“Abide” Homes In At The Grove

I’ve always argued that owning a home or any other kind of building is just rent by another name. Whether renting and owning, the arrangement is ultimately temporary, evanescent.

Now ​“Abide,” the latest art exhibition at the Grove — the co-working space on Chapel Street — proves to my many detractors that I am undoubtedly right.

Well, at least it engages the issue, and a whole lot more.

The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 10, features the work of four artists whom curator Elinor Slomba has brought together to meditate on the meaning of buildings in our lives, in the largest sense. Though also, in particular the buildings of New Haven.

At the opening reception last Wednesday, Slomba reported, the artists engaged in a conversation about the various connotations of ​“abide,” ranging from ​“to dwell” and ​“to endure” to the word’s sense of ​“abide by the law.”

The images in the show range from quietly traditional views of individual houses and roofscapes from artists Eric March and Peter Konsterlie, to schematic designs by architecture student Sungwoo Choi, to jazzy apartment blocks created by Shaunda Holloway. Cumulatively, they remind you that a building is very much in the eye of the beholder, or inhabitant. It can be a place of shelter and home to those who live within, and a mass of volumes, shapes, and colors that may be gorgeous or mysterious or perhaps even threatening to those of us who silently pass by.

Konsterlie’s three painterly offerings depict traditional houses and a water mill.

That’s generally a non-house, although his structure in the woods suggests a Hansel-and-Gretel-like sense of dread. Someone dangerous, perhaps the mill owner, might abide in the room above the wheel and waterworks.

Contemplating such possibilities and dualities makes the exhibition quietly energizing, and I wondered whether Konsterlie had been thinking in this mill composition, with the river running mightily in the foreground and stealing all the attention from the structure, whether water abides longest of all.

To me the most interesting single composition in the show is Shaunda Holloway’s ​“Uptown Mama,” a monoprint that’s a kind of busy montage of photo images of faces with a high-heeled shoe and lettering at the bottom left.

The houses it depicts are both flags and high-rises with window gates that look like prisons constructed perhaps of bamboo; they remind me of cages from movies and other imagery from the era of the Vietnam War.

Perhaps Holloway’s structures are versions of homes that should not abide.

Over the course of the show, additional works — including models from the Yale School of Architecture — will be installed, Slomba reported. Interested viewers have until the beginning of next year to see how this show about buildings, well, builds.