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?
Fitzsimmons’s pieces, and their ambiguity set the stage for “Mysterious Circumstances,” the latest art exhibition in the Institute Library’s gallery on Chapel Street, running now through Jan. 24. It’s fitting that the opening reception for the show was set last weekend, close to Halloween. With its unsettling photos and other visuals, including a few never-before-seen visual gems from maestro of the macabre Edward Gorey, it was the perfect place to get a little creeped out. But the show’s long run lets on that it has a lot more to say, and it does, about our abiding fascination with the darkness in life, the way we depict it in art, and the fine, fuzzy line between confronting the reality of the grimmer parts of history and exploiting them.
Geoffrey Detrani
Unwept, Unkept: Arrows and Threads.
To start, several of the pieces remind the viewer that an artist can create a sense of dread without having a specific subject at hand. Geoffrey Detrani’s abstractions, especially in the context of the show, are more than enough to elicit a mood.
John Frederick Walker
Stolen Page.
John Frederick Walker’s book pieces, meanwhile, exude foreboding. What messages printed on the pages were so potent that the book needed to be blacked out? And what does it mean that a page is missing? What will be unleashed on the world because it is legible?
CAVITY.
New Haven-based tattoo artist Rex Morris taps into the power of unsettling imagery; they harness that power on their clients’ skin and transfer it to them. “Morris, also known as FCKNRX, is an abstract contemporary tattoo artist whose work embraces the dark edges of the fringed underground. Through a progressive and poignant destruction of the tokenized tattoo industry, Rex is creating a visual language that resonates with those who do not find themselves represented through mainstream tattoo aesthetics, philosophies or archetypes,” a statement on Morris’s website reads. “FCKNRX tattoos are meant to endow body-ownership and control in a world where we often have none. Like a controlled burn in the depths of a far reaching forest, this artwork compassionately destroys to make way for new.”
But what is the source of that power? Here, show organizers Martha Willette Lewis and Maxim Schmidt pull back the curtain on our fascination, as they intersperse the art in the show with accounts of real brutality. There are the killing of patients in Chicago’s Dunning Asylum at the end of the 19th century, which newspapers described in lurid detail. There is also an account of the execution of a man named Antoine-Francois Desrues, convicted of poisoning a woman and her son, in 18th-century France. He was tortured to death, but “it wasn’t enough to harrow his body,” an account reads. A book appeared shortly after he died, and “the streets of Paris were flooded with a mysterious profusion of other sinister engravings of Desrues and his exploits.” His perceived androgyny, in the manner of his dress, made him a sensation, the archetype of a deviant villain. How deep does the exploitation of Desrues go?
It’s a question that continues to dog us — as individuals with intensely varied degrees of stomach for such stories, and as a society with a seemingly insatiable appetite for them — as true crime novels, documentaries, podcasts, and TV shows have flourished. People are at least as interested now in the terrible things that can happen to other people as they were two centuries ago.
It’s telling that true crime remains so popular even as In Cold Blood — which perhaps kicked off the modern American incarnation with its publication in 1966 — offers a cautionary tale, as the book, detailing the murder of a family on a Kansas farm and the fallout for the townsfolk and, in time, the murders, is widely understood as having ruined Truman Capote, its author, even as it made him wealthy. If there’s exploitation, where does it begin for Capote? Where does it begin for those of us who have read it? Why do we want to know these things?
Thus questions about exploitation, in turn, rest on a deeper question of why so many of us are drawn to take in books, movies, visual art, and other artifacts about the bleaker, unsettling side of human life. Part of that fascination, arguably, isn’t exploitative at all. Lewis and Schmidt make deft use of family photos submitted by New Haven community members to show that the extreme cases that appear elsewhere in the exhibition help contextualize what for many people is a vague sense of unease about their own surroundings, their families’ pasts, perhaps even themselves. Many live with the sense that something is askew in their lives, even if they can’t quite put their finger on it. The secret histories that are laid bare — even if they’re upsetting — are also validation that there are indeed secret histories, things that happened that people don’t talk about. The revelations of horrors in a small town in Wisconsin is validation that bad things can and do happen to people. When they go unnoticed, survivors can feel isolated. When we talk about them, maybe we all don’t feel quite so alone.
“Mysterious Circumstances” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through Jan. 24. Visit the library’s website for hours and more information.