Allan Appel Photo
You think March Madness, which actually runs well into April, is only for basketball?
Think again. Not in New Haven. This young mixed-media bride is one of 113 (!) art works — count ‘em — by 113 individual artists the have gone on display in the 112th Annual Juried Art Exhibition of the New Haven Paint & Clay Club.
Ruth Sack’s “Bride” appears to have landed on a candle holder after she scored or perhaps executed a great dunk of herself, as if she were the ball or the prize.
Nathan Lewis’s oil on canvas “Orpheus.”
Now she even clings to the hoop from which also falls the bridal gauze.
Yet is it a gesture of victory and accomplishment or the not-letting-go of desperation? And where is the groom?
The show, on two floors of the John Slade Ely House, the redoubtable venue for contemporary art on Trumbull Street, runs through April 14 and is viewable Wednesdays through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
The show’s 100 hung works and 13 sculptures were selected from 388 received, which is oddly down from the 450 submitted last year, according to the club’s longtime president Dolores Gall.
#56 in the show is Inga-Britta Mill’s “Allegro II,” a monotype over woodcut.
I decided to take an arithmetical approach to writing about this show, rather than try to write about all 113 pieces. I looked at the first art work in the show, Sack’s mysterious trophy bride with her plaster of Paris body decorated in blue leaves; then at the 113th or last art work in the show, and number 56, smack dab in the middle.
Mills’s monotype in the middle calls to mind the fluid images of Helen Frankenthaler “Mountains and Seas” as it catches the transom light at the top of the steps midway between the two floors full of paintings.
Along the way I looked for some of the winners of various $4,000 in prizes that the club annually awards. This year they included Nathan Lewis’s (pictured above) haunting image of a girl clutching a book and looking back at the disaster of what might be her house or a library.
He won the most (financially) prestigious of the 18 prizes in the show, The Weiss Sisters Prize. It is worth $800.
In the era of Katrina, Sandy, and Nemo, what perhaps is most shocking is how familiar disaster feels as we look over the shoulder of the survivor who has plucked a volume from the ash.
The torque of her body to me suggests the wistfulness of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, one of the most famous pictures of a much safer era.
But if Christina was worried about disaster, abandonment, and or the unknown and unthinkable, it’s arrived again, and again and again in this image by Lewis.
Perhaps that dissonance is why the judge — always a non-member of the club and this year Helen Klisser During of the Westport Center for the Arts — chose the Lewis.
On my way up to the last of the 113 in the show, I stopped by Greg Shea’s “Second Skin.” The small work, acrylic on board, is of an armored man whose layers reflect the redoubtable frame in which it sits; it won one of two Hull’s Art Supply & Framing Certificates, $75.
Arthur Guagliumi’s “Patas” won a prize for collage.
The last work in the show, numerically, is an airy oil and graphite work, “Witch House, Winter,” by Lisa Smith Arnold.
By the time you get to it, on the upper floor, you think you might be tired, but you’re not. Many of the works are small, easy to access, and are grouped by subject, like vegetables or flowers, and the house makes an accommodating venue to sense the wide range and large number of artists at work in town and beyond.
Gall said that while the submitting artists can hail from anywhere in New England and New York, most come from Connecticut, including a heavy representation from the Shoreline and Hartford areas.
Despite the name of the club, the exhibition does not allow for crafts or photography or computer art or video.
“Video art would take up a whole room. We have enough to deal with,” Gall said.