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Brian Slattery |
Feb 22, 2024 9:41 am
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A giant squid seems to erupt from the floor of the gallery. Not far away, another wooden figure, more abstract, takes on a shape that could be leaning into the wood’s natural form and could have deviated far from it; from the finished product, it’s hard to say. Close by, there’s an abstract canvas with the contours of a cityscape, the hulking buildings rising from streetlights into darkness, all of it reflected in water. Unifying these works — by William Kent and Leo Jensen — are both the aesthetic sense of the era in which they were created and a more universal spirit of exploration. They’re what happened when the artists making them tried new things.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 21, 2024 9:34 am
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Roy Money
Emeishan View 2.
The view of a mountain in Sichuan, China is breathtaking, though not for the usual reasons. Photographer Roy Money doesn’t train his camera on the usual kind of tourist pictures — the highest peak, the widest vista, the prettiest temple. Instead, he has an eye for the beauty in the details, the shape of the land, a mat of vegetation, curls of fog. Pictures of famous vistas might make us want to go there. Pictures like Money’s might give us more of a sense of what it’s like to already be there.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 16, 2024 9:28 am
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Shaunda Holloway’s Nature’s Children greets viewers as soon as they enter the second floor of the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop. Over the shoulder of that piece, Aisha Nailah’s HERstands ready, like an ally. From the doorway, it’s easy to see that the pieces in the show, by multiple artists, share affinities in form and color, as well as subject matter. The diversity of the voices is vast. But they’re all in the same cause together.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2024 9:23 am
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New Haven artist Sarahi Zacatelco.
On the walls of Atticus on Chapel Street, just above diners’ heads, is a row of mixed-media artworks that brighten and enrich the space, making it feel both more vibrant and more homey. But a closer look suggests complication, symbolism, layers of meaning.
As accompanying labels explain, the pieces are loaded with significance. The first encapsulates a prayer from the culture of the Huichol in Mexico for health, home, and a long life. In the second piece, the flower — associated with the Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli — was used to remedy fever and burns. The third represents the Aztec and Mayan god Quetzalcoatl and his abilities as a seer. It only gets richer from there.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 13, 2024 9:14 am
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It’s not just the large paintings covering the walls that suffuse the gallery with color, though they go a long way toward transforming the space around them by themselves. The balloons making their way around the gallery floor help out a lot, too. Even if the gallery is quiet — has a party just finished, or is one about to start? — they encourage a different way of engaging with the art, a little less formal, a little more festive. Maybe, in another sense, they help us let our guard down, and be more open to what the art has to say.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 6, 2024 10:00 am
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William Frucht
From the series Coney Island.
WIlliam Frucht’s photograph from Coney Island combines rigor and humor to make for an engrossing image. On the rigorous side, there’s the strict geometry of the workout equipment, the thin band of ocean separating tan sand from slate sky. On the humorous side, there’s something entertaining about the poses; they’re exercising, but they’re also like kids on playground equipment. More generally, there’s the juxtaposition of the handful of people working out with the multitudes in the background lounging in the sun. For every person working to get their heart rate up, there are 10 more who maybe think they’re trying too hard.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 2, 2024 9:17 am
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Gregory Crewdson
Untitled (from the series Beneath the Roses).
Gregory Crewdson’s arresting photograph is nearly five feet tall and eight feet across, large enough for a viewer to get completely engrossed in the details. The scene at its most basic is simple enough: A man standing by a river bank, shirtless; a makeshift shack behind him, lit from the inside; beyond a stand of trees, a row of houses.
But the mood, the lighting, and the details all set the wheels for any number of stories in motion. Does the man live in the shack? Or does someone else? Or does anyone? Do the people who live in the houses know someone’s down there by the river, or is the man truly isolated? And what has brought him to the water’s edge at night? Is he lost in contemplation? Is he waiting for someone else to arrive? Or, perhaps, is he watching intently as something’s happening, maybe on the opposite shore, maybe in the water itself? Maybe this is actually a scene of ferocious action, only just out of frame.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2024 9:15 am
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Howard El-Yasin
Blue Velvet Suitcase.
Blue Velvet Suitcase is simple: a wooden chair, a small suitcase, a shirt from a uniform, neatly folded. It’s unassuming enough that it almost — almost — invites the viewer to sit in the chair. But the text printed on the facing wall tells us we’re looking at so much more.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 12, 2024 8:30 am
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Hank Paper
Another Brand New Day.
Hank Paper may have given his photograph the perfect title. Another Brand New Day is on one level just a normal street scene in Italy, but its vivid colors and warm light are almost supernaturally delicious. Paper finds the ecstasy in the everyday, and with it, a palpable sense of hope.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 11, 2024 10:03 am
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Judy Atlas
Blue Flux.
