Some might say that it is the most unusual time of the year. At Art*Bar, “Fear 12” presents a selection of artists visualizing the uncanny and creepy, keeping in tune with the season.
This year’s exhibition showcases tightly arranged sets where works speak to each other in thematic groups. Ava Carmen dips into a romantic version of the femme fatale, with images of innocent, youthful women pictured with opened ribcages, roses and hearts. These are the ventricular kind, not the Valentine version. Woodcut prints by Steve Hopkins use the hard nature of the medium to present stark visages of tension, the exaggeration of the face and eyes offering a modern vision of contortions explored by German Expressionists in the early 20th century. Ryan Laessig gets into a bit of punk aesthetic via a stenciled skateboard depicting Frankenstein and his bride. The white figures on the black deck are iconic and, with his broad handling of negative space, take on a more alien appearance, suspended against speckles of paint like stars.
Many works in the exhibition are by Stephen Somers whose digital work, used by companies such as Fantasy Flight Games, follows suit to the conventions of video game aesthetics with bulbous alien forms full of squishy limbs and the occasional buxom female. However, Somers also has a sense of irony and humor in pieces like We Need to Talk. A multi-limbed creature with tentacles and an aardvark snout places a conciliatory hand on the back of a young woman, seated in a pinkish cave made of something like intestines. Even more satirical and deviant from the genre is Let Them Point and Judge, a scene where a nude woman in sunglasses, sunbathing in a park, quizzically confronts two fleshy, jeering aliens.
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The annual “Fear” show at Art*Bar has become a tradition. Interestingly, the tradition that seems to hold most true in these works is that what disturbs us most is the distortion and destruction of the body. Are these our greatest latent fears?
Through Nov. 10 at Art*Bar, 722 E. Burleigh St.
