Darrel Morris

First Methodist Church, 2007.

In our youth-obsessed culture, it’s rare to find images of men going to seed. But in Chicago-based Darrel Morris’s show, “Decline and Other New Works,” the collaged drawings and embroideries portray exactly that. By generously layering thread onto fabric, like a chef would a cake’s icing, Morris blends visceral emotions with tactile, domestic materials.

A portrait titled Coach presides over the show; the man’s red face is so saggy that his black under-eye creases feel like muddied river tributaries. He’s the kind of guy whose knees have given out, but whose voice still barks commands across the court or field.

In age is again the central theme; a slightly overweight, older man eyes a lean, muscular, lad wearing red swimming trunks. In Morris’s color study collage of the same name, he inserts cartoon bubbles: The younger man thinks, “That will never happen to me,” while the older man says, “I bet he thinks Men’s Health is literature.” In the fiber version, this subtext is implied—as is a hint of homoeroticism. The show’s only young boy appears in Homemade Hair Cut. He cries out in agony—his little mouth threaded into a perfect circle shape—as a woman slices into his orange locks. In each piece, Morris’s narratives weave together powerful, emotionally resonant portraits of deflated masculinity. Some feel like painful memories, while others reinforce cultural fears of growing old.

—Alicia Eler