by
Brian Slattery |
Jul 20, 2022 8:56 am
|
Comments
(1)
Ieshia Evans Protesting the Death of Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, 9 July 2016).
The source photograph — by Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman, of Black Lives Matter protester Ieshia Evans standing off against police in Baton Rouge, La., during a protest of the killing of Alton Sterling by police in 2016 — is already a capturing of opposites. The kinetic poses of the police, clearly in motion, versus Evans’s stillness. The heaviness of the officers’ body armor versus the light billowing of the hem of Evans’s dress. Marc Quinn’s treatment of the image, made in 2017, takes it all a step further. Cutting the image into quarters accentuates what’s going on, and hearkens back to triptychs and other more antiquated forms of history paintings. The streaks of paint thrown across the painting add to the immediacy of the action, but also call attention to the change in medium, from photography to painting. What does it mean to try to immortalize an image? Which is another way of asking: how do we remember history?
by
Brian Slattery |
Jul 19, 2022 8:21 am
|
Comments
(0)
Sylvia J. Yanez
Hi, I'm Melting.
Sylvia J. Yanez’s Hi, I’m Melting has its sense of humor, starting from the title. It exudes a friendliness that draws a viewer in. But there’s something harrowing going on, too. There are the cracked patches of paint like angry scabs, the colors bleeding and running together seeming out of control. That the paint is roughly in the shape of the United States, and that it appears to be melting down, gives it an extra push into chilling territory, though explicitly commenting on the current political situation isn’t Yanez’s stated objective. The aim of her art is more personal, more social; maybe you could say deeper.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jul 15, 2022 8:43 am
|
Comments
(0)
Bridget Riley
Blaze 4.
On one hand Blaze 4 is a simple design concept: a series of concentric circles, lines angled in alternating directions. The kind of thing that, in the hands of someone less attuned to detail, would be a muddled mess, or almost silly, like a picture of spiraling tweed. But in the hands of master contemporary artist Bridget Riley, it’s a buzzing, vertiginous image, the sort of thing that requires a warning label for people sensitive to strobes. It’s a perfect marriage of form and technique, and that the effect is so visceral is argument enough for why the Yale Center for British Art has dedicated two floors of the museum to a massive retrospective of the celebrated artist’s work, called “Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction” — and there are just two more weekends to see it before it closes on July 24.
The proposed configuration of the old plinth next to the new statue.
Now that the statue of Christopher Columbus is gone from Wooster Square Park, what should happen to the pedestal that once held it up?
The Historic District Commission weighed that question on Wednesday evening. It voted to keep the pedestal in place without a statue atop it, a few feet behind the new sculpture slated for the park.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jul 14, 2022 8:37 am
|
Comments
(0)
Sheila Kaczmarek
Caterpillar Homes.
The sculpture in the window of City Gallery is fashioned almost like it could be a bouquet of summery flowers, or a piece of interesting coral — the kind of art made from natural objects that you see a lot. But the pleasing shapes are actually representations of caterpillars that look like they could crawl out of their ceramic homes at any second. Some may find it a little creepy, but it’s also about the abundance of nature, the way it moves and grows, especially in the summer.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jul 7, 2022 8:51 am
|
Comments
(2)
Susan Clinard
Missing the Mark.
Susan Clinard’s sculptures are an exercise in extreme empathy, even as Missingthe Mark represents something more complex as well. It’s hard not to feel the pull of judgment in the juxtaposition of the crying face of the baby, who just needs some attention, with the blank faces of everyone else, staring at their screens. But in a broader sense, they’re all victims, of a specific mode of modernity we’re told we want. Clinard’s pieces forces us to look at ourselves, too. Are you reading these words on your phone right now? What are you missing around you?
New Haven photographer Chris Randall has a unique perspective on fireworks — as you can see from these photos he took at Sunday evening’s city East Rock display.
by
Olivia Charis |
Jun 27, 2022 3:50 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Olivia Charis Photos
"Hispanic Identity: Between Two Words"
As viewers walk into NXTHVN gallery to view a new group exhibit, Sofia Carrillo’s contribution stands out as one of the only artworks not on the walls. Carrillo’s sculpture consists of two armchairs tied together by woven flags. Atop each chair rests a telephone. The chairs, Carrillo said, represent “the new versus the old generation.”
by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2022 9:04 am
|
Comments
(1)
Cassides' Diner.
Cassides’ Diner sits everywhere and nowhere; it could be on any number of city blocks around the Northeast, and at the same time, it’s hard to say from the picture where on that block it is situated. The building itself is also a little improbable. It carries the signs of both tough economic straits and real ingenuity, the result of someone taking what’s at hand and making something better out of it.
Artspace Executive Director Lisa Dent shows Sen. Blumenthal New Havener Leonard Galmon's Gloria.
