What Doesn’t Kill The Art, Makes It Stronger

It’s claustrophobic and poorly lit. Getting there requires a security clearance, with walls interrupted by six elevators bays, phones, and silent bankers wandering by to use the bathrooms. It has the feeling of a long sarcophagus, except you’re on the inside.

You got to love it. That’s why Gallery 195, arguably the bleakest place in New Haven showing art, often attracts bright, bold, humanizing art works that overcome the tomb in which they are displayed — or die trying.

The gallery, on the fourth floor of the First Niagara Bank building at 195 Church Street, is currently showing the digital prints of photographer Mark K. St. Mary and the acrylic and charcoal paintings of Ethan Boisvert.

The exhibition, which opened on March 19 and runs through June 14, more than survives its setting.

My eye always first goes to the way the art works and their curator deals with the three elevators bays facing each other in the middle of the long rectangular corridor which comprises the entire gallery.

In this case Art Council Director of Artistic Services and Programs Debbie Hesse has hung Boisvert’s ​“Serial Slider” between two elevator doors.

Not only does the title pun niftily on what the surrounding elevators are doing, but the work is made up of two identically sized small panels, a kind of comment on the series of doors with which the colorful canvases are competing.

Curator Hesse sees an added plus to the space as one where the two artists showing in a space you might at first glance think large enough for one only.

“The space is conducive to two person shows as it offers an opportunity to create dialogue between two different bodies,” she wrote in an email.

She likes to juxtapose work that ​“presents a tension conceptually and formally.”

In the case of Boisvert and St. Mary, the tension Hesse sees pulsates along the surfaces of the artists’ work, although ​“Boisvert achieves this through layers of paint while St. Mary photographs found patinas.”

Of course, what the art also creates tension with is the space. It’s gotten better I believe in recent years since I dropped by to review a previous show of photography combined with sculpture. (Click here for that story, which ponders the important question: When you display art in a corporate setting, does it suggest the work is corporate art?)

If memory serves, right around this location on the wall there used to be one of those see-through cases that held an emergency axe that you break and use to chop your way out in case of a fire.

Now Boisvert’s ​“Paging the Sham” is hanging with its bold thumbnail-sized swatches of color tumbling out, as if indeed someone broke a case of pigment from deep inside the canvas and this is the result.

At approximately the same position down the hall, beyond the elevators and wall phones, hangs this contrasting digital print by St. Mary. If most of the works push out from their surface, this one pulls you in to what might be an aerial view of a bombed out ashen city, a burned landscape; on the other hand, the source of the print might be a pattern of lint, and some of the fun and interest is trying to figure out which.

Likewise in ​“All Undone with Insipid Subsume,” the tension Hesse talks about spills out of the work and seems about to fall onto the industrial carpeting.

You could ignore it easily enough as decoration, as several folks seemed to do as they walked from one set of double-doored offices at the end of the gallery, or corridor, to the other.

On the other hand, a moment’s pause reveals a whirling topsy-turviness that does indeed shake up the dour geometry of the corridor, as do many of the art works.

In ​“All Undone” it really seems to come to a head, with the jagged splotch of red in the upper left of the canvas, a site of explosion or bleeding, a kind of ground zero of color that propels all the more angular blues into the air. They might be buildings catapulted into a visual space where they lose, well, all their property value, except as art

All in all, a very nice show to be in a bank.

An artists’ reception is scheduled for Tuesday April 23, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., and everyone’s invited.