Visual Arts

“Altars of Reconciliation” Unites Faith and Culture

by | Jun 9, 2023 9:09 am | Comments (0)

Erin Shaw

Protect Us From Ruin.

Erin Shaw’s Protect Us From Ruin shows photographs of three shadowed women confined within wooden panels like church windows. Each panel is wrapped with colorful bands that both imprison and protect the figures. 

That dichotomy, between protection and captivity, represents the friction between Shaw’s identity as a member of the Chickasaw Nation and a Christian. As long as I can remember, I’ve had one foot in two worlds,” she explains in an accompanying statement. It’s been the work of my life to live in that tension as best I can, understand and reconcile it.”

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ECA Artists Find Space In Smallness

by | Jun 6, 2023 8:33 am | Comments (1)

The paper houses are perched on the ragged edges of foam cliffs. There are places in the world like it, where people have built actual houses in unlikely places, on rocks all too close to the water, on stilts over surging marshes, on the sides of mountains. But the houses in this art exhibition push it all just a little further. Upon closer examination, some of the structures are more improbable than real houses could be. Others are built high overhead; you’d have to have wings to live there. Finally, there are the houses built on a wall’s vertical face, oriented sideways. To live there, you’d have to defy gravity.

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Four Artists Find The Depth In The Field

by | Jun 2, 2023 8:30 am | Comments (0)

Robert Bienstock

Concentricity 3.

Robert Bienstock’s Concentricity 3 is an abstract piece, but the lines are evocative of several natural forms at once. They could be the shapes on a topographical map, depicting hundreds of square miles of land. They could also be organic or inorganic forms growing under the light of a microscope. Bienstock may make conceptual art, but the patterns point toward the real.

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Haven String Quartet Makes Painting An Experience

by | Jun 1, 2023 9:04 am | Comments (0)

Eleanor Polak Photos

Haven String Quartet at Yale Art Gallery.

Think about the relationship between listening and looking.”

So encouraged Jessica Sack, curator of public education at the Yale University Art Gallery and organizer of Playing Images,” at an event that combined artwork with the music of the Haven String Quartet.

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Isaac Bloodworth Finds A Path For Joy

by | May 30, 2023 8:53 am | Comments (4)

Brian Slattery photo

Isaac Bloodworth.

His characters grace New Haven’s walls and windows. His puppets appear on New Haven’s stages. Now and again, he himself appears at community meetings and labor events, helping facilitate the conversation while also keeping an eye on the goal of creating more equity, more inclusion, and more compassion. In his art and action, Isaac Bloodworth has had a hand in shaping the direction the Elm City is moving in.

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Painters Find The Point In The Abstract

by | May 25, 2023 8:16 am | Comments (0)

Esmeilyn Tejeda

Herterochromia Iridium.

Esmeilyn Tejeda’s Herterochromia Iridium is the portrait of a man and an exercise in style. Tejeda’s attention to the details of her subject’s face and the abstractions she introduces work together to reveal something of the subject, his strength and his vulnerability. The painting is part of a series of Tejeda’s, and the aim of that series — an exploration of how facial expressions give way to deeper personal insights, the challenges of removing our masks to reveal who we are when confronted with public scrutiny, and the juxtaposition between the facade we display versus the emotions we attempt to subdue” — shines through.

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Four Artists Emerge For Spring

by | May 17, 2023 8:55 am | Comments (0)

Danae.

Anastasia Mastilovic’s painting Danae may be named after a figure in Greek mythology, but her style makes the figure evocative of more. The woman could be a goddess or a mermaid. She could be in repose, or unleashing magical powers. Or perhaps it’s all a metaphor, about power, latent and dynamic, and how it can be used to transform the world.

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Fair Haven Art Show Finds A Place To Land

by | May 9, 2023 8:40 am | Comments (2)

Milena Alvarez

Luz.

Luz, by Milena Alvarez, gets its effect first and foremost from the atmosphere the artist captures. It’s a picture that looks hot, a blazing afternoon. The people are keeping cool. The artist is part of the painting, as all three subjects are aware of her, which complicates things. Was the artist just taking their picture? Or was the artist interrupting something? The ambiguity is heightened by the subjects’ blurred faces. They seem relaxed enough, but we’ll never know what they’re thinking.

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Two Artists Capture The Matter Of Moments

by | May 5, 2023 9:13 am | Comments (0)

Keith Johnson

Flying Untied (detail).

The sky is full of planes. Not like it is at an airport, or ever an air show. No, in Keith Johnson’s Flying Untied, the atmosphere is littered with planes, as if they’ve been shaken all at once out of a gigantic cosmic bag, or as if a dozen air traffic controllers messed up at once and we’re in for the biggest cumulative air disaster the world has ever seen. Flying Untied succeeds in being both somewhat comical and a little threatening in this regard, an effect amplified by the fact that — apart from their proximity to one another — the planes seem totally natural. 

