Artist Rolls With The Temporary

by Brian Slattery | Dec 19, 2023 9:45 am | Comments (0)

After decades of printmaking, Barbara Harder revels in embracing the accidents. ​“I’m trying to make things the way I’m making them,” she said, but ​“sometimes I almost like tripping up,” because sometimes she likes the images she creates better. ​“You don’t have to beat yourself up more than you need to,” she continued. ​“It’s really nice to have the space as an artist to do that exploration, and wrestle with yourself, and the paper, and the ink.… It’s the hope that at times in the studio, I can have this spark… whether it’s done, or whether it’s perfect, or whatever it is, it just makes me happy. It’s something to keep after.”

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Artist Questions The Questions

by Brian Slattery | Dec 18, 2023 8:55 am | Comments (0)

The show of artist Amira Brown’s work, up now at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville through the end of the month, doesn’t have a title, nor do any of the individual pieces. That gesture alone seems to be part of the point, as is the elliptical, border-melting nature of the work itself. It’s a show to find your way into; one possible starting point is a piece that shows, in outline, a person in a classic pose of pondering, but the pondering itself is dissolving the person. The person contains other people. The person contains stars. But Brown’s sly humor is on full display as well. ​“Meh,” is one complete thought. ​“Shrug,” another. And then: ​“rodeo.” The rodeo of making art? Of showing it? Something bigger? Whatever the case, it isn’t Brown’s first.

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Artists Create Sound And Vision At Cafe Nine

by Karen Ponzio | Dec 7, 2023 1:16 pm | Comments (0)

Music and visual art both went live Wednesday night at Cafe Nine when Color in Sound, an event organized and curated by local artist Andres Madariaga, brought together three musical acts and a number of visual artists, some who displayed their work, some who created art while the bands played, and some who did both. 

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Exhibition Shows How Ann Lehman Struck A Spark

by Brian Slattery | Dec 6, 2023 8:59 am | Comments (2)

The two friends in Ann Lehman’s sculpture — we only know they’re friends because the title tells us so — appear as though they’re deep in the middle of a long conversation, one that started long before we arrived and will continue after we’ve gone. One is perhaps trying to convince the other of something. He’s pressing his point. The other isn’t convinced, but he’s hearing the argument out. It’s happening on a bench that could be in any public park. In short, it’s a definition of community: people coming together in an open space, exchanging ideas, listening and speaking, challenging one another knowing that the friendship is stronger than any argument, that the bonds between people matter the most.

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Three Artists Follow The Moves

by Brian Slattery | Dec 5, 2023 8:53 am | Comments (0)

Ken Grimes’s pieces in ​“The Truth Is Out There” partake of the style of cartoons, woodblocks, and also — thanks to the associations from the X‑Files reference in the title — the illustrations on the covers of the Golden Records aboard the deep space exploration vehicles Voyagers 1 and 2. Those contain information for any aliens that might find the record, starting with instructions on how to play the music and proceeding to a diagram showing the location of the origin of the mission, that is, us. 

Grimes’s work shares that sense of playful seriousness. It muses aloud whether scientific experiments activated a distant alien probe, the tone of voice making room for wonder, conspiracy, and the skeptical response to both: Probably not. And so what if it did? The inherent humor allows for it all — yet in its dogged focus on its subject matter, puts its thumb on the scale. Grimes hears the skeptics. But what if there’s life out there? When it makes contact, how do we respond?

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Artists Explore The Meaning Of Home

by Brian Slattery | Nov 29, 2023 8:37 am | Comments (0)

The photograph of a brass worker in Kolkata encompasses the weight of history and the immediacy of the present; it’s an image from decades ago, but it’s plausible to believe that there are still people who work metal in similar ways now. The picture is lived in. It carries other senses with it. Maybe the tangy smell of heated metal, the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere. The sounds of a metal shop. And for Amartya De, it’s a connection to where he’s from, a small piece of that larger whole.

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Kehler Liddell Decks The Walls

by Brian Slattery | Nov 28, 2023 7:55 am | Comments (0)

Penrhyn Cook’s series of photographs, Holiday Reflections, are absorbing enough in their own right. Colorful and festive, the images are just askew enough to warrant a closer look. Are we looking at double exposures? What do we make of the giant fruit and a rainbow on a city block? In the context of Kehler Liddell Gallery’s annual holiday show — titled ​“Deck the Walls” and running at the Westville space through Dec. 24 — the title of Cook’s series earns itself a double twist, as the works of fellow gallery members on the opposite walls are reflected in the photos’ glassy surfaces. Images layer on images, an apt depiction of the show as a whole, in which all the gallery members play a part.

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Garden Workshop Teaches How To Put Down Roots

by Brian Slattery | Nov 21, 2023 9:07 am | Comments (3)

Putting your hands to soil to plant garlic. Chewing on a leaf of fresh oregano. Noticing the sun on your face. At ​“Rooted Youth,” a collaborative event between the Dixwell art center NXTHVN and the garden-creation outfit Root Life, held at the Goffe Street Armory Garden, participants learned about how these simple experiences can open up broader pathways to understanding more about our relationship to our environment, and how we can adapt to climate change.

