“Trash Talk” Has Game

A vivid painting stands tall, from the floor to well above the average person’s head, a riot of color and faces, a collage of brushwork, print, and found objects. It depicts chaos, but it’s not chaotic. It has a point to make, and you know that before you see the writing in a small panel of the piece. It’s hard to make out at first. You have to get close to see it. But then the words are plain as day: ​“If you decide to fly, be the pilot.”

The piece — by Shaunda Holloway — is one of the first that greets you in ​“Trash Talk,” an art exhibit on view until May 3 at the New Alliance Foundation Gallery, room S101 at Gateway Community College.

“Trash Talk” features the art of Shaunda Holloway, Aileen Ishmael, Jahmane, Iyaba Mandingo, Aisha Nailah, Ibou Ndoye, Amit Sahu, and Nate Williams, and the title of the exhibit provides a key to unlock the ways the pieces in the exhibit are connected to one another.

The title can be understood as a pun. The artists’ styles hearken to graffiti and other street art, modes of expression that still fight for legitimacy in the art world even as they’re embraced more and more for the life and energy they bring. But the phrase also tells you something about the artists’ approach — playfully aggressive, confrontational, clever, and fun, and intended to make the game better.

Holloway’s phrase is both goad and inspiration. That dual sense of energy pervades the rest of the pieces. Nate Williams’s collage transfers this to the relationship between a sharp-eyed woman and a pensive boy with his back turned to her. Are they mother and child? Teacher and student? The specific relationship is unclear, but the intensity of the connection isn’t. As the world rushes around them in a storm of sharp-edged color, the woman and the boy have their eyes on each other. The woman also has her eye on us. She’s wary, protective, maybe even a little accusatory. She’s someone whose trust we have to earn.

The theme of determination in a stormy world is echoed in Aisha Nailah’s Nappy Headed Hope. For all the action flying around the circular canvas, it’s the figure in the center that commands attention. It could be a snapshot of a woman walking down a cacophonous street. The words ​“nappy headed” float near her brow. Without the ​“hope” at the end, they’re an insult. But she has learned how to tune out the noise, how to reclaim the slur. Her eyes are fixed on a goal ahead of her, and she’s not wavering.

If Holloway’s, Williams’s, and Nailah’s pieces are rooted in the artistic traditions of the descendants of Africa in the Western Hemisphere, a few pieces reach more explicitly back to Africa itself — though not the Africa of the past. Ibou Ndoye uses glass to portray a scene from the modern Africa, as three women carrying bundles on their heads confront a car similarly overburdened with packages. It connects the past to the present — and more tightly binds the pieces in the exhibit to one another.

So, in a sense, the pieces come full circle in Aileen Ishmael’s piece of the face of a woman next to the outline of the African continent. The shards of mirrors incorporated into the piece are what give it teeth. You can’t look at the piece without seeing a part of yourself reflected in it, but only a part of you. Ishmael’s piece takes you to pieces. The suggestions embedded in Ishmael’s piece, especially in the context of the art around it, run deep. What are we without our connection to the place we’re from? When we look in this mirror, do we like what we see? How can we be made whole again?

“Trash Talk” lives up to the promise of its title. It bears the message that maybe we all need to up our game. But it also invites us all to play.