Not extreme enough to be surrealist and not nonsensical enough to be dada, Aaron Fowler’s black-and-white and color photos—tacked and pasted modestly on the gallery’s walls—depict odd juxtapositions of objects and bodies that are as likely to provoke a smile as a frisson. For the show’s title image, “Ocean,” Fowler proffers a conch shell with a cell phone protruding from its cavity that rests on a wavy deep blue woolen blanket covering a capacious bed. The abounding cross-references and visual puns and metaphors in that picture seduce us into attempting to affix a single meaning to it, yet we are inevitably reduced to failure. Fowler is also capable of being direct, as when he presents, in “Pun kin,” a bright grinning orange jack-o’-lantern with one of its teeth tied to a string, the other end of which is wrapped around a door knob in obvious ominous preparation for a primitive dental extraction. Fowler’s hallmark is the gentle edge that his studies project on life. (Michael Weinstein)
Through July 11 at Hungryman Gallery, 2135 N. Rockwell
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
