Objects and Aesthetics Tell “Tales From the Freezer”

The 10 moments that comprise Carter Flachbarth’s solo painting exhibition, “Tales From the Freezer,” are hauntingly composed dioramas of emotion and identity. Each centers a different human subject, yet the story of the scene is told through the objects that surround them: A duck tchotchke bears mythical significance in The Transaction, a bell placed amid gardening supplies catches a curious eye in The Harvest, a naked man’s gray suit is shorn inA Well Dressed Man.

The crumpled suit, balanced duck, silver bell, and other items throughout the collection are imbued with implied symbolism and sentimentality by their peculiar, sometimes too-perfect placement and deliberate lighting. In The Brooding Artist, a miniature house glows in a halo of a stained glass-filtered sun beam like a supernatural talisman, its message to the painting’s forlorn figure unclear. An antique butterfly hairpin in The Absolute Truth glints resolutely with an early-morning glow, an uncertain link to the burning house in the distance. 

In Flachbarth’s snapshot-style compositions, the prescience of these objects feels puzzle-like, as if each one is an Easter egg from an unwritten backstory, solvable with a key visible only in another dimension. The tension depicted between items and their human proprietors creates a cinematic ambience – as if Flachbarth’s works were lost stills plucked from realism-warping motion pictures like Magnolia or Mulholland Drive. 

The implication of film, particularly the kind of cult classic campiness that lends itself to generations of aesthetically impacted creators, underlines the philosophical questions put forth in the artist’s exhibition description: “Where do we draw the line between a life lived and a life consumed?… And what about a life consumed and a life produced?”

The painter traces these questions back to German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1920s concept of “thrownness,” the idea that the incidental makeup of one’s surrounding culture shapes how – and who – one becomes in the world. In a media landscape of increasingly globalized, exhaustively digitized, immediately accessible content, Flachbarth wonders what the illusion of choice in what we consume and our position as data creators for advertising algorithms means for forming an identity. 

Though these are curiosities of the present, the clothing, architecture, and settings of these 10 paintings are nostalgic and tech-free, undeniably bearing traces of the artist’s own cultural touchstones and accumulated visual sensibilities. 

In The Transformation, light caught on a freshly painted fingernail evokes that transcendent feeling of belonging derived from discovering a piece of media, an article of clothing, or maybe a signature nail color that feels inexplicably like “you.” A levitating figurine of ancient-mythology-meets-science-fiction significance in the right corner of the composition lends the instant a supernatural power. 

Other works hint at more mundane methods of cultural assimilation. A wistful youth looks plaintively into a rural suburbia landscape of planes and power lines in The Things That Fly and Float, tinted in the sepia palette of remembered childhood malaise. In The Harvest, sentimentality feels passed down, through the two figures’ embrace and the gardening tools around them, imbued with memories and shared activity.

While Flachbarth’s exhibition text asks questions about consumer culture, what comes across in these works is a deep appreciation for the identity-shaping power of things. The items pictured are not mass-produced plastic baubles nor Instagram ad gadgets, but carefully crafted tools and trinkets that the viewer is made to feel have secret significance for the paintings’ subjects. 

The artist’s pieces themselves offer no definitive opinion on, or answer to, the questions Flachbarth puts forward, but the words draw attention to the combination of references and points of inspiration embedded in these – and ultimately all – artworks. Whether introduced through a barrage of media or the wrinkled hands of a relative, our relationship to objects and material stylings continues to shape our identity through some combination of thrownness and self-selection, even as the world at our fingertips complicates our journey. 

This article appears in April 24 • 2026.