Artspace Rides The Tide

A sailing ship transformed, with eyes on its sails, heads toward the edge of the world, until a hand rises from the mythological depths to warn the vessel to turn back. A hurricane whirls at the center of a small square that shouldn’t be able to contain it. Empty pools bake by the seashore; are they being built or are they being abandoned? It’s hard to say.

The images by Sam Messer, Joseph Smolinski, and Marion Belanger are just three in a series of 20 pieces of art assembled from Artspace’s flatfile by curator Sarah Fritchey to create ​“Toy Boat,” now running in the project room of Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown through March 2.

“Life on the sea has captivated this collective consciousness of land dwellers — we go there to seek freedom, respite, peace and thrill, to unplug, practice mindfulness and drift into memories of childhood,” Fritchey writes in an accompanying statement. ​“Yet the water has always been a highly sought after and contested territory, a site of violence, failed experimentation, economic competition, and the unknown.” Fritchey has set up ​“Toy Boat” to explore the tension built into our relationship to the ocean, and it works.

Of all the pieces in the exhibit, Elizabeth Livingston’s Spinning on an Axis may come close to evoking the way we go to the ocean not just for relaxation, but for renewal. But Livingston’s image captures what the title implies. Part of the pleasure of going to the ocean is a little like staring at the night sky, into outer space. We’re tiny things at the edge of a vast and beautiful thing, and part of its power over us lies in its ability to humble us, to put our problems in perspective, just by its existence.

But our relationship with the ocean also diverges from our relationship with space in that it has become much more fraught. We learn all the time about the damage we have done to it, from collapsing fisheries to garbage dumping. And the ocean, meanwhile, has a way of getting back at us. The boat on its side in Marion Belanger’s image doesn’t look like it was put that way intentionally. It looks like it was knocked over from its resting place in a storm, or perhaps even carried in on a wave. We’re told on the news that our relationship with the ocean is only going to grow more tense. We may be responsible for permanently altering life as the ocean knows it. For its part, the ocean is altering our lives as well — particularly those of us who live on the coast.

Cynthia Back’s Fire and Rain gets at the same tension with an effective split screen of the two scenarios in the title that invites the viewer to perceive them both as happening almost simultaneously, as if both are possibilities for an otherwise (for now) calm place, or one is the hallucinatory alternate reality of the other.

What do we do about that, though — not just in terms of environmental action, but in making sense of it, in coming to terms with it all? In the context of the other images, Shanna Merola’s Cadmium (Cd) can be read as dramatizing a first reaction — a mind flooding with images and information to the point where it floods over, and spills out. Maybe the individual in this picture can’t stop talking about it, or is employing some other release valve. It’s (perhaps obviously) not something that lends itself to an clear, literal interpretation, though the emotion is clear enough.

Cleverly, Fritchey offers viewers an avenue for reaction. On the opposite wall from the images are instructions for making a paper boat from waterproof paper, along with the supplies to do it. In the middle of the room is a blue kiddie pool filled with water — and, when this reporter visited, boats. ​“Where am I?” reads one. ​“R is B’s runaway bunny,” reads another. Still another has the names of family members written on the side of it, with the addition that they’re the ​“best family ever.” A fourth boat seems almost to sums things up. ​“Keeping my head above water,” it reads.