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Artists Show "Everything And Nothing" At Ely Center

by Brian Slattery | Nov 17, 2023 9:17 am | Comments (0)

Hyunsuk Erickson’s Thingumabob Tribe #3 spreads out across one of the first-floor galleries of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Their sinuous shapes and bright colors might carry, for some viewers, suggestions of meaning. They could be seen as chess pieces, or as rock formations on an alien planet. Or perhaps they’re microscopic shapes brought to the human scale. On the other hand, are they really asking to be understood, to be perceived in that way? They can be taken as is, simply as shapes, forms, colors. Or anything in between, an apprehension of form, the content arising in the viewer.

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Zines Create Scene At Possible Futures

by Karen Ponzio | Nov 13, 2023 9:02 am | Comments (0)

Tiny Ghosts Haunting Small Things, The Band Plays in Front of a Big Audience, and Cars Go Too Fast (and our road design encourages it) are not titles you might find on the bestseller list or at your local news stand. But you can find them in the zine library making its way through the city as part of the New Haven Zine Scene, a group of creatives that meet up once a month to make, read, and talk about zines and share everything and anything zine related. This past Saturday, the group met for the first time at Possible Futures on Edgewood Avenue, where it will continue to trade off monthly meeting dates with Witch Bitch Black Box on Whitney.

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Nature Journal Club Draws From "Urban Oasis"

by Karen Ponzio | Nov 9, 2023 9:25 am | Comments (3)

East Rock Park on a sunny November Saturday was an idyllic setting for the most recent New Haven Nature Journal Club meet-up. The biweekly event focuses on gathering in natural settings to witness, observe, and document the surroundings through drawings and writings, with a bit of guidance and a bunch of support. 

The group, led by Madelyn Neufeld, meets on Saturday mornings twice a month: once in East Rock Park and two weeks later at another location that changes each time. Neufeld started this club back in August after researching the Wild Wonder Foundation — which provides free nature journal resources — and finding no groups in Connecticut.

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Artists Lead The Narrative In "Voir Dire" Exhibition

by Brian Slattery | Nov 8, 2023 11:14 am | Comments (0)

The two men in Cal Bocicault’s painting are, first and foremost, stylish, and they know it. Peering askance at the viewer, colors coordinated with themselves and each other, together they open the shoeboxes on their laps. The shoeboxes themselves become classic MacGuffins. We have no idea what’s in the boxes. For all we know, the boxes are empty. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they contain the most stylish sneakers we’ve ever seen, footwear that elevates all the clothes around it. The important thing is that the two men can see what we can’t. They know what’s in the boxes. They’re just not telling us.

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Art Exhibition Unveils The Horror Beneath The Horror

by Brian Slattery | Nov 3, 2023 8:52 am | Comments (0)

Joan Fitzsimmons’s images both beckon viewers and warn them about what’s in store in the Institute Library’s upstairs gallery. The hands, in part because of their visual treatment, feel iconic, perhaps from an old horror movie. But what are they doing? Are they trapped? Are they casting a spell? Are these the hands of a prisoner, or is the owner of those hands doing the manipulating?

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Two Artists Consider The State Of Play

by Brian Slattery | Nov 1, 2023 8:13 am | Comments (0)

Two photographs by Marjorie Gillette Wolfe hang in the front of Kehler Liddell Gallery, at 873 Whalley Ave. in Westville. They’re both of hedges, and the way Wolfe composes the image, the eye is drawn to the plant life, without worrying too much about where it is. We can see the similarities in the forms of the plants, the spacing between them. It’s only in looking at the titles that the true humor comes out, as one photograph is taken in front of a diner somewhere, and the other is taken at the Alhambra, one of the great architectural wonders of the world. Both locations are almost entirely absent from the images.

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Westville Brings The Heat With Open Studios

by Karen Ponzio | Oct 30, 2023 9:33 am | Comments (0)

The last weekend of October finally gifted the city a warm and sunny Saturday, but nowhere was it hotter than Westville, where a two-day neighborhood event — part of the artist-led City-Wide Open Studios — encompassed everything from galleries, creative collectives, and private residences to Edgewood Park and even pods on Central Avenue.

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In "After Picasso," Artists Reckon With A Giant

by Brian Slattery | Oct 27, 2023 8:39 am | Comments (2)

Cynthia Beth Rubin’s collage crackles with energy, as colors vibrate off one another and forms within forms, textures within textures, rub against each other. Keen senses of both aesthetic freedom and control of technique suffuse the piece — which, it turns out, hearken back to a famous artistic ancestor.

