Howard El-Yasin
Blue Velvet Suitcase.
Blue Velvet Suitcase is simple: a wooden chair, a small suitcase, a shirt from a uniform, neatly folded. It’s unassuming enough that it almost — almost — invites the viewer to sit in the chair. But the text printed on the facing wall tells us we’re looking at so much more.
The piece is part of “Material Worlds,” the latest show at the New Alliance Foundation Art Gallery at Gateway Community College, curated by Noe Jimenez and running through Feb. 26. The suitcase, we learn, belongs to the paternal grandparents of the artist, Howard el-Yasin. In the 1930s, “they left the agrarian Jim Crow South for better opportunities in the North,” el-Yasin explains. For a time, they worked in domestic service to a wealthy family, living in the attic apartment of their mansion on St. Ronan Street. Grandfather William was a driver; grandmother Ruby did housework. William then got factory work and Ruby worked as a custodian at Yale (“the blue velvet coffin,” el-Yasin calls it). She cleaned private houses, too; el-Yasin, in his childhood, sometimes helped her do it.
“Ruby received low wages for her labor her whole life,” el-Yasin writes. “She wore her blue Yale University smock uniform over her own clothes when cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, emptying trash cans and more. Her uniform is a reminder of the domestic care and labor of many Black and Brown women, which must be acknowledged, again and again.”
El-Yasin writes further about how Ruby would never have had a chance to study at Yale at the time she was cleaning its property. “Blue Velvet Suitcase is a monument to my grandmother.… Her capacity was unfulfilled, but she is remembered.”
Douglas Degges
forever eating its own tail on my brother's shirt.
None of that meaning is inherent to the objects in the sculpture; it’s the artist who does the unpacking, who carries its importance and conveys it to the viewer. In the process — in addition to giving us a poignant slice of personal history that resonates with many in New Haven — el-Yasin is demonstrating something to us about how meanings can be constructed, and how they can transform our relationship to the object.
“This exhibition centers the theme of materiality within three differing art practices, exploring material’s capacity to abstract or distort content,” an accompanying note states. “El-Yasin’s work investigates ‘the materiality of “things” as signs pointing to multiplicities of meaning, including social values that may reference marginalization.’… The investigations within El-Yasin’s work reflect the theme of differentiating modes of interpretation across mediums and context. Before we knew the family history, the shirt could have been anyone’s, something the artist found yesterday. Now that we know the history, we see the shirt as a family heirloom, as full of meaning as a photo album.”
Artist Douglas Degges likewise deploys family history in creating art, but unlike in Blue Velvet Suitcase, a situation that could have been presented clearly is made more difficult to read. “In Degges’ abstractions, images are zoomed in on and context is removed. Many of Degges’ images are based on cell phone photos sent to him by his parents. Obscured sometimes beyond immediate recognition, Degges compositions are an extraction of content from a personal, lived-in database of images, creating a new state of meaning,” an accompanying note states. Without that note, even the source of the image is unclear, and we’re left only with the piece itself, a photograph that’s hard to parse, blurred images. Constructing a definitive meaning is out of the question. But there’s enough to go to want to try; we just have to know that whatever meaning we come up with is one we created for ourselves.
Untitled Brown and White.
One wall of the gallery, meanwhile, is dominated by artist John Keefer’s enornous painting of a dog. As an accompanying note states, it “pans out, framing an expanded landscape. While Degges’ and El-Yasin’s works render conceptual interpretations of their inspirations, Keefer’s massive landscape is thickly painted, monumental and heavily material.” The painting captures a moment in time — the dog isn’t posing, or doing anything out of the ordinary for a dog. The size, the form, of the painting conveys the message. The animal, and that moment, for whatever reason, were important. We don’t have to know what the reason is; Keefer’s painting, by its presence, makes us feel it.
“Material Worlds: John Keefer, Howard El-Yasin, and Douglas Degges” runs at the New Alliance Foundation Art Gallery at CT State Gateway, 20 Church St., through Feb. 26. An opening reception is scheduled for Jan. 25 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.