Sarah Player Morrison
Darrin Martin
Elizabeth Bernstein
Closing January 29 - Corporeal at Martina }{ Johnston. The body has so long been a subject in art that it's rare to see truly fresh takes on the subject, but Indira Martina Morre and Farley Gwazda have very thoughtfully assembled a group of artists in their home gallery who grapple with our too solid flesh in all its complexity. Sarah Player Morrison's large-scale nude paintings carry the weight of those by Lucian Freud, but they come from a distinctly female perspective that is still no less unflinching in its gaze. Darrin Martin dresses up his bone-anchored hearing aid in handmade prosthetics and then stitches together sequences of self-portraits, and just as arresting is his video Navel Mining with its themes of alien abduction and biological invasion set to an otherworldly soundtrack of noises generated by the artist himself. Keith Lea and Alan Resnick present a sort of infomercial offering imperfectly rendered 3D avatars of sleeping friends, while in the gallery's beautiful new screening room Curtis Tamm takes you on a magical and vastly uncomfortable journey into inner space, edited together from found medical instruction videos. Finally I defy you not to be stopped in your tracks by Elizabeth Bernstein's honest, erotic, devastating photographs. That image above of the topography of her mom's knees crushed my heart.
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