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Brian Slattery |
Feb 4, 2021 10:20 am
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Yawen Zhang
Eating in Front of Fish.
Yawen Zhang’s Eating in Front of Fish manages to feel like a documentary and like a bit of surrealist humor. At first glance the fish appear to be swimming in midair. And while there’s nothing weird about eating fish in front of fish — some restaurants have aquariums in them — there is also something deeply weird about eating dead specimens of animals while the live specimens of those animals are watching. What happens to the diner who stops to think about this midway through their meal?
A certain senator and former presidential candidate is still sitting out in the cold — only now on West Rock Avenue, not at the presidential inauguration in D.C.
Courtesy of Peel Art Museum and Archives, Brampton Ontario, Canada
Raina.
Standing in front of the Kashmiri Gate in Lahore, Pakistan, the artist Jagdeep Raina was overcome with emotion. At first, his reaction was inexplicable. He grew up a world away in a Toronto suburb and had not visited his family’s homeland in 14 years. Why did he feel so much as he gazed at the wooden monument dating back to the Mughal Empire? Raina brought a tripod to the site and began documenting the gate to understand what it signified to him.
The product of that effort was a short film that the Yale Center for British Art screened last week as part of its ongoing “At Home: Artists in Conversation” series. The film layers shots of the gate with evocative charcoal drawings of figures sitting outside, riding horses, and relaxing at home — only to be washed away by blood dripping from disembodied hands.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 27, 2021 10:37 am
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Rosen.
What is a book
It’s a simple question — it’s a rectangular object with pages, and those pages most likely have words on them, and you read it to get information, or be told a story.
Right?
But what if there are no words? What if the pages are filled with images? What if they’re empty? What if the book doesn’t open like books usually do? What if it can become another shape altogether if you unfold the pages right? Is it still a book?
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 26, 2021 10:40 am
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Penrhyn Cook
Megaphone.
In some parts of the Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville, there’s a child crawling into a giant sculpture while others look on. A meeting of Segways. A ruffle of clouds over an open city square. In other parts of the gallery, nudes recline in parlors, and walk with strength and determination through ruins. They catch the photographer’s glance and stare back.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 21, 2021 10:21 am
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On Wednesday evening, Ann Cofta — one of the artists featured in “Urban Escapade,” an exhibit up in the Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s Digital Grace gallery now through Feb. 8 — let an audience virtually into her New York studio to show how she represented the cityscapes around her through improvisational uses of traditional fiber art practices. The idea, she revealed, began when she inherited fabric scraps from a quilting friend.
“What can I do with these little tiny pieces?” she recalled thinking.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 15, 2021 10:37 am
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Susan Reedy
Urban Passage 22.
Susan Reedy’s Urban Passage 22 looks at once like a well-used place to post public bills, and like time-lapse photography, and like the view from a speeding train. Scraps of messages come and go, flickering in and out of sight before we can fully comprehend them. We know that the messages were for day-to-day things. Maybe one was a poster for a concert, and another an ad for sneakers, and another a political message from a candidate running for local election. But Reedy’s piece captures the way urban places can sometimes feel like they’re teetering on the edge of meaning; if you could just rearrange the letters of all those posters in the right way, or stand there long enough, the city you’re in would tell you what it all means to be there. We know that’s a farce, that there’s no real Bigger Meaning to find behind it all. But sometimes it still feels urgent to keep looking.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 7, 2021 11:14 am
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Host Nadine Nelson turned over a string of pink beads she was starting in her hands on Wednesday evening.
“I think it might be the end of the world,” she said, referring to the riots at the U.S. Capitol, so “I think I’m going to make a necklace and some earrings.” She wanted to “make something I can finish.”
Her guest, artist Lee Lee McKnight, was working on an altered book. It was the latest installment of Co Create, a series supported by the New Haven Free Public Library in partnership with MakeHaven.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 6, 2021 10:18 am
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Ruth Sack
There’s a clock on the back wall of City Gallery. It doesn’t have hands, and the numbers by and large have been replaced by abstract shapes. It’s a sign of how time has drifted away, and the expression on its face gives an unmistakable sense of mixed feelings. The piece, by artist Ruth Sack, is about the election season, the sense of anticipation and worry it has brought, but in another sense it sums up how so much of the last year felt — and how we look to this coming year with beleaguered hope.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 5, 2021 10:54 am
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“The Coffee Tree and I.”
In “The Coffee Tree and I,” a short film by Konjit Seyoum, we see a coffee tree in its adolescence, not much more than a sapling. A red liquid at its base — is it water colored by fertilizer, or just water as it appears after poured onto the soil? — seeps slowly into the ground around its roots. It’s a chance to take a long, deep breath, to think about how we nourish plants, and how plants, in turn, nourish us. Margaret Hart’s “Poly-Morphosis” is an animated collage that ruminates on the wonders of science in an elliptical, often humorous way. And Daniel Hyatt’s “Escape from the Cage (and Dance)” features just that, as a man first magically finds his way out of a kennel, then dances until he disappears.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 22, 2020 10:44 am
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Dan Gries
180 Cups of Coffee, detail.
It’s a simple geometric design, just a grid of dark circles, but look closer and you see the abstraction is pulled out of something very concrete. Dan Gries’s 180 Cups of Coffee — part of the “Solos 2020” exhibition now running at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street through Feb. 21 — fits in with a theme that emerges among the six artists’ work in the exhibit, of using unorthodox materials and exploring the most basic ideas of our existence, like hunger, thirst, and the simple fact of living in our own bodies.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 7, 2020 10:38 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Crowley.
