Featured Review: Marks of Absence: Caleb Cole, Lily Cox-Richard and Lori Larusso

Featured Review: Marks of Absence Curated by Marie Heilich, this three-person, two-venue exhibition presents another group of recent Santo Foundation grant recipients. At Good Citizen, Caleb Cole's photographic series Other People's Clothes depicts the artist in outfits and environments borrowed from friends, acquaintances and strangers. Cole appears in ill-fitting suits, in an empty parking garage, cross-legged and wearing duct-taped high heels in a cramped automobile, staring blankly from behind the desk of a veterinarian's office. His "drag" performance is of the most nuanced variety — no makeup or wigs; he embodies his adopted personas through the slightest of gestures, a mutably gendered Buster Keaton armed with sidelong glances, parted lips, subtly betraying props. At Fort Gondo Lily Cox-Richard's plaster sculptures resembling small, draped obelisks stagger the gallery amid Lori Larusso's shaped acrylic paintings of stark suburban interiors. In both exhibits the viewer apprehends the notion of absence as a motif in the form of unrequited empathy: Larusso's lobster boiling, menacingly unattended, in an empty kitchen, her sculptures reticent under their shrouds. The same, in a way, goes for the owners of Cole's costumes and reconstituted personas, casually leading their lives out of the picture — if they even exist. Through June 6. Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, 3151 Cherokee Street; 314-772-3628 or www.fortgondo.com; hours by appointment. Good Citizen Gallery, 2247 Gravois Avenue; 314-348-4587 or www.goodcitizenstl.com; hours: noon-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat. and by appointment.

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