Hannah Barrett, who left Boston for New York a few years ago, composes her paintings here by cutting up and pasting together photos of members of an old well-to-do Boston clan. In Lady Travesty, a mustached man's torso is combined with a dancer's dress and legs standing en pointe atop a table set for dinner. Barrett aims to interrogate traditional gender roles, but the abrupt shifts in gender, scale, orientation, and locale focuses attention on her awkward, cut-up Frankenstein construction rather than her meaning.
Kent Rogowski, a RISD teacher based in New York, offers photos of stuffed animals turned inside out. They're cute and forlorn and disconcerting (revealed seams read like wounds) one-liners.What's most powerful here is the sense of disillusionment and disappointment evoked in varying degrees by Regier, Cole, and TRIIIBE's art. Childhood is depicted as an oasis of delusion, our youthful optimism and wonder revealed as shams as we age. Adulthood is confining societal norms. It's disappointment and exhaustion and work. Here play isn't about escapist fun or wish fulfillment, it's about gaming out dreary realities.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Brown University, Brown University, Randy Regier, More 
, Brown University, Brown University, Randy Regier, Bell Gallery, Bell Gallery, Jane Maxwell, Caleb Cole, Triiibe, Cary Wolinsky, Less 
