North Loop West is honored to present Eyes, Mouth, Wings: a two-person exhibition featuring artists Hank Ehrenfried and Marty Williams. Both artists explore a philosophy of history through the lens of contemporary self-construction and personal identity. The works on view engage collage as a method of translation and transformation: Ehrenfried paints arrangements of papers pulled from his personal archive, and Williams layers photographic self-portraits on transparent film with objects collected from his personal and professional life. Framed through queer identity and the shifting presence and obfuscation of the figure, the artists employ collage’s equalizing potential to consider how we witness personal and collective histories—not as linear narratives, but as events and moments cut, folded, and stacked atop one another.

Ehrenfried paints collections of papers he’s accrued since childhood. He pins his methodically catalogued personal collection of photographs, old art auction catalogs, pages from gay erotica magazines, manga, and childhood artworks to the walls of his studio, and paints the collaged compositions from close observation. The artist tears, folds, and overlaps specific imagery to reconstruct the figures and information held within the source material and map new spatial and conceptual relationships. Ehrenfried’s manipulation and translation of these papers into paint gestures towards trompe l’œil, down to his faithful representation of the walls of his studio. With playful illusion, he carefully renders the many screw and nail holes, residual marks from previous paintings, and torn pieces of painter’s tape the wall has accumulated over time.

Los Angeles-based Marty Williams—a skilled woodworker and surfer—creates poetic collages that comprise photographs on transparent film, mulberry paper, rare wood, and found oceanic materials like driftwood and abalone shells. Using a self-timer, the artist photographs his own body—seen from behind in small swim trunks or crouched on a surfboard—to reproduce himself as an anonymous, silhouetted figure. These images are transferred onto transparent film and layered into hazy, spectral compositions that both transpose and obscure the figure. The inclusion of wood—milled from scraps at the frame shop where Williams used to work—is as significant as the photographic imagery. By playing with the material’s unique woodgrain patterns and natural chatoyance (the shimmery effect that light has when reflected on specific grains), Williams builds visual parallels between found materials, the surface of water, and the ethereal transparency of the film as he considers his place within the typically hyper-masculine worlds of woodworking and surfing.