Review

Joel Sager
Onion Skins and Armor

By appointment during business hours.

Stairway Art Space
HNTB Architecture
715 Kirk Dr.
Kansas City, MO
816.472.4201

Hours: By appointment, Monday-Friday
Runs through: March 31

Artist's site: http://www.joel-sager.com
Gallery site: http://www.hntb.com

One of the hallmarks of those who deal skilfully in the suspenseful and macabre is a gift for making the commonplace — a blowing curtain, a barking dog, a worn strip of wallpaper — seem ominous.

Joel Sager's work, on display that month at HNTB Architecture's Stairway Art Space,  is full of that portentous ordinariness. (And not to belabor the Charlotte Gilman point, did you see all that wallpaper?)

The theme of Onion Skins and Armor, Sager's show at Stairway, is protection from the outside world. And we do tend to need a lot of protection: against the elements, against unwanted intrusions, perhaps even against each other.

But where there is protection, there's also separation. And as any viewer of suspense cinema knows, there are few things holding quite so much promise of Bad Stuff About to Happen.

A mother looks up in the park to see her child gone. A couple wanders purposefully away from a group of rambunctious teenagers, or surfaces from a dive to find the boat has departed without them. A telephone handset hangs from its cord ... as in On the Line, today's featured piece.

It's an innocent enough image, isn't it? Nothing really menacing about black plastic, wire and wallpaper. And isn't the telephone an instrument of protection, guarding our time and privacy and safety?

But why is it dangling like that? Who took the call and ran out in shock? Who tried to make a call and couldn't?

What's happening that we can't see?

Sager clearly understands the truth that the commonplace can be far more disquieting than the fantastic, because the commonplace is real and all around us. He also clearly understands power of the imagination to conjure up images far ghastlier than a viewer can be shown. And in Onion Skins and Armor, he has mined that truth, tapped that power and used them to deliciously unsettling effect.

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