Ten Years, Tin Musings

We see crushed cans in the natural urban habitat all the time, but artist Christina Hunt Wood makes us look at them again. There they are, on the road, on the sidewalk, in a layer of scattered leaves. But by turning them to gold, one solid color that connotes value, Wood lets us appreciate the shapes they make, and how varied they can be. Sometimes art is just about a change in perspective, a way to see that we’re making art all the time, even if it’s just because we smashed a can of Coke under the front wheel of our car.

“Human Nature” is part of ​“Tin There, Done That,” a group show of work from 19 artists in celebration of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECOCA) turning 10.

The entire show revolves around one of the most workable and common metals out there, tin and aluminum — ​“the traditional material for a 10th wedding anniversary,” an accompanying note states. The show ​“represents ECOCA’s marriage of fostering contemporary arts in New Haven and the charitable legacy of Grace T. Ely in her Elizabethan mansion.” 

The show runs through April 20, with the 10th anniversary celebration continuing on Saturday, April 26, with food, live and silent auctions, a steel drum band, an aluminum origami demo workshop, and a photo booth. The show itself, in marking ECOCA’s longevity, also has picked the right material to give viewers a snapshot of the breadth of art that ECOCA has put on the walls in the past decade.

Among the 19 artists, many lean hard into using tin for its physical properties — it’s shiny and reflective, it’s durable, and it’s easy to make certain kinds of shapes out of it that would be difficult with other materials. Artist Sok Song exemplifies this with the piece Unfolding Currents — Neon Flux. The neon gets a chance to shine twice, with emitted and reflected light. Meanwhile, Song has crumpled tin into a compelling form that feels both like scrap and like a shimmering curtain.

Other artists use tin as a canvas. Deborah Greco paints directly onto a piece of aluminum, then scores some of the paint off, to create a luminous background for the plant life she depicts. On a certain level it’s a pretty stunning transformation: Greco has used a hard, flat metal to connote nothing more than air, to great effect.

Many of the artists in the show use tin to call attention to the way we use, consume, and discard materials in our day-to-day lives. Maria Markham’s Artefact of the Future hones this perspective to a finer point. The piece itself reads as a fine abstract sculpture, but the title encourages the viewer to imagine that it might actually be a functional object, even a part that fell off a machine 1,000 years from now. What purpose does it serve? What purpose do the machine parts we produce now serve? And how obvious will those purposes be to archeologists who find them 1,000 years later?

Meanwhile, in the upstairs galleries is another group show, ​“A Desire Path,” ​“inspired by the unplanned trails that humans create despite extensive planning,” an accompanying note states. Each artist in the show — Jessica Bottalico, Annie Ewaskio, Jessica Fallis and Sydney Kleinrock — ​“navigates their practice similarly to such a structure, finding moments in natural settings to get to their destinations; planned or unplanned, cyclical or straight.”

Fallis’s pieces draw the eye in right away with their eerie depictions of light falling through the branches of deep forest. ​“As a native of New England, I was fascinated by the quality of color and light of the West Coast,” Fallis states. ​“To step into that forest” — Muir Woods, in California — ​“was to experience the sublime and a deep inner peace; these paintings became a way for me to revisit that feeling.” They are also a way for Fallis to explore the surreal behind the sublime, a move made manifest in one of the canvases, in which the outline of a bookcase appears. It’s an intrusion of sharp geometry, and an indoors, civilized object, on a natural landscape, but at the same time, it feels like it’s just in the right place. It turns the forest into a library, the library into a forest, transformations that in a sense we do all the time, in our imaginations and our memories.

Ewaskio, meanwhile, runs with a different interpretation of the word path. ​“Our planet holds knowledge in its physicality: the past, the present, and the future of a landscape hum in simultaneous presence. The landscape overwhelms our limited senses like a drug, placing a distorting lens between our awareness and reality. What I find, in the natural world, is a psychedelic density — a wealth of information seen and unseen.” Ewaskio’s and Fallis’s paintings can be understood as offering complementary perspectives on what happens when we go to a natural place and open ourselves to it. Fallis charts the aspects of a natural place that make that happen. Ewaskio illustrates what can happen in our minds when we let it.

Many people experience time differently in the woods. It can pass quickly and more slowly, revealing, in a way, that it’s more flexible than our more regimented lives in cities and towns suggest. Kleinrock points out that this says something about ourselves — that we, as living creatures, are not as fixed as we might feel sometimes. ​“I use the fragmented nature of the quilted material to queer time through non-linear storytelling, often drawing on stills from life, memory, and imagination,” Kleinrock states. ​“The sections, when viewed as a whole, simultaneously depict moments of growth and decay, chaos and calm — weaving together a picture that evokes our entangled influence on nature through the cyclical passage of time.”

Taken together, the artists get at the ability of natural places to transform us, perhaps more deeply than we can ever transform them. For some people, it’s part of the reason to be afraid of the woods. For others, it can be thrilling, opening doors to serious personal growth and change. Bottalico’s pieces embrace that change in a few different ways at once. 

“For much of my life, I viewed my own body as a … non-functional vessel,” Bottalico states. ​“Then, just weeks after starting this series, I learned I was pregnant. My work evolved from two-dimensional drawings into sculptural forms, driven by an obsession with creating vessels that reflected my ever-changing body — and, more recently, my ever-expanding roles as a woman, wife, mother, educator, and artist.” All the artists remind us that the desire paths we follow change us as much as they change the ground we walk on, and if we do it right, maybe we can flower and bloom like the life all around us.

“Tin There, Done That” and ​“A Desire Path” run at Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through April 20. The 19 artists in ​“Tin There Done That” are Adria Arch, Adam Brent, Tamara Dimitri, Madison Donnelly, Mary Dwyer, Terry Donsen Feder, Lesley Finn, Elli Fotopoulou, Deborah Greco, Shanti Grumbine, Nate Heiges, Tom Kutz, Maria Markham, Hillel O’Leary, Sok Song, Alixe Turner, Shane Ward, and Christina Hunt Wood. Also running in the gallery are two solo shows: Amartya De’s ​“Maidan & XX” and Anita Maksimiuk​’s ​“Stone Screen.” Visit ECOCA’s website for hours and more information.