Galleries: …three solo shows…and a focus on young artists.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

By Edith Newhall

At least three galleries in Old City are currently home to solo shows of young artists whose works they have not previously exhibited in one-person exhibitions.

The front room at LGTripp Gallery, which is showing two newcomers, is dominated by Matthew Stemler’s monumental, handsome painted wood construction Flotsam, which suggests a pier and bulwarks and indestructability more than the destruction and chaos its title would seem to imply. Stemler’s small abstract drawings are more evocative of the overwhelming power of nature.

In the rear gallery, “John Doe Puzzles,” Raphael Fenton-Spaid’s series of candy-colored, multipanel portraits based on photographs of victims of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suggests the prettifying of war for public consumption. By mounting his panels with spaces between them, Spaid has abstracted his images almost beyond recognition, though a nose or a mouth can suddenly, and disturbingly, come into focus.