A friend and I were playing with the acoustics in a domed room in the European Art section of the Yale University Art Gallery. If one person stands in the corner to the left of a statue and another stands with their ear to the opposite corner, the first person’s whisper will be amplified by the dome and heard clearly by the second. Meanwhile, the symmetrical echoes caused by the dome meet and cancel each other out in the dead center of the dome; talk and walk through the center of the hallway and you’ll find that when you hit the center, the natural reverb in the room suddenly disappears.
We were testing that out when a passing docent interjected: “If you think that’s cool, then come with me.”
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 4, 2019 1:13 pm
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Keith Johnson Photos
At first glance, maybe it looks like a simple painting made on a textured canvas with a broad brush and a confident hand. Maybe that hand has captured a distant mountain and its foothills, giving birth to a meandering river.
But they’re really just tar-filled cracks in street pavement. And that’s part of the point of “2018,” photographer Keith Johnson’s exhibition of recent work, now running at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville until Feb. 10.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 31, 2019 1:24 pm
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Osvaldo Mesa
Passing Glance.
Shapes undulate against a circus background. The green pods could be plants or bags. The lengths of cord could be a stem or a noose. Are the things inside the speech bubble plants or insects
Osvaldo Mesa’s Passing Glance needs more than that to be read fully, and is of a piece with “Ear to the Ground,” an exhibit running at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Feb. 21. Energetic, colorful, and off-kilter, the exhibit engages by balancing the playful and the sinister.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2019 1:17 pm
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Amie Fanning Photos
An island with a steeple rising from it, floating in a lake surrounded by mist. Wild horses charging through water. And snow on the arch on Wooster Street.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 17, 2019 8:24 am
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Sam Messer
Untitled (from Denis the Pirate series).
A sailing ship transformed, with eyes on its sails, heads toward the edge of the world, until a hand rises from the mythological depths to warn the vessel to turn back. A hurricane whirls at the center of a small square that shouldn’t be able to contain it. Empty pools bake by the seashore; are they being built or are they being abandoned? It’s hard to say.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 13, 2019 11:29 pm
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Roberta Friedman
Hot Stuff.
Roberta Friedman’s Hot Stuff, true to its name, blazes with whirls and streaks of bold color, lancing across the paper. Here and there are corrosive interruptions that crackle with their own energy. It’s the product of a process using hot wax on a steel plate that required Friedman to work fast and embrace accidents — and allowed her a chance to express her current state of mind.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 11, 2019 8:46 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Geertz.
The Institute Library is changing its organizational structure as it works, at last, to address structural problems with its aging building. But everything’s going to be OK.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2019 12:57 pm
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David Roth
Serigraph.
The two images in David Roth’s Serigraph are in many ways identical. Same size. Same pattern of dots of changing hues, creating the same shapes, the same shifting fields of light and dark. But in terms of color, they depart radically. One employs only blacks and whites, shades of gray. The other, a vivid palette of the six primary and secondary colors.
It’s a study of color, but more important, a study of the effect of color on the viewer. “What can color do? What is it doing for you?” said gallery owner Gabriel DaSilva. “Does it speak to you differently?”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 7, 2019 1:08 pm
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John Goto
Deluge, 2000-2001.
The skies above are a roiling gray as the water reaches halfway up the wheels of a vehicle. The people in the picture may panic, or flee, or face the waves, but they know they’re in harm’s way. The above description could apply equally to John Goto’s Deluge and Frederick Rosenberg’s The Mail Coach in a Flood, two works of art separated by the better part of 200 years but connected by the same concern: rising waters, and our ability to survive them.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 3, 2019 8:26 am
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Unknown
Old Light Signal on Long Wharf, 1933.
Yale-New Haven Hospital sits on the place where a church once burned from arson and buried its dead. The Long Wharf light, now electric, was for a time lit every night by a man named Tom Wilson, who died just as he was about to light it one night in 1910. And College Street Music Hall stands where a church — the College Street Church — was built, then converted into a music hall that was lost in a fire in 1921 that killed eight people and injured more than 70.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 2, 2019 8:31 am
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Liz Antle-O’Donnell Photos
Pizza making at Rawa as part of “Let’s Play.”
From its art galleries to its warren of studio spaces to its live music and theater venue at Lyric Hall, “Westville is seen as an arts center in New Haven,” said Elizabeth Antle‑O’Donnell. An initiative she’s helping to build is making sure it stays that way, and grows.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 18, 2018 8:36 am
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Julie Fraenkel
Conversation.
Two finely textured dolls stand facing each other. Their expressions are simple, but not simplistic. They suggest openness, warmheartedness, a willingness to engage. One of them has an open flame in her hand. She passes the flame to the other one.