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Artist-Led Open Studios Take Over Erector Square

by Brian Slattery | Oct 23, 2023 8:35 am | Comments (1)

Artist Chelsea M. Rowe marries festive colors to a violent act in her art, a contrast that opens up the possibilities for interpretation. There’s no getting away from the pain, the blood spilling from both figures as they split from one another. But it’s not just a portrait of torture. It suggests a form of creation and change, too: the chance to survive, make something different.

The sense of energy, connection, and a little bit of revolution in Rowe’s piece was in the air at the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios’ Erector Square weekend. 

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Marlinworks Open Studios Falls Into Place

by Karen Ponzio | Oct 23, 2023 8:21 am | Comments (0)

The top floor of the Marlinworks Eagle building in East Rock was the setting for the opening of the studios of a small but dazzling array of artists on Saturday afternoon, with a display of works as eye-grabbing as the foliage of East Rock Park right outside their windows. The five artists — Linda Lindroth, Nancy Karpel, Craig Newick, David Margolis and Jo Kremer — were participating in the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios weekend this past Saturday and Sunday, which also included events in Erector Square and City Gallery. 

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YUAG Art Show Turns The Numbers Back Into People

by Brian Slattery | Oct 20, 2023 8:55 am | Comments (0)

Prentice looks like a no-nonsense woman. The depiction of her is simple, but it appears to capture some of her essential nature. Prentice looks smart, curious, and strong. But she also looks a little tired, like she’s been carrying a lot of weight. That she can bear it doesn’t make it any less heavy.

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Solo Artists Band Together At ECOCA

by Brian Slattery | Oct 19, 2023 9:34 am | Comments (0)

Among the digital video detritus of Kit Young’s installation at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art is a cracked screen with a sign rarely seen in a gallery: ​“Please touch.” With the first hesitant brush of a finger, there’s almost no effect. But press a little harder, and the cracks bloom with almost bioluminescent patterns. Whether this effect is something Young designed or discovered is beside the point. In pressing into the screen, the viewer has helped make the art happen —even if, just as quickly, it starts to fade.

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Amplify The Arts Raises The Barn

by Karen Ponzio | Oct 16, 2023 8:49 am | Comments (6)

The soul-stirring sculptures of Linda Mickens, both large and small, anchored one corner of the Eli Whitney Barn. Across the room, Michael Jackson’s iconic Off the Wall album cover in the style of Saint Phifer faced portraits of women dancing and laughing as seen through the eyes of Jasmine Nikole. 

Those neighbored the dazzling array of faces created by Shaunda Holloway, while between them lay stairs leading to the open studio of Susan Clinard, where a seemingly endless number of her own sculptures that one could see themselves and just about anyone else in the world in stood, sat, and hung from the rafters. 

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Artist Finds The Balance

by Brian Slattery | Oct 13, 2023 9:00 am | Comments (3)

If the works of artist Linda Mickens — one of the recipients this year, along with fellow artist Jeff Ostergren, of a grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists — were to all appear in one gallery at the same time, you could line one wall with a choir of angels, in various poses, heads tilted toward the sky or downward, wings folded or unfurled. 

On the other side of the gallery, though, would be a woman with nails for hair, screaming, a machine gun in her lap; faceless statues in hoodies, the victims of police shootings. Light and darkness, held in suspension, with the artist always moving from one to the other and back again. And maybe, with the piece she’s about to create, finding just the right balance between them.

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Artist Finds The Drug In The Paint

by Brian Slattery | Oct 13, 2023 9:00 am | Comments (0)

It’s a street scene in psychedelic colors, pointilism with an extra point, as though you’re walking down an urban street with your mind thoroughly altered. But If the overall composition of the painting looks familiar, that’s because it’s explicitly taken from Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 painting Paris Street; Rainy Day. The figures in that painting, however, are replaced with figures from contemporary pharmaceutical ads. The building in the background is the former Purdue Pharma building in Stamford. It’s the beginning of unpacking what artist Jeff Ostergren’s project is about.

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In Hillhouse Classroom, "Art Is Power"

by Maya McFadden | Oct 10, 2023 10:18 am | Comments (1)

With pop artist Keith Haring in mind, Hillhouse High School junior Emonie Jackson imagined up a chicken leg, to-go cup, and ketchup bottle all with arms and legs — and then penned those images to paper, honing her own creative style and skills amid her classroom’s dive into recent art history.

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Never Ending Books Scares In The Season

by Brian Slattery | Oct 10, 2023 8:32 am | Comments (0)

The Volume Two collective at Never Ending Books threw open its doors Friday night for a seasonal art opening running at the space at 810 State St. through the end of the month — not of fall foliage and decorative gourds, but of ghosts, ghouls, and other visions of the macabre, as New Haven prepares for what is, in some ways, its most celebrated community holiday. The exhibition, called ​“Vol. Boo,” is a collaborative art show featuring the work of 15 artists who all took the chance, some playfully, some seriously, to explore and illuminate the darker side of life.

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