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Brian Slattery |
Dec 10, 2019 1:21 pm
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Jennifer Davies
Threading My Way.
Threading My Way is a textile in the act of creating itself. Patches of color give way to others. The ends tatter off at the top, as if the yarn hasn’t been fully spun. And then there’s the netting, falling in a wild pattern until it snakes off into a loose thread at the end.
It’s a fitting introductory piece to “Casting a Net,” an exhibition of fiber works by artist Jennifer Davies — now running at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Dec. 29 — that celebrates the art of discovery.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 8, 2019 5:20 pm
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Daniel Eugene Photos
Babz Rawls Ivy.
Babz Rawls Ivy, member of the board of directors of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, looked out over the crowd seated in the ballroom of the New Haven Lawn Club Friday afternoon for the Arts Council’s 39th Annual Arts Awards. “We are all connected,” she said. In New Haven, it is “just a few steps” from Newhallville to East Rock to downtown, and in those steps you found affluence and poverty, creativity and despair.
“Whatever happens in this city, it is all our responsibility, all our care.”
Guns Down/Books Up’s Ray Wallace, center, with Young Knights Elizer Diaz, left, and T.J. Yuio
Enhance the municipal canoe launch at Clifton Street. Fund a school-based anti-bullying program that culminates in a musical production. Beautify storm drains near local schools with images of fish. Paint a mural of an oyster near the Q River. Deploy pavement marking and bright textured paint to narrow the avenue and slow the traffic.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 27, 2019 9:03 am
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The piece is already playful enough, an energetic overlapping of fabric patterns and vivid colors. There are photographs of trees and what looks like a hotel room. There are also photographs of statues, but taken as if by a 12-year-old or someone with a fun sense of humor, because the cropping of the photos lops off the heads and draws the viewer’s eye to the statues’ naked posteriors. Then there’s the quote, emblazoned in white paint: “My stomach is the most violent of all of Italy.”
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 21, 2019 8:46 am
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Michael Zack
The silhouettes themselves seem to shimmer against their shifting backgrounds, as if everything is in motion. In the image to the left, two figures are running while another seems to be turning toward them. In the image to the right, a crowd of figures stands together while another stands alone. Both images seem like stills in a film — but what stories do they tell? Are the figures on the left running toward or away from the other figure? Are they friends or a threat? And on the right, is the man standing alone because he’s a leader or an exile? Or something else altogether?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2019 8:55 am
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Julie Buffalohead
Indifferent.
A coyote sits in a plastic lawn chair, paw to face. Maybe it’s resting. Maybe it’s exasperated. Whatever the coyote is feeling, it’s not enough to stop the animals at its feet, who look like they’re starting to wreak some havoc.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 7, 2019 1:15 pm
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Roy Money
Pond Elder and Remaining.
They’re pictures of the surfaces of water, of the roots systems of trees, but the scale the photographer chooses helps us look at them in a different way. Roy Money doesn’t pick landscapes that encourage us to take in the full view. They’re pictures of nature on a human scale, what you might see if you crouched down on a trail on the woods, or stopped to sit by a pond’s edge. But the sharp clarity of the images helps you see more detail than you might otherwise. It makes the roots of the tree look a little like a mountain range, or wrinkled fingers. It makes you look again.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 5, 2019 1:47 pm
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Brian Slattery Photos
Schmidt.
Maxim T. Schmidt‘s This Is Not an Exhibition — running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Nov. 10 — may seem at first like a nod to Rene Magritte’s surreal classic, This Is Not a Pipe.
But in another sense, it’s genuine. Tucked away in a corner of the Ely Center, it’s something to stumble on. It’s a collection of artful trash. It’s a story. It’s a contradictory thing, and Schmidt wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 4, 2019 9:07 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
A man in a silver mask. A face in extreme closeup, features twisted in what could be laughter, could be discomfort. Someone else looking skeptical.
Maya Vulinovic’s photographs were crowded on a wall very near the entrance to the warren of offices and hallways that comprised City-Wide Open Studios’ Alternative Spaces weekend at Yale’s West Campus in Orange, the final event capping a month of activity that had ranged across New Haven, nearly reflecting the crowd of faces looking back at them.
Eleven-year-old Kai Sarmiento dressed in costume Saturday night to join 100 others in a Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration that highlighted capitalism’s threat to the environment and the contributions “aboriginal people can [make to] overcome and create a sustainable world.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 30, 2019 7:37 am
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Aimee Hert
Arrrangement 2.
A sculpture made of recycled materials. A painting of the trees outside of an apartment building that are usually part of the background. A suit you can float on.
These things are part of two different art exhibits — What Surrounds and Ready Famliar — that speak to each other in interesting ways. Both are currently on view at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street until Nov. 10.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 24, 2019 12:03 pm
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Cate Barry Photos
In the first photo, the two people in the image are coming in close, breathless, passionate, ready for a kiss. The intention is completely serious, even formal. It makes the next picture feel almost jarring. It’s the same couple, but where there was tension, there’s now relaxation. Where their brows were furrowed, there’s now laughter. Are the pictures separated by a minute or an hour? How long does it take for the mood to change? How long does it take for the photographer’s subjects to let their guard down?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2019 7:35 am
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Tsering Dorje
Two Tibetan Red Guards.
The young woman in the photograph is intent, concentrating. Is her face set in resolve? Or is there doubt behind her eyes?
It’s 1966, in Tibet, and she’s a member of the Red Guard — the soldiers charged with submitting the people of Tibet to China’s horrifically destructive Cultural Revolution, and in the process, erasing history.
