NinaJohnson

Goings on about town

ART
 

GALLERIES-DOWNTOWN

CLIFFORD OWENS
Owen’s performance at his opening-the kind of free wheeling participatroy happening for which he’s best
known-ended with the artist surrendering his naked body to the audience. The show, by comparison,
is anticlimactic.The curious hodgepodge of photographs includes scenes from a collaborative, mud-slinging
performance with William Pope.L and colorful but solemn portraits of African-Ecuadorian children. The show’s
sweet spot is an image of Owens’s hed nestled under the pregnant belly of his Ecuadorian partner. A grid of
framed white-on-black texts attempts a playful mix of sexual innuedo and art-critical and racial commentary but
instead strikes a note of pose-conceptual prosaism.

Through Dec. 14. (On Stellar Rays, 133 Orchard St. 212-598-3013)