New Haven’s annual “Open Studios” festival will have a farther reach and more space to display local artists’ work this year thanks to a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 21, 2022 8:53 am
|
Comments
(0)
The image of a young Black person behind bars is freighted with decades — centuries — of cultural hurt, and artist Mosho knows it. As an accompanying note explains, the artist “deploys paint, plastic sheeting, and other materials to construct installations that explore issues of identity, community, and belonging.” Here Mosho takes the image and subverts it. Give the image more than a cursory glance and you see that the bars are melting away before the subject’s gaze. And that the hand that holds that dissolving bar, and is perhaps doing the dissolving, contains a galaxy within it, a sign of universal power and also nearly unknowable complexity. It’s an image that hints at liberation through exploration, of the universe and of the self at the same time.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 16, 2022 8:55 am
|
Comments
(1)
Origins and Future, detail.
Origins and Future spreads out across the floor of an upper gallery at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street. It’s composed of shapes that are fascinating and uncomfortable in equal measure. Are they the result of biology or technology? The stranger ends of the plant and animal kingdoms or something that was created in a lab? Or perhaps are they a mixture of both? Or, is it that the line between the natural and technological world is a lot more porous than we usually think it is?
by
David Sepulveda |
Jun 15, 2022 9:12 am
|
Comments
(4)
David Sepulveda and Frenemy Photos
Corner of new mural facing Exchange Street.
Frenemy: Man with a can, and a message.
A sharp-eyed osprey peers over the edge of its densely woven nest of thick branches. A frog, dressed in patched coveralls and top hat, sits comfortably on a tree stump, reading to a school of attentive rainbow trout. Only the moon seems to have dozed off, its exhalations producing cottony-white night clouds with every breath.
These are some of the vignettes of animated plants and wildlife that have taken residence on the exterior walls of a previously faded and graffiti-marked industrial property adjacent the John S. Martinez Sea & Sky STEM Magnet K‑8 School in Fair Haven — thanks to the work of a globe-trotting muralist and illustrator who goes by the name Frenemy.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 8, 2022 9:30 am
|
Comments
(4)
Brian Slattery Photos
Kotcher (aka Frenemy) and Bernblum at 162 James.
The latest mural from public art organization Site Projects is transforming a building in Fair Haven — just as the projects it’s connected to, from Save the Sound and the Mill River Trail, are hoping to transform the surrounding community’s relationship to the river nearby, and the nature all around them.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 3, 2022 9:07 am
|
Comments
(0)
A cluster of paintings on the wall of the gallery all border a central piece, as if feeding it, which in a sense they do. The central piece holds the others together. In it, a yard bordered by trees is the site of some kind of excavation, roped off. Something is being unearthed there, the ruins of a house, or something still older, maybe. But instead of a crew with tools, the only animals in sight are a cardinal and a bluejay, watching over the proceedings in a moment that’s both funny and a little magical, a flight of fancy on the part of the artist, though very much grounded in reality.
by
Thomas Breen |
May 26, 2022 4:41 pm
|
Comments
(2)
A sculpture by artist Yvonne Shortt on display outside 51 Trumbull St.
Clockwise from upper left: ECOCA board members Suneet Talpade, Jeanne Criscola, Debbie Hesse, Jeanne Ciravolo.
A downtown visual arts nonprofit has closed on its purchase of the John Slade Ely House — warding off the building’s potential sale to a residential developer, with the help of a loan from two Fair Haven businessmen.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 25, 2022 8:47 am
|
Comments
(1)
The foggy, paranoid view through the peephole of a door to an apartment. A painting of a container ship erupting into flames. A gas can looking ready to be ignited. They come across as a dislocated parts of a whole, tiny fragments of something too big to comprehend all at once. They’re part of “Proximity,” a show running now in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through June 8, in which artists come to grips with the war in Ukraine, producing an exhibit that conveys the conflict’s harrowing immediacy and something of its historical context at the same time.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 24, 2022 8:14 am
|
Comments
(26)
You may have seen the signs at the exit ramps of I‑91 or I‑95 around town, or on long straightaways on Whitney Avenue, or that particular curve of road on Mather Street in Hamden. They say “Slow Down,” and they’re clearly directed at car traffic. Neatly stenciled and uniform in size, some of them look quasi-official. But they’re not.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 17, 2022 8:36 am
|
Comments
(0)
Julia Rooney
Scrollscape.
Julia Rooney’s Scrollscape hangs in the front window of Artspace, serving the dual purpose from the street of inviting people to come in while also obscuring what’s going on within. Inside, Scrollscape reveals itself as a piece that one is allowed to wander within. When you’re inside it, you can only see out in bits and pieces; likewise, someone looking at you from outside the piece — or, for that matter, from another part of the piece — would only be able to see you a little bit at a time. It’s a little disorienting, obfuscating, playful on one but tinged with a little menace. If someone comes looking for you in there, or if you go looking for them, is it hide and seek or stalking?
by
Brian Slattery |
May 16, 2022 8:31 am
|
Comments
(12)
Brian Slattery Photo
The Town Green District’s New Haven Night Market once again drew throngs of people, as the event closed the intersection of Orange and Crown and its surrounding streets to car traffic, turning those city blocks into a bustling bazaar of food, art, and crafts. But there was also evidence that the event was expanding more informally, as artists and businesses beyond those blocks threw events to attract their own parts of the crowd.