Judy Atlas’s Blue Flux can evoke dozens of things if you let it: a cityscape in the rain, a snow field, the inside of an ice crystal, with just a little sun streaming through. But that’s not the game the painting asks you to play. It can also just be taken on its own terms, as color and texture, a composition that is satisfying because its elements are well balanced, without having to mean anything in particular. Or maybe put another way, it can evoke a few meanings at once, without ever needing to land on a single one; it’s the impression it leaves on the viewer that matters.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2024 8:59 am
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It’s a plush duck butt, hanging from the wall. Is it a piece of cartoon taxidermy? Is the bird crawling through a hole? Or is there something more oddly magical going on?
The only way this reporter knows for certain that the bird in question is, in fact, a duck, is because elsewhere in “Outdoors at Paul’s” — a show of art by Douglas Degges and Noe Jimenez running now through the week at iiiiotae in Cedar Hill — the duck’s head and torso are emerging from the wall, with the kind of blank stuffed-animal expression into which one can read just about any emotion.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 19, 2023 9:45 am
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Harder with J Topog Rivulets 231.
After decades of printmaking, Barbara Harder revels in embracing the accidents. “I’m trying to make things the way I’m making them,” she said, but “sometimes I almost like tripping up,” because sometimes she likes the images she creates better. “You don’t have to beat yourself up more than you need to,” she continued. “It’s really nice to have the space as an artist to do that exploration, and wrestle with yourself, and the paper, and the ink.… It’s the hope that at times in the studio, I can have this spark… whether it’s done, or whether it’s perfect, or whatever it is, it just makes me happy. It’s something to keep after.”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 18, 2023 8:55 am
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The show of artist Amira Brown’s work, up now at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville through the end of the month, doesn’t have a title, nor do any of the individual pieces. That gesture alone seems to be part of the point, as is the elliptical, border-melting nature of the work itself. It’s a show to find your way into; one possible starting point is a piece that shows, in outline, a person in a classic pose of pondering, but the pondering itself is dissolving the person. The person contains other people. The person contains stars. But Brown’s sly humor is on full display as well. “Meh,” is one complete thought. “Shrug,” another. And then: “rodeo.” The rodeo of making art? Of showing it? Something bigger? Whatever the case, it isn’t Brown’s first.
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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 7, 2023 1:16 pm
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Karen Ponzio Photos.
Cherrie Cherrie through the eyes of Andres Madariaga
Music and visual art both went live Wednesday night at Cafe Nine when Color in Sound, an event organized and curated by local artist Andres Madariaga, brought together three musical acts and a number of visual artists, some who displayed their work, some who created art while the bands played, and some who did both.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 6, 2023 8:59 am
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Ann Lehman
Friends on Bench.
The two friends in Ann Lehman’s sculpture — we only know they’re friends because the title tells us so — appear as though they’re deep in the middle of a long conversation, one that started long before we arrived and will continue after we’ve gone. One is perhaps trying to convince the other of something. He’s pressing his point. The other isn’t convinced, but he’s hearing the argument out. It’s happening on a bench that could be in any public park. In short, it’s a definition of community: people coming together in an open space, exchanging ideas, listening and speaking, challenging one another knowing that the friendship is stronger than any argument, that the bonds between people matter the most.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 5, 2023 8:53 am
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Ken Grimes
Untitled (The Electrical Experiments of Marconi).
Ken Grimes’s pieces in “The Truth Is Out There” partake of the style of cartoons, woodblocks, and also — thanks to the associations from the X‑Files reference in the title — the illustrations on the covers of the Golden Records aboard the deep space exploration vehicles Voyagers 1 and 2. Those contain information for any aliens that might find the record, starting with instructions on how to play the music and proceeding to a diagram showing the location of the origin of the mission, that is, us.
Grimes’s work shares that sense of playful seriousness. It muses aloud whether scientific experiments activated a distant alien probe, the tone of voice making room for wonder, conspiracy, and the skeptical response to both: Probably not. And so what if it did? The inherent humor allows for it all — yet in its dogged focus on its subject matter, puts its thumb on the scale. Grimes hears the skeptics. But what if there’s life out there? When it makes contact, how do we respond?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 29, 2023 8:37 am
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Amartya De
Brassworks, CPIML Building, Kolkata
The photograph of a brass worker in Kolkata encompasses the weight of history and the immediacy of the present; it’s an image from decades ago, but it’s plausible to believe that there are still people who work metal in similar ways now. The picture is lived in. It carries other senses with it. Maybe the tangy smell of heated metal, the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere. The sounds of a metal shop. And for Amartya De, it’s a connection to where he’s from, a small piece of that larger whole.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 28, 2023 7:55 am
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Penrhyn Cook
Holiday Reflections.
