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Brian Slattery |
Feb 8, 2022 9:28 am
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Yvonne Shortt’s Material Investigations at the Ely is simple yet evocative — a system of ropes that Shortt is slowly transforming over time into something else. The patterns she’s creating remind one of braids, or farther toward the floor, maybe cascading dreadlocks. The knotting she’s doing is a simple macrame, but also the pattern for the beads on a shekere. All these evocations are in play; she “investigates hair and cultural mindsets using rope, repetition, various other materials, and historical context,” she writes. But the rope serves another purpose, to bind together all the artwork around it, in form, process, and function.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 3, 2022 8:27 am
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Three long, heavy bags of salt snake across the wall in one of the galleries in the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and their goal is empathy. To artist Ying Ye, who created them, they evoke fortune cookies. But their weight — 50 pounds each — is meaningful, too; as Ye writes, that “represents the average physical weight … restaurant workers need to lift up in the workplace.” The salt “implies their sweat and pains have transformed into delicious tasty food.”
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Allan Appel |
Jan 27, 2022 4:52 pm
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Marc Massaro
New version of proposed monument, with plaque.
Gone are the benches, planters, flood lights, and gravel walking paths.
The sculpture itself — of an aspiring immigrant family — remains in the picture, as a controversial plan to replace the former Wooster Square Christopher Columbus monument moved to a new stage.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 27, 2022 8:44 am
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Matthew Dercole
Remnant 16.
Matthew Dercole’s artwork dramatizes a phase of biology that many find uncomfortable. His pieces are in a sense fungal; they’re full of life, but the kind of life that sprouts from death, that transforms flesh into something else. It’s the kind of reminder of mortality that many find unsettling. Dercole knows this; with his exquisitely detailed pieces, he seeks to both attract and repel.
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Coral Ortiz |
Jan 25, 2022 12:04 pm
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Author Megan Shaughnessy with her new children book.
Megan Shaughnessy remembers the day her son came home from kindergarten “embarrassed” to show his artwork with his family.
As she watched his confidence in his artwork dissipate, she thought back to her childhood. when her art teacher “selected students” to be in an advanced class. Shaughnessy was not chosen.
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Allison Hadley |
Jan 25, 2022 9:02 am
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Allison Hadley Photos
Romei.
It was a cold Saturday afternoon when they started shuffling in, limbs held stiffly, in small groups. They pushed the door open to the Cellar on Treadwell. There was no escape. That’s right: it was Drawn of the Dead night for “It’s Alive,” a new art show running at the Hamden music club through the end of the month that’s fit for guys and ghouls.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 12, 2022 11:00 am
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Bloom, Kane, Crowley, and Friedman.
“Convergence” — the show at City Gallery running now through Jan. 30, and featuring the work of Meg Bloom, Phyllis Crowley, Roberta Friedman, and Kathy Kane — celebrates not only the ways in which the four artists have continued to make art during the pandemic, but how the City Gallery artists have maintained the bonds of their community even while being, once again, forced apart by Covid-19.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2022 9:07 am
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Ana Henriques’s Forest I partakes of recognizable natural shapes — spreading tree branches, a mirrored sun, the ripples of water and hills — without being beholden to them. There’s a push toward the abstract that sets the shapes and colors free from the viewer giving it the easy designation of a forest scene. She makes us see those shapes and colors again, as if we’re seeing them for the first time. Just as important in the context of “Reflections,” the new group show running now at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through Feb. 6, if viewers look closely in the glass that frames the work, they can see the works of Mark St. Mary and Liz Antle O’Donnell — the other two artists in the show — reflected in the glass.
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Maya McFadden |
Jan 2, 2022 10:53 am
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Maya McFadden Photo
Honda Smith, Nijaya Brown, Barbara Hawke-Lopez, Rhieanna Rubertone, Nashali Nieves, and Rebecca LeQuire by new mural at spruced-up Shack.
With the help of four high school students who found a fun way to spend part of their Christmas break, the late New Haven rapper known as Stēzo has been brought back to life on his home turf of West Rock/West Hills.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 17, 2021 1:15 pm
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A new 50-year retrospective exhibit displays works by artist Bruce Oren (below), including the above sculpture of Moses.
Artist Bruce Oren renders the face of Moses in fine detail in marble, from the wrinkles worn into his face to the weight of his eyelids. He conveys the heaviness of the tablets on his shoulders by the angle of his elbow, the definition of the muscles. But as we move away from Moses’s face, the details begin to grow coarser, until we see the edge of the block that Moses came from.
