The image of a young Black person behind bars is freighted with decades — centuries — of cultural hurt, and artist Mosho knows it. As an accompanying note explains, the artist “deploys paint, plastic sheeting, and other materials to construct installations that explore issues of identity, community, and belonging.” Here Mosho takes the image and subverts it. Give the image more than a cursory glance and you see that the bars are melting away before the subject’s gaze. And that the hand that holds that dissolving bar, and is perhaps doing the dissolving, contains a galaxy within it, a sign of universal power and also nearly unknowable complexity. It’s an image that hints at liberation through exploration, of the universe and of the self at the same time.
Mosho’s piece is one of many in “Reshaped / Refocused” a show of work by Mosho and fellow artists Amira Brown and Greg Aimé “who are excavating themes of novelist Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic Parable of the Sower,” as an accompanying note explains. The show — which runs at the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through July 9 — “is a meditation on the transformational passage through landscape and peril of Butler’s protagonist. Using materials and processes both experimental and familiar, Brown, Aimé, and Mosho reflect and recast their own notions of containment, presence, and freedom.” It’s a part of the One City, One Read program organized by the New Haven Free Public Library, Yale Schwarzman Center, and International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and is both an altogether fitting tribute to Butler as well as a sign that the ideas she set in motion are continuing to be developed by more than able hands.
Amira Brown, as an accompanying note explains, “layers personal, psychological, social, and recorded moments, creating speculative histories and places of potentiality. She disrupts societal standards of Black value as cultural capital to be exploited, activating narratives of empowerment and nuance.” In “Reshaped / Refocused,” Brown, a prolific creator, scatters her paintings across the gallery, her canvases feeling like dispatches from a journey of discovery that combines playfulness and sadness, whimsy and threat. For one canvas, Brown breaks the frame altogether, the piece freeing itself from its prescribed borders, perhaps heading toward a kind of reinvention — though not before imparting a message: “I hope Jesus is a Black woman next time.”
Where Brown’s exploration of world and self moves across the walls of the gallery, Greg Aimé, in effect, reaches back in time. Aimé, an accompanying note explains, “explores the complex relationship of African descendants of the diaspora — foregrounding history, spirituality, and royalty. He seeks to bridge the past and the present, as well as Eastern and Western culture, to showcase similarities within diversity.” Aimé’s pieces present almost as archeological artifacts — a sense further enhanced by ingenious use of an app (downloadable to your phone on the spot) that, when you point your phone at the pieces, triggers an animation and audio component in which the artist dives into the history behind the image. Aimé’s narration forces the viewer to linger and to learn about the past both personal and social. Without being didactic, the narration fleshes out the pieces and enriches their meaning.
More than many group shows, “Reshaped / Refocused” also feels like a truly collaborative effort in the way the pieces speak to one another. Whether it’s because the artists actively coordinated, or were drawn together by the theme of the show, or simply worked in similar veins, the overall effect is have a sense of them moving as one into the future. Their works complement one another on the walls (and floor) of the gallery and the themes of exploration dovetail to present a rich, vibrant set of ideas on how Black liberation — and, in a wider sense, human liberation — can operate. Taken all together, the works suggest that exploration of the farthest corners of the world, the furthest reaches of the past, and the most inner parts of the self are all part of the same great project, a project that will take much longer than the time any one of us has on this earth. Yet the work is worth doing, to pass on what small knowledge we’ve gleaned to the people who come after us, just as we stand on the shoulders of ancestors. We can only go so far into the future, but if we do the work right, what we pass along can continue without us.
“Reshaped / Refocused” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through July 9. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.
