Jeff Sonhouse at Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera - New York

In his first selo show, New York-based artist Jeff Sonhouse exhibited 12 works from 2002--six on paper, six on canvas--that were all concerned with portraiture, though of general types rather than specific individuals. Toying with racial stereotypes, Sonhouse depicts bust-length pictures of black men peering out from behind ski-type masks of diverse materials arranged in decorative patterns. Some of the modestly sized works are flatly painted in solid colors or in various designs (paisley, argyle, checkerboard, stripes), while others are composed of colored glitter and sequins. Many of the figures are complemented by Afro hairstyles made from elaborate arrangements of matches--some paper, some wooden--constituting the most formally inventive aspect of Sonhouse's work. In a few, these matches had actually been set on fire, apparently at the show's opening. In one untitled drawing, this produced wispy ashes that had leaped off the paper and onto the wall.

The smaller works are of single masked heads, but it's the larger grids of heads that are more successful. All wear different disguises. In Social Studies, the canvas is divided into 16 squares, each containing a portrait. Here, Sonhouse engages both space and color, in its painterly and racial dimensions. Each figure sports a stylized mask (one bears a Gucci logo pattern). The facial features that show through these masks are tweaked into various expressions, all rather ambiguous. Sonhouse further complicates matters by making two of the heads Caucasian and altogether cutting the features out of a third, leaving holes in the canvas.

Accentuated by their frontality, reminiscent of mug shots, many of these portraits rifled off of African-American stereotypes: the hustler in a zoot suit, the burglar in a ski mask, the athlete with a shaved head--but Sonhouse mixes, manipulates and juxtaposes his stereotpes in order to deconstruct them. Reflecting on the ways that black men are packaged in contemporary society, and perhaps their own need to don the masks of materialist culture, Sonhouse uses his artfully masked men to challenge our notions of race and identity, and to expose the ways they are constructed by society and personal prejudice.

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