.” Its dual identity emoji-face starkly contrasts, in the same figure, a sunshiney visage emitting rays of warmth and fire against a cold blue moonish skull with one eye peering out at the viewer. The painting's viewer is tempted to contemplate the centrality of death in the cycles of life’s renewal and regeneration inherent in all living beings. "In the lower right and upper left corners, could those be teeming spermatozoa on their life-giving journey?," a gallery-goer might wonder.

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