Local sculptor Joseph Saccio offers a plastic grass and tar paper vision of the once and maybe future Nine Squares of old New Haven. His “Our Town” is one of 13 fabrications, by turns scary and funny, on view in a new exhibition that feels like a stroll with Chiquita Banana through the Petrified Forest.
Two dozen people gathered at the Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville Sunday afternoon to look at the exhibition titled “transformative,” which features both the sculptures of Saccio and the photographs of Keith Johnson.
Saccio is a much admired local child psychiatrist who has turned his life-long involvement with art into a rising second career. In an artist talk to the gallery’s patrons, he explained that, “However much I try to be tragic in my work, it comes out humorous.”
Saccio’s life and his artistic vision might easily have listed into the heart-breaking, tragic side of the ledger had he allowed it, but he did not.
In 1979 the artist’s twelve-and-a-half year-old son was struck by a bus on Whalley Avenue and killed instantly. The event indeed transformed Saccio, but also his art.
“Within a short time,” Saccio said, “I gave myself my first real studio space. Instead of working in the garage, which I had done all my life, I found a space as high as I could find, fourteen feet, and started really to embrace my artistic life.”
In a kind of now highly personal homage to his son and by drawing on the little dyings and rebirths that characterize our lives, and which are the stock and trade of analysts, Saccio began to build.
Among the objects that emerged were these two large wood memorials to his son, Titled “The Teeth of Grief,” they are cut off wood, some petrified, from trees that fell in a local park during a hurricane in the early 1980s.
For his current exhibition, Saccio has restored, altered, and repainted the sculptures. One of the artist’s questioners said that he saw humor and even irony in the tree, which Saccio has growing out of a bed of coal and yet showing new growth in the form of nodules that look to be more like baby elephant tusks than new branches.
“I deal often in the ironies that come from juxtapositioning of themes and different materials,” Saccio responded, “but I don’t happen to find anything humorous in those pieces.”
In the “Witch Queen of the Forest,” you feel, from a distance, that you’re approaching a svelte and exotic Carmen Miranda figure, or as another interlocutor suggested, some kind of turbaned rajah. It’s all colorful and quaint and approachable.
However, when you indeed approach, you see within the bamboo basketry that forms the ribcage or the head of the figure an assortment of bloody doll faces. Saccio has a collection of these doll parts, boxes of them, apparently left over from the play therapy sessions he used to run in his practice.
That’s juxtaposition for you, or, as Saccio tends to call it irony. However, there’s always a price to pay in terms of impact when you mess with irony, which, at heart, is a cerebral, not an emotional effect.
In Saccio’s work you discover the humor and then the tragedy; or you do so in the reverse, but the discovery is sequential, not at once. That is, the pieces generally don’t blend into a new element, compounded of tragedy and humor, a powerful wallop. It’s not as if you don’t know whether to smile or drop your jaw.
You do both, and yet sometimes the effects of one cancels out the other. So that the humor, instead of striking deeply, risks devolving into wit, and the tragedy feels, well, like the inevitability of life, not a desperate cry against the horror of the repeating cycle.
Of course, as an artist, as opposed to a psychiatrist, materials often dictate where Saccio journeys in his work, and how far. He said he has been a “dumpster-diver” all his life, filling his studio with all kinds of such found materials. The bamboo basketry and rattan that he’s used in his witch and warlock pieces, for example, he picked up in large quantities when the Perkins Fence Factory in Woodbridge burned down.
“Our Town” seems to me, in its simplicity, to have overcome the cerebral dangers of mixing the tragic and comic. It’s just right.
Saccio says the piece owes its inspiration to the photographs of Keith Johnson, whose photograph of similar nine squares of grass hangs on the wall nearby. In fact all of the photographs that Johnson displays are in a repeating series of framed images, three by three, in nine-photo squares. These nine-image photographs, many of forms that echo the trees and other natural materials out of which Saccio builds, fill the side walls of Kehler Liddell as if fencing out an area for Saccio’s petrified trees and turbaned bamboo witches grow.
Johnson’s recurrent images, especially the splashes and mists of Niagara Falls, and formations of fog and rock, from a distance give a sense of clouds rising. And they just might suggest clouds of the apocalyptic mushroom variety. The overall effect of these two artists’ work in tandem is a bit like the final gleeful frames of Stanley Kubrick’s great 1964 film Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where the mushroom clouds practically perform for you a choreographed, sweet thanatopsis.
The exhibition runs through March 1. For hours and programming information, go to the Kehler Liddell site or call 389‑9555.