“Serendipity” Lights Up The Grove

In an upper room at the Grove, New Haven’s premiere co-working space, New Haven arts czar Andy Wolf was addressing the Jewish Business League of CT about the emergence of New Haven’s ​“creative economy” and the public-private partnerships that, he argued, would drive the city into an unprecedented era of economic and cultural prosperity.

Just down the hall, several artists in the vanguard of that creative economy, who are committed to the city as a place to realize their creative visions, were celebrating the opening of their new art exhibition ​“Serendipity: Marks of Abstraction,” featuring artists Carmen Lund, Annie Sailer, and Giada Crispiels.

According to the Grove’s gallery curator, Elinor Slomba, the Grove is a place where even serendipity gets a boost. ​“In a community like the Grove there’s a kind of ​‘engineered serendipity’ where unpredictable positive events happen nonstop, or at least at higher frequencies than elsewhere,” she said.

The well attended artists’ reception was sponsored by the Jewish Business League, after Jonathan Snyder, the league’s chair and member of the Grove, approached Slomba with the idea for a collaborative intersection of business and art — a concept that Slomba promotes through her company, Arts Interstices.

“That’s partly the magic of hanging art in a nontraditional gallery space,” said Slomba, ​“Different networks come together and it amplifies the effect of looking at the art. They’re not all there for the same reason and that adds conversational interest.”

At the exhibit opening, much of the conversational interest was about the paintings and collages of New Haven-based artist and Silvermine Arts Center instructor Carmen Lund, who exhibits internationally but is making her New Haven debut at the Grove. Lund’s work is sourced in her careful observations of nature, informing both her representational and abstract work.

“My process is addictive, accumulating layers of visual experience. As a result, what I construct are not scenes but compilations from nature,” she noted.

Lund said that many of her works in the exhibit, mostly unframed and hung informally with pins, were created with re-purposed bits and shapes culled from her painting palettes. Each collage-painting, no matter the size, reveals a journey of process, mark-making, and brushwork that ends in a visual feast of dazzling color harmonies in a field of raised edges and angles.

Patches of opacity and atmospheric transparency combine with a pentimento effect of faded, underpainted lines, which appear both in the ground and on the applied geometric and irregular collage shapes.

“I intentionally use movement, color, and shape to produce images that are upbeat, sensuous, and rich with possibilities,” Lund said.

Several of Lund’s representational floral images — some painted directly from the natural environs of Vieques, Puerto Rico, where she teaches her Paint & Play classes (the next one begins Feb. 22), are also on display.

Lund said that because most people are not buying her art at established market prices, she is making available high-quality, ready-to-hang digital prints on stretched canvas that can be ordered at comparatively affordable prices.

Annie Sailer, who moved from New York, is another artist finding creative ground in New Haven. A painter and modern dancer-choreographer and director of the Annie Sailer Dance Company, Sailer noted that these expressive modes are, ​“essential parts of my life, informing each other while remaining separate practices.” Her paintings, she said, ​“are grounded in a post-Abstract Expressionist/Minimalist aesthetic” and influenced by a host of artists: Willem de Kooning, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Katherine Bernhardt among them. George Sears Greene, Sailer’s biological father and Abstract Expressionist painter who was part of the New York and Hamptons art scene, was also a major influence in her artistic development.

Sailer, who maintains a studio at Erector Square, described her paintings as being informed by ​“the materials themselves, color and spatial relationships, emotional and spiritual realms of the human condition, popular culture, fashion, and by my process itself.” The artist’s strokes of layered color and drips invite dimensional exploration; her palette of inventive color combinations applied with exuberance, suggest a visual dance of elements that hint at her vocation as a dancer.

Artist Giada Crispiels, who moved to the United States in 2010 from Italy, is included in Slomba’s curatorial alchemy at the Grove. Her ink-on-paper leaf images mounted in double-sided plexiglass are available for purchase. According to her artist’s statement, Crispiels focused on ​“cycles of nature and how they are altered by human interventions in the contemporary world.”

In her leaf forms composed of line, irregular shape, and well-coordinated color schemes, a new topography emerges. Coexisting, non-modeled shapes and three dimensional form evoke the leaf’s life cycle as a microcosm of nature’s splendid handiwork. In each specimen we recognize the whole tree, brought into focus.

A multimedia artist, Crispiels’ body of work includes performance art, installation, and video. Earlier this year, Artspace commissioned her to create a mural as part of her Urban Shadows of Nature series for a new home designed by Yale School of Architecture’s First Year Project and NeighborWorks, a group show also curated by Slomba at 193 Winthrop Avenue and part of City Wide Open Studios’ Transported Weekend.

Though spread across various floors, corridors, and rooms at the Grove, ​“Serendipity: Marks of Abstraction” holds together as a collection of artists’ responses to the natural world, and as a testament to New Haven’s emergent arts economy.

“Serendipity: Marks of Abstraction” runs at the Grove, at 760 Chapel St., through Jan. 10. For more information, contact the Grove gallery curator here.