nothin At Ely Center, The Art Is Only Natural | New Haven Independent

At Ely Center, The Art Is Only Natural

Lili Chin

Glaciers (erratics).

It’s rocks and trees. But the rocks are defying gravity, the trees are an illusion.

That the trees are just a projection is clear enough. But look closer, and the rocks, which convey so much weight, are actually made from muslin and cheesecloth, wire and glue.

You knew already that the rocks couldn’t actually be rocks. But seeing how it’s done only adds to the intrigue, that the artist — Lili Chin — could make an object so convincing, and then go out of her way to point out that it isn’t real.

Chen’s work, on the first floor of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street for its 2018 winter showcase — on view now through Feb. 22 — offers an entry point for a house full of dozens of works by a dozen artists.

Lili Chin

Tree.

Technically, the works are divided into four separate exhibitions. But in the experience of going to the center, a theme emerges of the artists using manufactured materials to mimic the real world, but also being very self-aware about the processes they’re using to create the art — opening up interesting questions about what it means when nature makes new things, and when people do.

Meg Bloom

Intermezzo.

But the surface pleasures of the art — playful, fun, and sometimes a bit like a puzzle — are evident as well. It might take more than a glance to find the tree in Tree, and another glance after that to see the hands floating in the air above the branches. Like Glaciers, Tree represents a natural form that reveals its artifice the longer you look.

With Chin’s work settling the ideas in motion, the galleries open up not just the eyes, but the head. It’s there in Hong Hong’s All Night Dream-Sowing III and All Night Dream-Sowing IV, which appear as paint applied to rough paper. But the materials list reveals that the paper is repurposed, and that the images were created using kozo, dust, and sun. It suggests that watching the artist at work might be less like visiting a studio and more like visiting a garden. Likewise, Meg Bloom’s Intermezzo, made from paper, wax, silk, organza, and wire, hangs like a diaphanous jellyfish at the top of the stairs. It’s an elegant aesthetic creation that also looks like it could swim away through the air.

Robert Datum

Old Colony Beach.

Robert Datum’s Old Colony Beach — one of a series of his paintings to employ the same impasto approach — uses just oil paint, but the three-dimensionality of the paint itself makes it seem as if the artist incorporated literal sand and pebbles into the painting itself.

This mixing of natural and manmade things reaches a high point in Walk in the Woods, an installation by Susan McCaslin on the second floor of the house. At first it appears that McCaslin hauled in a small carload of rocks from some woods nearby, found a couple old coats, and got to work. But look again. The paper backdrop on the far wall is the key that unlocks the rest of it. The rocks are made from paper as well. The handful of leaves scattered about are enough to make them completely convincing.

Susan McCaslin

Walk in the Woods.

And unlike Chin’s rocks on the first floor, McCaslin’s are meant to be seen simply as rocks. The technique dissolves into the subject. The mimicry is nearly complete. It suggests that McCaslin’s artistic work and the work nature does in creating actual rocks are maybe not so different after all. Or that the line between the manmade and the natural environment, which we’re always so quick to draw as humans, might not be as bright as we think it is, or even exist at all. It suggests further that maybe there’s a way to live — and to make things — that embraces the erasing of that line not by reenacting Lord of the Flies, but by making things that don’t impose themselves so much, that accept the natural and manmade worlds together and find a place in it that just fits, just right.

This theme had its origins in An Anthropogenic World,” an exhibition that ran at Albertus Magnus College in December. One of the exhibitions in the showcase is indeed labeled An Anthropogenic World II.” But in a way it’s as if that exhibition has extended vines into all the others, asking us how we might become not just better stewards of the planet, but a part of it.

Faustin Adeniran

Hustle.

So Faustin Adeniran’s dress made from aluminum cans takes on extra meaning, not simply as a playful way to recycle, but suggesting that maybe a lot of materials we don’t recycle now, we could still use again, over and over, in different ways, if we’re creative enough.

Katro Storm

21 Paintings in 21 Days.

And Katro Storm’s exhibition — which will find the artist visiting the space to make more paintings over the next month until the close of the exhibition, when he’ll be part of a talk and panel discussion on Feb. 18 — seems to embody much of that spirit. The completed work already hanging on the wall features a horn player, but the bell of the horn is deep and wide enough to be read as a separate planet, an entire world in itself.

Brian Slattery Photo

And the black panels, laid out on the floor of the gallery on Sunday afternoon, when the exhibitions opened to a steady flow of visitors, suggest the work to be done. We think of environmental problems as so complex, so enormous, so difficult as to be almost insurmountable. Maybe the canvases, so to speak, are already prepped and waiting. We just have to stop and kneel down, take a good look at what’s right in front of us, and then grab a tool and begin.

The winter showcase runs through Feb. 22 at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St. Click here for hours and more information.

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