Artspace Reads Under The Lines

Julia Rooney’s Scrollscape hangs in the front window of Artspace, serving the dual purpose from the street of inviting people to come in while also obscuring what’s going on within. Inside, Scrollscape reveals itself as a piece that one is allowed to wander within. When you’re inside it, you can only see out in bits and pieces; likewise, someone looking at you from outside the piece — or, for that matter, from another part of the piece — would only be able to see you a little bit at a time. It’s a little disorienting, obfuscating, playful on one but tinged with a little menace. If someone comes looking for you in there, or if you go looking for them, is it hide and seek or stalking?

That mix of emotions and reactions works for the animating idea behind Scrollscape. ​“Body-scaled and mobile, the scrolls are suggestive of personas — different from yet related to a person who has created a version of themselves online,” an accompanying text explains. (Get it? Scrolling.) ​“Rooney’s installation asks a radical question: what does the embodiment of this experience feel like? How does the interaction of real persons with online personas affect the behavior of both?”

Rooney’s piece is a great introduction to ​“Footnotes and Other Embedded Stories,” guided by Artspace’s executive director Lisa Dent in collaboration with Yale University Art Gallery curator Keely Orgeman, organized by Artspace’s director of curatorial affairs Laurel V. McLaughlin, and running now at Artspace through June 25. The exhibit ​“takes inspiration from the tiny number at the bottom of a page that leads to an adjacent text.… disclosing a source, highlighting a reference, offering an opinion, tracing a line from thought to thought.” This overarching formal idea proves to be fertile ground for all the artists in the show — Rooney, Leonard Galmon, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Allison Minto, and Joseph Smolinski — whose work is worth diving into, to show the parallel worlds that can exist hidden in the details of the everyday. 

Each artist has several pieces in the show, and the organizers have taken the unusual step of mixing all of the artists’ works throughout the gallery space, rather than giving the artists their own section. The layout encourages the viewer to make more connections among the ideas floating about the artists’ many pieces. 

The accompanying notes to Leonard Galmon’s Uncle Fred explain that the subject ​“looks away from the viewer, unconcerned by our gaze and absorbed in the everyday action. The release of the cigarette and casual looking are interspersed with the tentacular overgrowth of roots on an urban sidewalk that intersect with the subject’s dreadlocks.… It is as if the roots and the subject harbor multitudes that break expectations of neatness.” It is about ​“Black men exceeding the limiting expectations that U.S. culture places upon people of color, and instead, imagine tender spaces of rest and reflection.”

The shapes in Galmon’s paintings, however, cut up the space in much the same way that the scrolls in Rooney’s Scrollscape do. We get glimpses at the subject, the rest obscured enough that we don’t have quite enough information to know exactly what’s going on. The individual remains half-inaccessible. In the context of both social media and the oppression of Black people, questions arise about how much of that the subjects can control. To be cut into strips against your will is a form of oppression. To erect those strips for yourself can be a form of protection, of the private self against outside intrusion.

In the project room is a short film by Allison Minto about the fact that the land where I‑95 and I‑91 intersect is the site of ​“what would have been the United States’ first HBCU, proposed in 1831 at the First Annual Convention of the Free People of Color convened in Philadelphia,” a note explains. ​“That same year, white property owners put pressure on the city of New Haven, which eventually voted against the college’s existence.” 

The film explores a keen sense of what could have been, had that college been allowed to exist, in cultivating a deep sense of ​“intellectual and communal kinships” within New Haven’s Black community. Her shots of the color guard and marching band at Hillhouse High School, steeped in Black traditions, points at the many ways New Haven’s people have created that sense of kinship for themselves already. But Minto’s angle on what could have been focus on just how much more impactful those efforts might have been with the kind of institutional support a local HBCU would have been able to offer. Most poignant are perhaps the shots of musicians from Hillhouse’s marching band playing at the quasi-derelict land around the highway interchange. A trumpet player is drowned out by a squad of motorbikes. A saxophonist plays on an all-but-empty lot to nobody. Imagine if that scrap of land were instead a nearly 200-year-old university, with the ability to amplify that music? How many people could hear it then?

Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, meanwhile, uses the concept behind the show to look inward, at her own past, while simultaneously looking outward to nature. The three pieces above ​“all depict reflective surfaces and spaces, whether through mirrors placed in New Haven’s East Rock woods or the empty and exposed outdoor room of a mulch dumping site.” In the pieces, Gonzalez Hernandez considers ​“someone I once was, in the language she understood.” The note goes on to explain that Gonzalez Hernandez finds ​“a sense of freedom in the ​‘outside world,’ which contrasts starkly to the strictures of her past in an intentional community, also called a cult.” In the context of the show, Gonzalez Hernandez shows how a person’s past is, in a way, a series of footnotes appended to their present experience, informing and shaping what happens now. In Gonzalez Hernandez’s case, she uses her art to ​“carve out space for the listening to and reimagining of herself.”

In Climate Repository, artist Joseph Smolinski nearly turns the concept of the show inside out by putting all the footnotes forward. Smolinski riffs on the 16th-century European idea of ​“wonder chambers,” pieces of furniture that ​“displayed exoticized objects collected on grand expeditions — often to colonized territories in which natural resource extraction took place — for display in private homes.”

Smolinski, by contrast, opens his piece up entirely, and takes us on a tour of the place we live, and how climate change is affecting it, by showing us the detritus of that change. Perhaps most movingly, the shelving is made from the Lincoln Oak, the huge tree on the New Haven Green toppled by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 (and revealed skeletal remains caught up in its roots). The curios on the shelving then include a broken rear-view mirror, 3D-scanned and printed replicas of melting snow piles, and images of breaking sea ice. It’s an apt comment on the way the evidence for climate change, even at the local level, tends to accumulate around us, the footnotes to our days full of more pressing, immediate concerns. What if we took a day to read all those footnotes at once — to see how all those details coalesce into a larger story about the changes afoot, and the need to adapt. How might we change our behavior then?

“Footnotes and Other Embedded Stories” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through June 25. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.