Penrhyn Cook’s series of photographs, Holiday Reflections, are absorbing enough in their own right. Colorful and festive, the images are just askew enough to warrant a closer look. Are we looking at double exposures? What do we make of the giant fruit and a rainbow on a city block? In the context of Kehler Liddell Gallery’s annual holiday show — titled “Deck the Walls” and running at the Westville space through Dec. 24 — the title of Cook’s series earns itself a double twist, as the works of fellow gallery members on the opposite walls are reflected in the photos’ glassy surfaces. Images layer on images, an apt depiction of the show as a whole, in which all the gallery members play a part.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 21, 2023 9:07 am
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Dishawn Harris, a.k.a Farmer D., at Saturday's workshop.
Putting your hands to soil to plant garlic. Chewing on a leaf of fresh oregano. Noticing the sun on your face. At “Rooted Youth,” a collaborative event between the Dixwell art center NXTHVN and the garden-creation outfit Root Life, held at the Goffe Street Armory Garden, participants learned about how these simple experiences can open up broader pathways to understanding more about our relationship to our environment, and how we can adapt to climate change.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 17, 2023 9:17 am
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Hyunsuk Erickson
Thingumabob Tribe #3
Hyunsuk Erickson’s Thingumabob Tribe #3 spreads out across one of the first-floor galleries of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Their sinuous shapes and bright colors might carry, for some viewers, suggestions of meaning. They could be seen as chess pieces, or as rock formations on an alien planet. Or perhaps they’re microscopic shapes brought to the human scale. On the other hand, are they really asking to be understood, to be perceived in that way? They can be taken as is, simply as shapes, forms, colors. Or anything in between, an apprehension of form, the content arising in the viewer.
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 13, 2023 9:02 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Making zines at The New Haven Zine Club.
Tiny Ghosts Haunting Small Things, The Band Plays in Front of a Big Audience, and Cars Go Too Fast (and our road design encourages it) are not titles you might find on the bestseller list or at your local news stand. But you can find them in the zine library making its way through the city as part of the New Haven Zine Scene, a group of creatives that meet up once a month to make, read, and talk about zines and share everything and anything zine related. This past Saturday, the group met for the first time at Possible Futures on Edgewood Avenue, where it will continue to trade off monthly meeting dates with Witch Bitch Black Box on Whitney.
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 9, 2023 9:25 am
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Map sketching and nature journaling in East Rock.
East Rock Park on a sunny November Saturday was an idyllic setting for the most recent New Haven Nature Journal Club meet-up. The biweekly event focuses on gathering in natural settings to witness, observe, and document the surroundings through drawings and writings, with a bit of guidance and a bunch of support.
The group, led by Madelyn Neufeld, meets on Saturday mornings twice a month: once in East Rock Park and two weeks later at another location that changes each time. Neufeld started this club back in August after researching the Wild Wonder Foundation — which provides free nature journal resources — and finding no groups in Connecticut.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2023 11:14 am
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Cal Bocicault
It's Gotta Be the Shoes.
The two men in Cal Bocicault’s painting are, first and foremost, stylish, and they know it. Peering askance at the viewer, colors coordinated with themselves and each other, together they open the shoeboxes on their laps. The shoeboxes themselves become classic MacGuffins. We have no idea what’s in the boxes. For all we know, the boxes are empty. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they contain the most stylish sneakers we’ve ever seen, footwear that elevates all the clothes around it. The important thing is that the two men can see what we can’t. They know what’s in the boxes. They’re just not telling us.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 3, 2023 8:52 am
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Joan Fitzsimmons
The Woods.
Joan Fitzsimmons’s images both beckon viewers and warn them about what’s in store in the Institute Library’s upstairs gallery. The hands, in part because of their visual treatment, feel iconic, perhaps from an old horror movie. But what are they doing? Are they trapped? Are they casting a spell? Are these the hands of a prisoner, or is the owner of those hands doing the manipulating?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 1, 2023 8:13 am
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Marjorie Gillette Wolfe
Alhambra Hedge.
Two photographs by Marjorie Gillette Wolfe hang in the front of Kehler Liddell Gallery, at 873 Whalley Ave. in Westville. They’re both of hedges, and the way Wolfe composes the image, the eye is drawn to the plant life, without worrying too much about where it is. We can see the similarities in the forms of the plants, the spacing between them. It’s only in looking at the titles that the true humor comes out, as one photograph is taken in front of a diner somewhere, and the other is taken at the Alhambra, one of the great architectural wonders of the world. Both locations are almost entirely absent from the images.