The figure emerges from the marble, but Oren leaves room for the stone to have its say, too. We get to see not just the finished figure, but the path Oren took to get there.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 10, 2021 10:45 am
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The crisp, heightened color and the vertical symmetry immediately draw the eye to Penrhyn Cook’s photos, Mexican Tub and VW at Sunrise, side by side on the wall at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville. They’re just normal manmade objects, and in the world there are many like them, but Cook’s treatment of them imbues them with substance, meaning — even dignity.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 9, 2021 9:10 am
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A darkened room filled with luminous yet ruinous shapes. A wavering eye at the top of a crooked tower, never blinking but always bleary. One wall has been transformed into a pale blue screen. The words “I wouldn’t do this to you if you didn’t deserve it” are typed out in a primitive font. Across the room is a chair with the word “guilty” projected onto it; on the wall behind it, a more expansive message: “Everybody’s guilty of something.”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 8, 2021 10:02 am
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Susan Newbold
Island Magic
The vivid colors make the title of Susan Newbold’s piece — Island Magic — appropriate enough, but Newbold’s treatment of the subject moves the image well beyond a travel postcard. There’s enough information in the texture of the painting that, with a small imaginative leap, the viewer can be on that coastline, feel the grit of the sand, the roughness of the rocks, the cool water. It’s not just a picture of a place; it’s a record of Newbold’s experience of being there.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 6, 2021 1:23 pm
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Brian Slattery Photos
Stewart and Taylor.
The Wandering, an event organized by artists Anika Stewart and Elizabeth LaCroix Taylor, turned Bregamos Community Theater into an arts bazaar, music venue, and burlesque stage all at once on Saturday night.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 2, 2021 9:21 am
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The portrait of the Foote sisters — Anna and Amelia — dating from around 1860 appears early in “Children of the Elm City,” the new exhibit at the New Haven Museum running now through winter 2022. It’s in the first section of the exhibit, dedicated to portraiture from the 18th and 19th centuries, before the advent of widespread photography.
Because the exhibit is partially geared toward children, a lot of questions appear in the text accompanying the exhibit. One might not expect those questions to be as provocative as they are.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 30, 2021 9:24 am
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From now until the end of December, visitors to Cafe Nine will see a change of art on the club’s walls — the photographs and paintings of Leigh Busby, who as a photographer has become one of the most sharp-eyed chroniclers of life in New Haven, particularly during the unrest of 2020, where he was there, camera in hand, to document the outrage and the energy of that summer and show the city to itself.
In combining his photographs and paintings into one show, Busby allows even those familiar with his work a chance to see how he moved from painting to photography, and the lines that carry through all his work.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 19, 2021 9:00 am
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R.F. Wilton
Baby Tubelegs With Shoes.
The baby in the middle of the image might just be a doll, but in the photograph it seems as though it’s been brought strangely to life. Is it a ruler, looking out over its broken domain? A performer playing for a mute audience? A judge passing down a verdict to the condemned? It’s an image that overflows with a sense that we’re looking into another world, adjacent to ours but darker and stranger, made up of the things we thought we threw out. Something’s coming from that world into ours, and maybe we’re both frightened and fascinated to find out what it is.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 18, 2021 9:20 am
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Dutkanicz with 4 Attempts at Being an Individual.
The dozens of colored shapes in New Haven-based artist Andrzej Dutkanicz’s paintings might at first appeared to be scrambled, almost in motion, because the visual effect is scintillating. But the lines that divide the canvas, and the focal dot in the middle of it, suggest something else is going on, a kind of symmetry and repetition. At first glance, it’s hard to say what it is. But the system is there, and for Dutkanicz, it’s the combination — of randomness and rules, of chaotic motion and unchanging order — that makes the art. And for the next month or so, that art will be gracing the walls of Never Ending Books on State Street as a show titled “Works.”
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 17, 2021 9:08 am
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William Frucht
Pink Blanket.
It’s a photograph of a couple on a beach on a hot summer day. On one level, it’s all perfectly normal, almost banal. He’s checking something on his laptop; she may or may not be nudging him with her foot. But in its form it seems almost coordinated, that the two people are dressed only in black and white, that they’ve then chosen a hot pink blanket to rest on, a bright orange bag to bring, a bright purple cup to drink from. And then it’s all framed by just sand, without a wave in sight.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2021 9:11 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
The Mo-Pho — a soon-to-be mobile photo studio and event space run by Teresa Joseph and Chris Randall, partners in the photo business The Notorious P.I.C. — started off four years ago as an idea in Joseph’s head. This week it took a major leap forward into reality with the acquisition of a double-decker bus from Liverpool, with more in the spring sure to follow.
For Joseph, it’s not just a dream of hers coming to life; it’s also a manifestation of the support she and Randall feel from the community around them.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 9, 2021 8:34 am
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From a distance on Audubon Street, it looks like a city has sprung up inside the gallery space of Creative Arts Workshop, stretching far back into the building. Come a little closer, though, and you see that the buildings are rusted, almost derelict, the windows empty. Go inside the gallery and explore, and you come across the small outline of a person, lying there as if outlined in chalk. There’s a small tablet close by, but its screen glows only a blank blue.
Where are all the other inhabitants? What happened to them?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2021 9:04 am
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Leigh Busby Photo
The ceremony for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 41st annual arts awards returned to being an in-person event on Friday, as people gathered at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University to honor several of New Haven’s artist educators: Miguel Gaspar Benitez, James and Tia Russell Brockington, Allen “Dooley‑O” Jackson, Linda Lindroth, Patrick Smith, and Bill Brown and Sally Hill.
