“That weird dog boy” is how Milwaukee-area artist Fred Stonehouse refers to the figure in Perko, one of his 13 bizarre paintings and drawings at Gescheidle. And why are hot water bottles floating above the pine trees? “They’re vessels, like bladders and stomachs,” he says. “Earlier I was doing paintings of see-through mythical animals, showing the stomach and esophagus, and they sort of escaped from the bodies. They also echo the word bubbles in cartoons.” Though the title came from the label on a package of hinges Stonehouse bought at a garage sale, he thought it sounded like the name of a sideshow freak: “The premise of my painting is that this is a mythical animal captured in the wilds of Wisconsin.”
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Growing up in the 60s and 70s, Stonehouse went regularly to the Wisconsin State Fair, where he saw sideshow banners advertising “Penguin Boy” in an arctic landscape and “Lobster Boy” at the bottom of the sea. Of course these “attractions” were just human beings born with deformities, but they fascinated him nonetheless. Stonehouse already had a “terrible fear of ghosts and hauntings.” As soon as it got dark after Sunday dinner at his Sicilian grandmother’s house, his aunts and uncles would tell frightening tales: “In one story, somebody paid their bill at my grandfather’s bar with an ornately carved cabinet. My grandparents woke up the day after bringing it home to find their baby sleeping on the floor in front of it rather than upstairs. This happened several times. So my grandfather decided to put him to bed down there, and he ended up upstairs.” The “iconography and voodoo magic of Catholicism” also had an effect on him. “It’s pretty exotic, the bleeding and tortures and miracles. People probably don’t think twice about the sacred heart, but here’s this disembodied bleeding heart surrounded by a crown of thorns, as weird as anything in surrealism,” he says.
