Ely Center Takes To The Sea

Laura Barr’s painting covers the wall and makes it teem with life. It’s a trip into warm, blue water, a document of how snorkeling or scuba diving is like visiting another planet, a place radically different from the one we inhabit in the air. And its title — Ocean Elegy 20 — reminds us of just how fast it’s dying.

From now until June 23, the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street is running two exhibits that speak to each other so thoroughly they might as well be one continuous show. On the first floor of the building, ​“Sea and Soil,” curated by Debbie Hesse, revels in natural forms. By focusing on them, Hesse writes in an artist statement, ​“hidden worlds come into focus, touching on ideas about stewardship, food security, global connectivity, and spirituality.” ​“Water Access,” on the second floor of the building, draws attention to our relationship to water. As curator Fritz Horstman writes, ​“some of the work is overtly political in its environmental concern; others depict its sublime qualities, its mundane aspects, the life it supports, or the ways in which we interact with it.”

Both shows join what is now a long line of recent art shows dealing with the environment, or climate change. You could say maybe it’s enough. You could also say that, as perhaps the biggest story of our time and the greatest existential threat to us and life on the planet, environmental concerns will never not be relevant. Regardless of your feelings about the subject, both shows have much to offer beyond the topic at hand. Barr’s paintings skillfuly capture the movement of undersea life. Cynthia Beth Rubin’s pieces offer a reminder that natural forms in a different context have something in common with abstract painting after all. Perhaps abstractions don’t stray quite as far from reality as we think; perhaps the solid forms we encounter in real life are more fleeting than we first imagine.

If we arrive at the show with an environmental bent to our thoughts, Barr’s and Rubin’s pieces both draw attention to the diversity of life we stand to lose. Marion Belanger’s photographs, meanwhile, give a face to the more immediate human cost. Her images hearken back to the famous 1930s pictures of Dust Bowl farmers, people who were climate change refugees before we had a term for it. The jobs of farmers haven’t gotten much easier since then, and the way they make their living is in many ways just as precarious.

It’s apt, meanwhile, that ​“Water Access” is on the second floor of the Ely Center, because if there’s a theme that binds the pieces together, it’s that the water level is rising. In the context of the exhibit, Daniel Eugene’s photograph of an auto shop with a big puddle in front of it takes on a certain air of menace. If we wander down the hall and come back to the picture, who’s to say that the puddle won’t have become a pool, and then the pool a river. Maybe next time we see that shop, the water will be up to the windows.

Likewise, with stunning craftsmanship, Leila Dow’s pieces in the show have the waters rising, and the works of man sinking under the waves. She conveys both the violence of it and an eerie beauty, suggesting that perhaps, if it’s not too late, we can still find a new balance.

That’s a motivating idea behind Gina Siepel’s Resurveying Walden. As the accompanying note explains, the artist ​“invited six friends to mentor her in a ​‘resurveying’ of Walden Pond. All six mentors were women. The boat, a center for this work, was her corollary to Henry David Thoreau’s cabin: a hand-built framing device through which to see and experience the world.”

Beyond the skill in actually building a waterworthy vessel, and beyond the delightful colors, which Siepel explains were drawn from the colors of the water on Walden Pond itself, there is the beautifully simple idea of updating Thoreau’s stance by replacing a cabin with a boat, forgetting about the soil and taking to the sea. If the waters are rising fast, maybe the way to achieve some sense of solace is to stop fighting over the patches of dry ground that remain, and learn how to float instead.

“Sea and Soil” and ​“Water Access” run at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through June 23. Visit the organization’s website for hours and more information.