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Artspace Sends Out "Love Notes"

by | May 4, 2023 8:42 am | Comments (6)

Carla Lia’s postcard-size piece, at first glance, seems altogether pleasant, a depiction of a girl with a heart-shaped balloon. But coming in close reveals layers of sharp humor. The picture is slipping out of the frame, which seems to be acting as a shredder to the image. Soon, it seems, girl and balloon will be in tatters. Which is where the text at the bottom comes in, feeling like a well-earned punchline: from my cold, dead hands.”

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Artists Meet Up And Create At Never Ending Books

by | May 2, 2023 8:38 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos

Painting by Ben Cannan.

Sunday morning may have been gray and rainy outside, but inside Never Ending Books a group of artists was bringing color and shape to the State Street space with pencils, pens, clay, watercolors, and acrylics. Arts Meet Up, a twice monthly event, provides an open area for creatives of all kinds and all levels. According to Ryan Licwinko, a member of the Volume Two collective that runs the space, the event has been going strong since June of last year with a simple and straightforward goal: to give artists a space to create.

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Artists Create Room To Grow

by | Apr 26, 2023 8:45 am | Comments (0)

A small sculpture hangs from the ceiling of City Gallery on Upper State Street and floats, as if it’s alive and capable of hovering in midair, or perhaps is a bit of plant life floating in the ocean. All around it, the walls are decorated with pieces that read like fungal growth, or the traces of growth, or perhaps the tracks left by some land or sea creature. They and the rest of the pieces in the gallery are so thoroughly integrated that it would be possible to believe that they were made by a single artist. But it’s really the work of two artists — Meg Bloom and Cyra Levenson — working in conversation with one another. And as the title of the show — Regenerations,” running through April 30 — suggests, that conversation has been nothing but fruitful.

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Ely Center Show Sees "Truth In Three Colors"

by | Apr 13, 2023 8:25 am | Comments (0)

Greg Aimé

Sir MacArthur and Pope Francis

Greg Aimé’s Sir MacArthur and Pope Francis are already intricate enough from a visual perspective. They are riffs on, even explosions of, classic European portraiture. They are collages to get lost in, places where cultural signifiers blend and collide. They capture the scrum of history, the messy generation of culture, where suffering, celebration, experience and investigation commingle. Aimé then adds a layer for anyone with a device that can read a QR code; there’s music, narration, that gives more context, broadens and deepens the themes. The layers of aural and visual components are a statement in themselves. There’s always more to learn, always ways to dig deeper.

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Ex-Ely Center Employee Slams Board On Sex Offender's Role; Kauder: New Haven's A "Second Chance" City

by | Apr 11, 2023 4:46 pm | Comments (42)

Brian Slattery File Photo

Now-former Ely Center employee Max Schmidt: "I think we can do better."

A now-former employee at a Trumbull Street visual arts gallery left his job after finding out about a board member’s decade-old child pornography arrest.

That employee is now speaking out about what he describes as an insensitive and unsupportive workplace, as well as an alleged exodus of board members sparked by their former colleague’s criminal record.

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After Resignations, Ely Center Charts Path Forward

by | Apr 10, 2023 12:47 pm | Comments (6)

Brian Slattery Photo

Conversation facilitator Kim Weston: "I want young people, and children, and anyone who walks into this space to be safe."

A downtown visual art gallery has kicked off a public reckoning with how to become a safe” workplace in the wake of resignations by several board members and an employee.

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Artists Explore The Cost Of Culture

by | Mar 28, 2023 8:24 am | Comments (1)

Emmanuel Massillon

Drill Music.

Emmanuel Massillon’s trumpet doesn’t have a mouthpiece. It can’t play. That’s the first hint that there’s a problem. Linger and look a little more, and you see that the misshapen bell of the horn is actually made from bullet casings. The title of the piece, Drill Music, suggests the indictment the artist is handing to that particular form of music. But something bigger and deeper is afoot as well.

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Artists Find And Lose Their Voices

by | Mar 23, 2023 8:54 am | Comments (0)

Joseph Keckler’s video installation Ghost Song (which can be viewed in its entirety here) describes an erotic encounter with a spirit that is made hilarious by the multiple layers of incongruous media Keckler uses to create the story. It is funny enough that the encounter — I had sex with a ghost,” the subtitles plainly read — is described in ludicrous detail (“different poses, like elderly aerobics. My ghost was a body worker. I held my arms in the air like a lost raver”). Funnier still that, after a more traditional ghost story opening, Keckler conveys the story in Italian, sung as light opera. The more seriously he emotes, the funnier it gets.

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