Art Explores The Importance Of Being Soft

It’s a simple idea with big consequences. The picture of East Rock is the sort you might see on a postcard. The message is easy to digest, a salute to a city the artist loves, a message of solidarity. But it’s also an acknowledgment of struggle, and that’s where the fact that the art is made on a record comes into play. Give the record a spin, and everything gets blurred, both the place and the message. In the midst of the struggle, the hardship can be dizzying. It’s hard to know sometimes which end is up. But that’s also when the music plays.

Beloved New Haven is emblematic of the themes that emerge in ​“Born Soft,” a show of art by Theo Muncey running now at Never Ending Books, 810 State St. Across the show, Muncey deploys bright colors and bold figures in the service of thoughtful themes.

There’s 64 Fairfield Est. 2019, featuring at its center the kind of split-level house that could be in any city in Connecticut and many of its towns, or for that matter, in several places in New England. The house is specific, but the vagueness in location — its generalizability — is part of the point. So is the skeleton of the story the images around the house suggest. Ghosts haunt the place, and there’s alcohol and pharmaceuticals, a sense of quiet desperation. 

But there’s also a moment of kindness, perhaps of shared vulnerability, of getting through something tough with someone else’s help, maybe whether the other person knew how much they were helping or not. Like Beloved New Haven, this art is made on a nontraditional surface, the side of a headphones box. It would have been thrown away by now for sure without the art on it. The art, and the memories, are what keep it around.

The keen sense of having gotten through something harrowing also pervades Magical Girl, Interrupted, in which a naked figure floats in a bubble of light in water prowled by sharks. The viewer doesn’t necessarily get the sense that the girl is powerless; she is protected, and perhaps protecting herself. But the ocean around her is dark and dangerous. She can’t make a false move. She’ll survive the threat, but she’ll remember it later, too.

But the show is more than an illustrated diary. It’s an exercise in empathy, in connecting with viewers who might have had similar experiences, who might feel similarly now. In that sense, the bright colors and characters are important; they suggest kindness, a sense of humor, perhaps a reminder to go easy on yourself sometimes, to treat others with a smile and gentleness. The closest thing to an overt message resides in Linear. Maybe there are people in the world who have understood their lives as an arrow, a straight line, a series of goals formed and achieved, over and over. Theo Muncey is making art for the rest of us, and if we’re honest, that’s probably most of us.

​“Born Soft” is running now at Never Ending Books, 810 State St. Visit the space’s website for hours and more information about this and other events.