BRIAN SLATTERY PHOTO
In ways that photographs can’t capture, the installation of “Impossible Souls” — running now through Oct. 29 on the second floor of the Hilles Gallery of Creative Arts Workshop at 80 Audubon St. — makes moving through the gallery feel almost like swimming. Along with the art on the walls, and the art on large columns, numerous pieces are suspended from the ceiling in such a way that they drift and spin with the climate-controlled air. The overall effect quiets the space. It makes you move through the gallery with extra care, knowing that the art isn’t always where you might expect it to be.
Creating an atmosphere is part of what the show is about. “Experience the ineffable in ‘Impossible Souls.’ Connections surface between people, time, and place. Through the serendipity of 缘分 (yuan fen, ‘fateful coincidence’) artists Steffen Pollock and Xiao Ma evoke the heart of Sufjan Stevens’ Impossible Soul as a primary ground to call out multiplicities of shared experience, stories of memory and loss, and explore place and home as a way to access entanglement,” an accompanying statement declares (the song, for what it’s worth, is a nearly half-hour long genre-bending song about a tumultuous relationship and searching for identity and belonging). “The exhibition ‘Impossible Souls’ explores art as a distillation of artists’ relationships that uses visual language as a way to convene over shared humanity and bridge divides.”
Produced by Gabriel Sacco in conjunction with Artspace New Haven and Creative Arts Workshop Hilles Gallery, the show is one in which Ma and Pollock’s work flows together in an immersive experience of words and images that details, movingly, an artist’s search for a kind of personal and artistic solace, which in turn reveals the depth of the emotion in the search itself.
Normally in writing up an art show it makes sense to navigate it by talking about individual pieces — a painting, a sculpture — and how the pieces by accretion add up to a larger whole. “Impossible Souls” isn’t like that. For starters, there is a lot of text, and a lot of it in overtly confessional mode, made more immediate by the fact that it’s handwritten with marker directly onto the surfaces of pieces. In the text, we get a sense of Ma’s own struggles, with making personal connections at school, with finding her way as an artist, and later, with traveling across the country. Embedded in those struggles, however, are strong threads of hope. She meets people with whom she forms deep bonds. Others — like a man she encounters in New Mexico who, it turns out, also serves as a guide, keeping her out of trouble — only appear in the narrative for a short time, but are bright flashes of compassion and humanity. The casual way the text is written, annotated, amended, and patched suggests above all that it’s a work in progress. There’s a lot of story, and it’s not over.
The images surrounding the text — on the walls of the gallery and floating in the air — amplify the story. They come across as snapshots on the journey. There are fragments of landscapes and houses, streaks of pavement and trees viewed from moving vehicles. Some photographs have the sense of overt art projects: nudes posing on lawns, experiments with exposures. But it’s the faces that stay with you. They’re not mentioned specifically in the story; we don’t know who they are, where the photographer met them, what their relationship might have been, let alone whether they’re still in touch now. But they have a look about them, recognizable to anyone who’s had a period in their lives like what the text is describing, a time that feels unmoored, precarious, even sometimes dangerous. A time of missed chances, miscalculations, bad decisions. Moments when you’re in over your head. Sometimes that means you fall, and some people fall a long way. But just as often, there are people there to catch you, even if it’s only for an afternoon. Maybe they give you a ride somewhere, or they say just the right thing at the right time, and it sets you on a better path.
Reading the text and looking at the images, I saw that struggle and the helping hands, and remembered both for myself. And I was reminded, too, how sometimes we get to be part of that web of compassion, catching someone before they fall too far. As goals, convening over shared humanity and bridging divides can seem somehow both too lofty and too simplistic when you say it out loud. The show itself, however, makes you feel it.
“Impossible Souls” runs on the second floor of the Hilles Gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through Oct. 29. Visit Artspace’s website for more information.