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Toying with qualms, paranoia
'Uneasy Places,' Dean Jensen Gallery
By JAMES AUERJournal Sentinel art critic
Posted: Nov. 16, 2004
Halloween is long past, but "Uneasy Places," a show calculated to undermine your sense of complacency and invigorate every qualm you've ever had, lingers like a grainy rerelease of an old Universal horror classic through Nov. 27 at the Dean Jensen Gallery.
FYI: Event details
Not that this group encounter with fear, loneliness and uncertainty has the visual wallop of a devil bat flying in through a half-open window, or Frankenstein's monster fleeing a torch-bearing crowd. But it comes close.
Barry Carlsen, for instance, delights in his paintings in taking us prowling through fog-shrouded woodlands and eerily lighted nocturnal parklands. Vagrant pools of light isolated in the darkness only serve to underscore our vulnerability in the midst of a world fraught with sudden violence and untrammeled hate.