Don Stahlke: Teeth and Fruit
The eccentric results–on view at Aron Packer are 43 etchings on teeth, 21 tattooed fruits, and 16 works on paper–are rather wonderful. Though Stahlke etched lines in and then applied acrylic paint to the teeth, he tried to respect their shapes and to include the lines in them that were the results of dentistry or gnawing. “Not hiding the fact that they’re teeth,” he etched on them tiny images of simple, single subjects: leaves, bugs, animals, a few humans. Honoring the origins of the teeth, he chose as subjects “things that cats or dogs get into or desire.”
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Though fruit offers more surface area than a tooth, Stahlke’s subjects remain endearingly simple in a series of nine reasonably fresh pomegranates: a chicken, a boy, a deer, a hand. In Hand Chair, a chain of four hands are clasped at the wrist in a most basic kind of touching. Together the nine pomegranates have the feel of a child’s picture book, a beginning vocabulary of images.
