Black & Brown Artists Abstract Origins

Howard el-Yasin’s My Mother’s Hose hangs at one end of Orchid Gallery in The Lab at ConnCORP, redolent with associations without landing definitively on a single one. From a certain frame of mind, the associations can be literally visceral: with intestines, or for that matter, the products of intestines. It could also be sausages, however, or a balloon animal. Or, abstracted, it could be figures embracing one another. The associations multiply when we learn that the sculpture (as the name reveals) is made from pantyhose, but is stuffed with plastic, burlap, a boa, a cardigan sweater, and a cotton shirt. The sculpture is an act of preservation, but also transformation. There’s no one answer that brings it together.

El-Yasin’s piece is part of ​“Origins,” running now at Orchid Gallery through Oct. 17. As curator nico w. okoro explains, ​“Origins” is the second show for Orchid Gallery since it opened earlier this year with the goals of showcasing Black and Brown artists in the community, supporting their professional development, and making a place where artists can come together. The first show, ​“Gather,” involved ​“predominantly figurative artworks, inviting New Haven’s communities of color to readily see themselves reflected in the works on view. Building upon this engagement, ​‘Origins’ prioritizes conceptual artworks to expand discussion around identity representation within contemporary art. 

“In a moment where Blackness is often tokenized by the mainstream art world, and depictions of BIPOC bodies are overconsumed, ​‘Origins’ insists upon a slow, nuanced read. Posing more questions than it answers — such as how might conceptualism and a collective move away from figuration disrupt white supremacy within contemporary art? — this probing exhibition reclaims abstraction as a vital language of self expression and uplifts the rich personal, collective, and material origins of the featured artworks.”

El-Yasin, the statement continues, ​“traces the life cycles of domestic materials — which have either been inherited or scavenged — to materialize acts of remembrance and stoke the tensions between individual and popular value systems.” El-Yasin’s keen sense of exploration is shared by all the other artists in the show. 

Christopher Paul Jordan, a statement reveals, ​“found artistic inspiration in a local scrapyard owned by Mr. Jones” in Tacoma, Wa. ​“A local legend, Jones salvaged architectural and personal artifacts that were forcibly displaced by reckless practices of gentrification, often reconnecting them with their original owners.” Jordan himself is ​“interested in the afterlife of memory; in the ways that oral tradition is altered and negotiated in conditions of diaspora.” His Untitled gives a sense of how messy the work can be, how some objects take a long time to reconnect with their owners, or perhaps never do. It’s not as simple as we might want it to be. 

Jasmine Nikole’s series of paintings, meanwhile, accrue meaning as the viewer progresses from one to the next. The first in the series, Divine Beginnings, may be tempting to pigeonhole as an expression of Black joy — a phrase as important as it is in danger, at this point, of being co-opted far too easily by the mainstream art world okoro is wary of. It does indeed depict happiness, but it’s complicated by the paintings that follow, in part because the girls are cast as both living humans while partaking something of myth, of prophets and seers. 

The paintings, as an accompanying statement reads, are ​“an ode to her ancestral roots and love letter to all those struggling to find their place.” The women ​“collectively navigate their homeland, guided by the element of water that weaves throughout as giver of life and community.” From her art, ​“one woman’s pain transforms into a point of origin for collective healing.”

Mexican-American artist Kaelynne Hernandez likewise taps into both individual and collective identities, ​“using her art to reclaim American indigeneity while also commenting on the interconnected origins of the universe,” an accompanying note states. The imagery she creates ​“comes from an unconscious collective state of mind that we have in all of us,” she says. But the works aren’t just flights of fancy; they’re an attempt to reconnect with and draw power from distant cultural roots.

Conceptually, Hernandez finds a strong ally in Jason Ting, whose animated installation is likewise concerned with expanding one’s sense of consciousness. Ting’s original inspirations come from nature — ​“the aesthetics of waves and fluid motion, gravitational and magnetic forces, sound vibrations yielding visual patterns, and the way light and color mix during sunsets,” an accompanying statement reads — but the resulting visuals would be just as home in a science-fiction epic, or a story about psychedelic experiences, as in a nature documentary. In some sense, that’s part of the point, not just of Ting’s work, but of the show overall. 

We are too often asked to consider figurative and abstract art as somehow opposed, when they are actually complements — and complements that draw from the same impulse, to create art. The more abstract ​“Origins” does indeed build on the questions posed by the previous exhibition at Orchid Gallery. The multitude of compelling questions that remain suggest that when it comes to where the next show will go, the mind is the only limit.

“Origins” runs at Orchid Gallery in the Lab at ConnCORP, 496 Newhall St., through Oct. 17. The gallery is open through normal business hours.