Contributed by Nancy Friedland / I don’t remember exactly when I first came across the work of Aaron Michael Skolnick, but I do remember the feeling. Confronted by landscapes so filled with love and loss, I wondered how a painting of light in a forest could express so much. When the gorgeous images from his most recent project – face mash-ups of Aaron and famous, sometimes funny, often tragic characters – started to pop up in my feed, I needed to know more. I searched to see what was out there about Aaron’s show “The Entertainer,” currently up at MARCH Gallery in the East Village, and found nothing to satisfy my curiosity. As I began to dig into the work myself, I quickly realized that it had tentacles that wrapped around every aspect of the artist’s life. There were the paintings, yes, beautifully wrought, deftly painted, of course, but there was also an installation, photography, and performance. The work was so layered and complex that I felt the need to reach out directly to Aaron to ask him what it was all about. Last week, I picked up the phone and tried to uncoil some of those tentacles and make sense of a complex, brave, and very funny new body of work.