nothin Randomness Strikes Again At Arts Council | New Haven Independent

Randomness Strikes Again At Arts Council

Allan Appel Photo

Into the hat dropped the 600. The brave, the anonymous 600.

Not the soldiers of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, which poem of my youth I simply can’t can’t eradicate from an echoing memory; the 600 or so artists of all media and levels of experience, who are members of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.

Curator Debbie Hess wrote their names on small slips of paper and dropped them in a hat, both literal and figurative. The hat, once again, was Dr. Seussian and purple.

Then out came the names of 16 artists who comprise Shuffle & Shake,” the two-part show of artists randomly chosen to show their work in the last exhibit of the summer at the council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery on Audubon Street.

“Taking Shape #6,” tar paper, polystyrene, clay, pom-poms, glue, by Suzan Shutan.

It’s a cool idea, as evidenced by the first part of the exhibition, which ran through Aug. 4 and featured nine of the 16, turning up interesting pairings.

What are the odds that, in the first part of the show, two of the nine artists randomly picked would submit work focusing on Italian vistas? Or that the one literary artist selected would have evanescence as her subject for the show, which by my epistemological reckoning, is a kissing cousin of randomness?

This second edition of Shuffle & Shake, which runs at the council’s Audubon Street gallery through Sept. 8, has not rolled the dice in as interesting a way.

Although I stuck my randomness hat on as firmly as I could and went looking for what interesting pairings, insights, and apocalyptic revelations might have been evoked by Hesse’s quirky idea in this second round, I found, well, mainly randomness.

Which is another way of saying the show has a lot of variety, from Suzan Shutans mixed media wall sculptures — garishly painted tar paper and polystyrene constructions that look like honeycombs created by bees on LSD — to the visually sedate large-size digital prints of John Arabolos.

I like his description of the work as digital algorithmic print,” suggesting that he gave the computer an algorithmic order, and it did the rest.

“Good Morning,” cut paper collage by Marcela Staudenmaier.

A nice transition from the world of art produced with the help of algorithms to that produced by the very evident human touch turns up in the back, sunlit room of the gallery, in the work of book illustrator Marcela Staudenmaier.

Her 3‑D paper collages live inside wall-hung boxes, dioramas of children’s adventure mythologies that draw you into their mysterious, self-contained worlds.

Hesse said the idea of Shuffle & Shake was to include artists who the council wasn’t as familiar with, or who didn’t show regularly. But some regulars have shown up.

Shutan is a well exhibited artist not only in New Haven and Connecticut, but with a recent show in Poland. She is also a freelance curator in her own right.

Jennifer Davies is a locally well-known creator of handmade papers and an artist member of City Gallery on upper State Street.

Staudenmaier has shown exhibitions at the council’s gallery. Randomness turns out to be not so random at all, at least in this go-round.

Nevertheless, while not adding up to a revelatory punch, the show has many small pleasures and, for seven artists, a wide variety of media and materials to marvel at.

And, speaking of randomness, the show is a good end-of-summer run-up to the council’s annual Somewhat Off The Wall fundraiser, during which participants can pick one of the 50 contributing artists’ work off the wall, based on, yes, their number, randomly chosen.

No word yet on whether Hesse and the Council Executive Director Cindy Clair will be using the same hat as was deployed for Shuffle & Shake. For more on Somewhat Off The Wall, the info is here.

Artists also exhibiting in the second part of Shuffle & Shake but not mentioned above include Mary Wolff, who is exhibiting silk paintings and metal jewelry; Kate Henderson, who is showing pastels; and Kathleen DeMeo, showing mixed media works and monotypes.

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