Dried fish like graceful plant life. A chunk of gray liver that looks like a “silver ingot,” as a visitor to the exhibit put it. A photo that captures the energy and the sadness of an overcrowded pen of fish. With “Thinking Twice” — on view now through Dec. 27 at City Gallery on Upper State Street — artist Phyllis Crowley asks us to both appreciate the fascinating forms that nature creates, and examine our own relationship to it, particularly in how we eat.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 3, 2020 10:41 am
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Host Babz Rawls-Ivy beamed from the offices of the Arts Council at the over 100 people gathered virtually Wednesday evening to celebrate the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 40th annual arts awards. She noted that it was an historic occasion — but not because pandemic restrictions had prevented the audience from gathering in person at the New Haven Lawn Club, as they have in years past.
“Forty years,” she said, “and all the awardees are Black. I love to see it.”
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 25, 2020 10:46 am
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Cynthia Y. Cooper
A Show of Strength (Banner).
Cynthia Y. Cooper’s A Show of Strength might conjure a host of associations — ocean waves, birds’ wings, the ceiling of a church. It’s all of these things, and at its core, none of them. It’s just a pattern of line and color, repeating ideas. We fill the pattern with meaning, as humans do. Sometimes that tendency to find patterns, and meaning in patterns, leads us astray. But, when handled with grace, it also leads constellations in the sky and holidays around solstices and equinoxes. It can be the foundation of building a community.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 20, 2020 11:14 am
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Bek Andersen
Power Portraits, detail.
Kerry Ellington, Addys Castillo, and Orisha Ala Ochumare stand with confidence on the walls of Artspace’s gallery. As captured by Bek Andersen in her piece Power Portraits — part of Artspace’s exhibition “Who Governs?” running through Dec. 12 — they become the images of the leaders and activists they are. Their voices and work in reshaping the city is palpable. But just as their actual political work involves revisiting and learning from the past, so “Who Governs?” delves into New Haven’s past, coming up with vivid questions about how unique the moment we’re in really is. What has changed? What has stayed the same? And what does progress mean when it seems that sometimes we find ourselves asking the same questions again and again?
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Laura Glesby |
Nov 19, 2020 11:14 am
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Laura Glesby Photo
Del Carpio-Beltran reads artist statement at 600-square-foot mural.
While the city sleeps through a pandemic, the Ninth Square has come alive with outdoor murals — as local artists like Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran demonstrated on Wednesday.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 17, 2020 11:36 am
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Liz Antle-O’Donnell
Tick Tock 2
Liz Antle‑O’Donnell’s clock is an older work made new. Those who’ve followed her work recognize the busy circular pattern of buildings and color. Turning it into a clock doesn’t just lend a piece a functional air. The moving hands animate the image behind them. In a sense it can be understood as a clock for our times. The pattern resonates with the way time feels a little different during the pandemic, a little more flexible, as days can sometimes seem slower while weeks slip away. The buildings can be read as waiting, minute by minute, for the busier street life we know before March.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 13, 2020 11:22 am
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There’s a quote from Spanish artist Joan Miró, written when he was 85 years old, sitting in the window at the entrance to City Gallery on Upper State Street: “I painted in a frenzy so that people will know I am alive, that I’m breathing, that I still have a few more places to go and I’m heading in new directions.”
“That’s how I felt,” said artist Roberta Freidman — whose exhibition, “Breathe: 2020,” is up now at City Gallery through Nov. 29. As the pandemic and its associated lockdown descended on the country and the social aspects of artistic life ground to a halt, “I could slink off into the studio and find some light in the day.”
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 12, 2020 11:09 am
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Yvette Mayorga
Homeland Promised Land.
Yvette Mayorga’s Homeland Promised Land is as colorful as a birthday cake and as sharp as the knife that cuts it. Its central figure is assailed by a whirlwind of fake Fanta bottles and cell phones, held captive by it all. But the artist isn’t just painting a screed against consumerism. There’s strength in the way she makes her art. Her style is asserting its own kind of resistance. When that figure in the center rises, maybe all those colors will burst from the frame, and take over — letting all of us live in a better place.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 6, 2020 10:45 am
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Steve Hamm Photo
David de la Mano at his emerging mural on Crown Street.
On the side of 33 Crown St., an eagle is spreading its wings, taking flight. The silhouettes of people can be seen riding on its back. Other birds rise in formation around it. There is an element of freedom, but also struggle.
And behind them, a familiar coastline — not as it appears today, but as it appeared over 100 years ago, when Black entrepreneur William Lanson was making his mark on the Elm City and moving it into the future.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2020 10:30 am
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Arts maven Bitsie Clark welcomed her virtual audience to her 89th birthday party on Friday evening with a cheeky rendition of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” But there was a serious intent behind the festivities: to check in with the 2019 recipients of the Bitsie Clark Fund’s annual $5,000 grants, and to award another $5,000 grant to a new artist for 2020.
