Artists Meditate On The ​“Proximity” Of War

The foggy, paranoid view through the peephole of a door to an apartment. A painting of a container ship erupting into flames. A gas can looking ready to be ignited. They come across as a dislocated parts of a whole, tiny fragments of something too big to comprehend all at once. They’re part of ​“Proximity,” a show running now in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through June 8, in which artists come to grips with the war in Ukraine, producing an exhibit that conveys the conflict’s harrowing immediacy and something of its historical context at the same time.

“Proximity refers to what is local and accessible both psychically and physically. It factors into our ongoing negotiations with self and the other, the subject and the object,” writes curator Steven DiGiovanni in an accompanying statement. ​“Who knew that events would turn as they have since the beginning of the new year? What once lay in the darker regions of history and the imagination has violently erupted with potentially grave geopolitical implications. Behind the flickering images on our big screens, laptops and cell phones is a reality that is difficult to grasp from afar. Yet, as we contend with historical and economic uncertainty, and revisit anxieties once relegated to the Cold War era, we are reminded that nothing in this world lies that far from home.”

DiGiovanni’s apt statement starts with David Borawski’s pieces; the gas can on the second floor of the gallery is his, but it’s his column of suspended flags that catches the eye before the viewer is even in the building. Borawski’s art ​“reflects upon iconic cultural and societal events or moments that have influenced major shifts in our collective consciousness, but now may be near the point of forgetting.… Both expressed and implied references to pop culture, social justice, art history and the dark alleys of society, all the while drawing upon lived personal experience, suggest connections and idiosyncrasies while exposing them as uncanny precursors to present-day realities.” In the context of the rest of the show, Borawski’s pieces take on additional poignancy. They read as artifacts from the conflict, and the mind races to fill in their backstories, while also being reminded that there isn’t nearly enough information to do so. That combination of urgency and unfathomability lies at the heart of much of how we’re experiencing the war in Ukraine, though a series of reports and flickers of video footage that shows us too much and not enough.

Joan Fitzsimmons’s pieces, which were made in 2007 in an apartment building in Warsaw, meanwhile, allow for a bit of perspective. Fitzsimmons went to Warsaw years ago thanks to fruitful friendships with artists, which gave her a taste of the fragility of the restructuring happening across Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. ​“My room was in a building that belonged to a series of structures referred to as ​‘Communist buildings,’ ” she writes, which had ​“neither grace nor character. It was apparent that capitalism was in full flower. Young professionals had bought and upgraded many of these apartments, yet it seemed to me that lives were lived in interior spaces.… While comfortable enough, the unreconstructed decor belonged to the 1970s. It was redolent of an era that I, as an American, associated with fear and oppression.” Her pieces effectively capture something of the mood of Eastern European politics more broadly at that time, as many countries tentatively turned toward Western Europe, knowingly under Russia’s watchful eye; in Ukraine specifically, it could be said that some had been anticipating Russia’s full-scale invasion ever since it annexed Crimea in 2014.

John Keefer reveals in his statement that his art often focuses on tragedy as a subject. ​“The power and the value of tragedy is bound up with our feelings of pity, shock and horror at the spectacle of that downfall and the well-known catharsis that follows. But I don’t understand catharsis as a relief or a release. I see it as more of a rebalancing, a reminder of the immutable rules of the game; a game played at twilight. The realization, the recognition of beauty comes just before the dark.” His oil paintings hearken back to paintings of sea battles from centuries ago (like the ones that hang in the Yale Center for British Art), except that Keefer strips his subject of any heroics, leaving a document of chaos and violence. In its choice of medium, it hearkens back to historical conflicts and the way those conflicts were depicted at the time. In its style and its treatment of the subject, it is decidedly contemporary.

The larger pieces in the exhibit are tied together by a swarm of small pieces from Nathan Lewis that are, at first glance, the easiest to overlook, but then on second glance, the easiest to get lost in. Combining a kinetic style and a way with short phrases, Lewis’s pieces contain echoes of Goya’s excoriating prints The Disasters of War, and also of the walls full of pictures of missing persons that appear in the wake of violent catastrophic events all over the world. His depictions of human action can become vaguely surreal, in the way past artists have gotten the absurdity amid the carnage of war. And at the same time, his pieces put the viewer right in the moment. In one particularly small and affecting pieces, war is a thunderhead, a swirling mass of destructive energy. The lone figure in the piece is at its mercy — all too aware it’s coming, and powerless to get out of the way.

“Proximity” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through June 8. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.