Yet here’s a photograph of it, making history. It’s part of Forbidden Memory, a fascinating exhibit of photographs by Tsering Dorje, a soldier in the Red Army who took pictures of the Cultural Revolution as it was happening, offering a very rare glimpse into one of the darkest moments of the 20th century — a glimpse that curator William Frucht, on Wednesday, could use to help students from Audubon Street’s Atlas Middle School explore cultural memory, how repressive governments sometimes try to erase it, and how it can be preserved and maintained.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 4, 2019 12:08 pm
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Susan Clinard
White Space, White Noise: Family Separation at the Border.
A piece by Susan Clinard, White Space, White Noise, depicts a scene of a family that takes on nearly religious significance, as if it’s a sculpture that belongs in a church. But the people in the sculpture aren’t icons. They’re people, their humanity affirmed in every gesture, their stories written on their faces.
White Space, White Noise is positioned near the entry to the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop, and it is a fitting introduction to “Sanctuary Cities and the Politics of the American Dream,” a sprawling show curated by Luciana Q. McClure running now at CAW on Audubon Street through Nov. 9.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 3, 2019 11:49 am
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Jacquelyn Gleisner
Ann P. Lehman, from The Million-Petaled Flower of Being Here.
Music produced through Kegel exercises. A tapestry of the fossil record. A reckoning with violence.
These projects and more are among the commissions for this year’s City-Wide Open Studios, which has the theme of “Older But Younger.” The commissions focus on how art passes from generation to generation, and what ideas can result when the artists working on a project together are decades apart in age.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 2, 2019 7:32 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Artist Jules Larson stood in the lobby of the Shubert with Anthony Lupinacci, the theater’s director of public relations, and Lew Michaels, the theater’s director of operations. Together they were taking a long look at the art adorning the walls of the theater’s lobby, big canvases of swirling, vivid color that were enlivening the space even as the lights were off while the lobby was closed.
Lupinacci thought he saw the comedy-tragedy masks in Larson’s design. Had she intended to put them there?
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 26, 2019 11:53 am
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Kraig Binkowski
Evening Light.
The image may be in black and white, but it feels like dusk even without looking at the title of the piece. It’s there in the angle of the shadows thrown across the buildings in a nameless American city. It’s there in the texture of the walls, the texture of the glass. And for all the built environment, there’s just one person in the image, perched in a window, hunched over a little as if taking a break from work just to watch the sun go down.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2019 7:45 am
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Brian Flinn
The Parson’s Second Wife.
The first impression of Brian Flinn’s work may be of humor. Some of his figures have the out-of-proportion features of cartoons, the odd poses, the uneven faces. But there’s detail within the comedy, layers of images on the skins of his subjects. There’s an eye that’s startlingly human. The other eye, upon closer inspection, isn’t an eye at all. The layering makes the skin seem translucent. Or maybe the body is in flux. Take another step back, and the image seems more like a flickering film. Maybe if you turned away and looked back again, it would be a different image entirely.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 20, 2019 7:35 am
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Pete Stewart
Spirit House.
The faces of the artist’s parents beam from the underside of a skillet. Wooden and metal utensils gather around it in reverence. A bottle of oil, a bottle of wine. Recipes and spices. You know it’s a shrine before you read the description of Pete Stewart’s Spirit House, but it’s not a shrine in the usual Western religious sense. It’s ancestor worship, a celebration of the deep roots of a family’s tradition, the way what we eat connects us to where we and the generations before us came from. And it is one of many such delectable pieces in “Melted Pots and Cooked Books,” the latest exhibit at the Institute Library on Chapel Street.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 17, 2019 11:41 am
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Jean-Francois Bory
Fin de mots (End of Words).
It’s a typewriter, but it has been rendered useless for its intended task. It has been occupied by soldiers who patrol its keys and chassis as if it’s a hill they’ve just conquered but barely hold. But it still produces language, or at least characters that could be language. They just don’t come out like they used to. They rise from the typewriter’s body as if they’ve been collecting there, even in the typewriter’s occupied state, and just have to come out. What do they mean? Nothing apparent. But that raises other questions: What did they mean before? And where is this all going?
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 13, 2019 7:36 am
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Nancy Mooslin and Susan Newbold
Royal Palm and City Tree.
Two trees stand side by side, their shapes and surfaces rendered in energetic detail. They’re dark against the dazzling lights that seem to pass through them. Knowing that these vibrant images are part of a collaborative exhibit by two artists — Nancy Mooslin and Susan Newbold — the viewer might think that the resemblances happened because the artists traded notes, or possibly even worked with their easels side by side. The truth is that the artists’ work is even more intertwined. Mooslin, who is based in California, and Newbold, who is based in New Haven, are old friends. And they decided to collaborate not only by making pieces that worked well together, but by working on the very same pieces together. Both trees are the products of both their hands.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 12, 2019 12:24 pm
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Diane Brown
Restoration.
Diane Brown’s paintings are luminous fields of color, with gauzy flashes of light floating over textured, deeper hues. They feel elemental, images of water or fire, or perhaps visual depictions of strong emotions — maybe turmoil, maybe ecstasy. Whatever the case, it’s hard not to be drawn in and linger, to see what the depths of the image might hold.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 4, 2019 7:29 am
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Alan Neider
A patchwork quilt made of moving blankets. Ice cream made of cement. A painting made of bananas. These and other playful yet thought-provoking pieces are part of “Matter,” the latest exhibit in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street. The works in the exhibit — by artists Olivia Bonilla, Howard el-Yasin, Joe Fucigna, Alan Neider, and Thomas Stavovy — call attention to the ways the stuff around us shapes our lives.
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Thomas Breen |
Aug 23, 2019 12:27 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
ECA student paintings line vacant Church Street storefronts.
Vacant downtown storefronts are filling up —not with new businesses, but with temporary art installations designed to showcase local talent and encourage landlord maintenance in an increasingly gap-toothed retail landscape.