The piece, by Julie Fraenkel, is called Conversation. As apt as it is for its chosen subject, it’s also a fitting concept for “Deck the Walls,” the last exhibition of the year from Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 10, 2018 8:39 am
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Luciana Q. McClure Photos
AwardeesMelton, Slomba, Downing, DeLauro, Hameen, and Washington.
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 38th annual awards ceremony, held Friday during a luncheon at the New Haven Lawn Club, began with a protest. As patrons were seating themselves in the Lawn Club’s expansive ballroom, a troop of young women marched in file toward the stage, chanting and holding aloft signs about stopping domestic and sexual violence, about women’s suffrage, about curing breast cancer.
The women were dancers from Premier Dance Company, headed by Hanan Hameen, one of the afternoon’s award recipients. They took the stage to a blast of music from the speakers, moving from funk to pop to hip hop, as patrons finished sitting down — a fitting nod to the theme of the arts awards this year, of phenomenal women.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 5, 2018 2:03 pm
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James Montford
Target Arrows, 2018.
An arrow embedded in the wall of the gallery. A cascade of disembodied hands, hanging from vines. Walls plastered with the arresting racial imagery of yesteryear. True to its name, Artspace’s latest exhibit, “In Plain Sight/Site,” drags history out into the open for us to see, and it’s not designed to make you feel comfortable.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 3, 2018 1:12 pm
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Sophie Zyla Photos
Autumn — Red-Tailed Hawk.
Autumn, a red-tailed hawk, is perched on an handler’s glove with an almost quizzical look on her face. Her wings seem half-ready to take flight, her beak a little open, as if she has something to say. It is so tempting to anthropomorphize her. But, as photographer Sophie Zyla’s thought-provoking photography exhibit, “Raptors, Rescues, and Ambassador Birds from A Place Called Hope,” suggests, that’s part of the problem.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2018 8:27 am
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Joseph Wright of Derby
The Prisoner.
The cell looks more like a tomb, a catacomb, something to get lost and buried in. The barred windows let in so little light that most of the image is taken up by darkness. It might take a minute to locate the prisoner in the picture, slumped on the floor near the window but barely registering the sun streaming in.
It’s a portrait of solitary despair, and is at the heart of “Captive Bodies: British Prisons, 1750 – 1900,” an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art that’s in the final weeks of its run but, in the context of a changing gubernatorial leadership, takes on a certain urgency along with its timeless tone of caution.
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 8, 2018 9:06 am
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Jon Nagel
Ceschi Ramos.
New Haven-based record label Fake Four Inc is marking its 10th anniversary through celebration, retrospection and introspection. Fake Four was started by Ceschi Ramos and his brother David in 2008 and became so much more than a business; the brothers are acknowledging this milestone with a show on Saturday, Nov. 10, at Three Sheets New Haven on Elm Street.
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Jake Dressler |
Nov 6, 2018 1:31 pm
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New Haven goths and goth-curious art lovers congregated in Lyric Hall in Westville to celebrate goth artwork at the first annual Gothic Arts Market, hosted by Lorelei Rayven.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 1, 2018 12:16 pm
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Amanda Lee
Amphiprion Ocellaris and Heteractis Magnifica.
Two clownfish hide in the tendrils of an anemone.: It’s a common enough scene if you’re a clownfish. But the way painter Amanda Lee has rendered the image in acrylics, it’s a riot of color, like a fireworks display.
It’s a testimony to the talent Lee has honed for herself under the instruction of Kwadwo Adae and Toni Giammona at Adae Fine Arts Academy on Chapel Street. And you can catch Lee’s work and the work of other academy students in an exhibition entering the last week of its run at the Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 28, 2018 11:58 pm
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Brian Slattery Photos
Sculptures like elephant tusks. Swaddled adults. Glittering masks.
Saturday and Sunday, Artspace’s City-Wide Open Studios Alternative Space Weekend transformed the large office complex of Yale West Campus into an arts extravaganza.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 26, 2018 8:18 am
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Hank Paper
Tourists 2.
In Hank Paper’s Tourists 2, we see two couples sitting on outdoor chairs and tables. We can barely see the faces of one couple; they look like they’re chatting amiably. Maybe they’re good friends. Maybe they’re on a date. The other couple looks tired, like they’ve been on their feet for a while. Maybe they’re carrying too much stuff around. But what really ties it together is the ridiculous gnome in the center of the photograph. Is the man sitting next to it staring it down? Staring past it? Has he almost forgotten it’s there?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 15, 2018 7:41 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
The carved faces of immigrants. A sea turtle diving beneath the waves. A quilt full of mythological animals.
As part of Artspace’s City-Wide Open Studios, The Eli Whitney Barn on Whitney Avenue once again opened its doors to artists who took over the old wooden space and transformed it, for Saturday and Sunday, into a gallery filled with art that was suffused with memory.
