Jane Snaider Photo
The artist with photographs.
The tiny ward room in the hospital is a ruin. A mattress-less steel bed frame is its only occupant.
The room is also haunted by decomposing photographs of its former denizens, those life-size images themselves flaking off the flaking walls. It makes for a double demise, of both the place and the memory of the place.
These are not the kinds of images that usually adorn an art exhibition space in a contemporary hospital setting, but that’s exactly what’s up on the walls of the Yale New-Haven Hospital — St. Raphael Campus this month, until the end of the month.
Allan Appel Photo
They’re in the “Art Corridor,” a long hallway opposite the hospital’s ground-floor cafeteria, where art by area artists has been hung for years.
This month, innovative curator Jane Snaider has brought North Haven-based Kathy Conway to hang a handful of her photographs from a trip to Cuba, which capture that Island’s crumbling beauty.
The dominant impression, however, comes from a larger selection of images from some of the 22 hospital buildings at the long-closed Ellis Island facility in New York Harbor, which greeted generations of immigrants decades ago, many of whom then made their way to New Haven.
Recently Conway, who is also showing work at the Berlin Foto Biennale 2016, was part of a special photographers’ junket, where she photographed the now-peeling archival photos of nurses and other long-gone denizens of Ellis Island that French street artist JR had wheat-pasted onto the crumbling walls in 2014.
Jane Snaider Photo
The wall labels say that the images of exhausted and maybe tuberculosis-afflicted immigrants asleep in their dilapidated chairs and a group photo of the white-uniformed nurses who cared for them “memorialize the bravery and hope of an immigrant generation treated and cared for in the most modern public hospital of its time.”
I simply don’t buy it. But I love the photos and their placement in St. Raph’s, because there’s truth here, and everyone knows it.
Conway’s photographs of Cuba tend to be more conventional images of the place. There is the crumbling facade of a colonial building washed in brown, the gloom relieved by the bright red clothing of a woman and child at the bottom left. There’s also a Caravaggesque image of African inspired dancers and a lonely woman looking down from her window toward the street, presumably where the photographer took the shot.
Allan Appel Photo
“Beauty Parlor, Trinidad, Cuba.”
The most intriguing photo from the Cuba portfolio is titled “Beauty Parlor, Trinidad, Cuba.” It shows a woman, her face in barely constrained despair, sitting beside a huge photo of a Marilyn Monroe movie poster.
This image blends seamlessly into the series on the Ellis Island hospital rooms, with their haunting reminders of what perky, ballooned gift shops conceal: the constant presence of sickness, death, and loss that are the inescapable elements of the hospital experience.
So kudos to Snaider and to Conway, who in addition to her photography is also by training a nurse and an attorney.
The power of Conway’s work in this setting is even more set off by three large oil paintings by Jean Dalton, at the end of Art Corridor. There she’s showing two landscapes and a large image of a woman and a new baby.
You expect Dalton; Conway is the jolting and rewarding surprise.
Kathy Conway’s photographs are on display in the Art Corridor of the Hospital of St. Raphael, 1450 Chapel St., until Oct. 31.
I'm an employee of Yale @ ( SRC ). I enjoy seeing all of the very creative photographs along the corridor. It's a nice break from the usual mundane signs we see everyday.😀