Ely Center Speaks The Language

Cynthia Y. Cooper’s A Show of Strength might conjure a host of associations — ocean waves, birds’ wings, the ceiling of a church. It’s all of these things, and at its core, none of them. It’s just a pattern of line and color, repeating ideas. We fill the pattern with meaning, as humans do. Sometimes that tendency to find patterns, and meaning in patterns, leads us astray. But, when handled with grace, it also leads constellations in the sky and holidays around solstices and equinoxes. It can be the foundation of building a community.

Cooper’s piece is part of ​“A Pattern Language,” an exhibition running at Perspectives: The Gallery at Whitney Center in Hamden through Jan. 4 and online at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s website. Curated by Debbie Hesse and Shaunda Holloway — who also has an exhibit at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street, running through this weekend — the exhibition features work by Nan Adams, Cynthia Y. Cooper, Will Holub, Aileen Ishamael, Ellen Pankey, Jessica Smolinski, and Ellen Weider.

“This exhibition takes its title from the 1977 book by architect Christopher Alexander,” the curators write in an accompanying statement. A pattern language, they explain, is ​“an organized and coherent set of patterns, each describing a problem and the foundation for a solution. Intersecting patterns can express deeper wisdom and energy — a sense of wholeness, elegance, spirit.”

Each of the artists ​“explore how patterns can form a personal alphabet, communicating ideas about human behavior and highlighting ways that communities and environments interact…. Drawing inspiration from personal, historical, and cultural iconography such as quilts and folk art traditions, travelogues, structural diagrams — these artworks presented together generate a visual vibration and sense of unity.”

Of the paintings, Aileen Ishamael’s Las Reinas most explicitly uses a sense of repeating motifs to connect with a larger whole, building an image of female strength from a series of naturally occurring shapes.

In her piece, Nan Adams lets the eye find human faces that dissolve into one another the closer we look. The people in her image are individuals, but in their similarities they share common identity.

Ellen Weider’s piece conveys enough motion that it’s possible to imagine the balls in her image swirling around one another, or speeding by in a row. Or, possibly, it can be understood as the paths two balls take as they move through time — one of them moving in a straight line, the other either circling into a central point or spiraling out from it.

Jessica Smolinski uses the repeating image of a bird resting in someone’s hand to go against type. Usually a quilt is associated with tradition, comfort, restfulness. Smolinski manages to create a quilt that instead feels fractured, almost dizzying.

Similarly, Ellen Pankey brings the quilting tradition forward by using those old techniques to introduce colors and patterns not usually seen in more traditional fabric. It’s a connection to the past, but firmly in the present.

Meanwhile, Will Holub’s series of pieces, of lines of different colors that are intertwining intricately in similar repeating patterns, suggests that no matter how divergent we may sometimes feel from one another, we can be brought to be on the same wavelength.

“A Pattern Language” runs at Perspectives: The Gallery at Whitney Center, 200 Leeder Hill Dr., Hamden, south entrance. Hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturdays, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.