Art Capsule Reviews

Simulacrum: Portraiture in the New Millennium The first thing technically on display right now at the Society for Contemporary Photography is the gallery itself; its new location looks better than ever. The actual exhibit, however, explores how portraiture has adapted to a time when the goal of capturing an objective reality has given way to a desire to change reality (or create a false or enhanced reality). Most exciting are Zoe Sheehan Sladana's photographic-needlepoint portraits. The dotted effect created by needlepoint looks like a pixilated, over-enlarged digital photograph. Get up close to these needlepoint images, and you will see how very few marks it actually takes to create a photorealistic likeness of a human face, however blurry. Other highlights include Peter Sarkisian's projection of a bathing woman into a bowl on a pedestal. The bowl appears to contain milk, and the naked woman appears to be wading in that milk, but on closer inspection, the entire image is projected onto a flat, two-dimensional screen. Another artist shows what the human face would look like if it were perfectly symmetrical, as is supposedly ideal. By mirroring one side of the face, the artist shows that a perfect face is actually a very scary face. Through Dec. 17 at the Society for Contemporary Photography, 520 Avenida Cesar E. Chavez, 816-471-2115. (G.K.)

The Snug Sensation Martin Morehouse's sculptures — nine white, upholstered forms of various shapes and sizes, simultaneously suspended from the ceiling and stuck to the floor — look like punching bags. But aggression is the last thing they're intended to incite; in fact, Morehouse wants you to hug them. Using a tactile transducer (a variation on a speaker that vibrates solids instead of air), he makes his figures pulse like muscle contractions, heartbeats, refrigerators and idle motors. The objective is to energize the senses of sight, sound and touch in a nonthreatening way. The gallery was deserted when we stopped in on a Saturday afternoon, and we felt damned silly embracing these sculptures while alone. But we found evidence of a more populated opening: the comment sheet. And we were fascinated by how the remarks differed by what appeared to be the writers' genders. Whereas large, loopy letters — often accented with exclamation points — declared the show "very intimate" and confided "I enjoyed hugging your art," a minimalist, masculine scrawl announced: "I kinda think this is bullshit." Through Nov. 26 in the Front Room Gallery of the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, 2012 Baltimore, 816-474-1919. (A.F.)