P·P·O·W is pleased to announce “Rainbow Play Systems” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Brett Reichman. Painting still lifes from direct observation, Reichman’s works are an inquiry into the symbolic nature of objects. The colorful sleeves of a jester’s coat, swollen with stuffing, finished with tassels and gold bells, twist and billow in infinite knots. Voluminous layers of multicolored fabrics push against the candy stripes. But the toys of Reichman’s paintings and drawings are not benign playthings. Contorted and stretched, they hint at an unspecified danger. Historically, in painting, the carefully rendered drape both conceals and reveals the body. Here, in an evocation of high camp, the body is completely obfuscated by the accumulation of fabrics. These meticulous paintings of rainbow colored stuffs address identity politics as they are enacted in San Francisco’s famous Castro district, where queer culture is simultaneously social and spatial, its boundaries mapped out through rainbow flags circumscribing neighborhood streets, businesses, and residences. The detailed twisting of color and form in these paintings dislocate an ordered rainbow spectrum, calling into question both external and internal constraints of identity. The paintings dramatize dualities represented by the rainbow flag as an identity symbol: protective of community, sometimes frivolous, a bit tacky, often dangerous, while also mapping a personal geography through the rainbow spectrum as a symbol of hope and happiness. A recent series of self-portraits represent transgressive performances with innocent objects. A "rainbow stacker” learning toy, is given both primal and phallic significations through sexualized interactions. These images are rendered through a delicate crosshatch technique. The repetitive process of building-up an image stroke by stroke hints at the subtexts of fetishism and the nature of eroticism. In one series of images, the rainbow stacker toy is literally consumed by the artist, block by block. The rainbow as a symbol of gay identity is both willingly consumed and force-fed, simultaneously embracing identity while critiquing the imposed politics of queer culture. “Rainbow Play Systems” is Brett Reichman’s second exhibition at P·P·O·W. His work is the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among other museums. He is on the faculty of the art department of the San Francisco Art Institute.