Artists Explore The Meaning Of Home

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.

De’s photograph is part of ​“Home,” running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Jan. 14. The group show ​“features work developed during the pilot of our Keyhole Artists in Residence program,” an accompanying note explains. ​“Using the former servants’ quarters to provide free studio space, ECOCA invited artists Amartya De, Lesley Finn and Vera Wu, whose work touches on the subject of home in various interpretations. We invite you to see how working in the attic rooms of a Victorian mansion inspired and supported their work. Come see the dialogues that emerged during their stay.”

In a personal statement, the Kolkata-born De describes himself as ​“a watcher, thinking of the past, his family’s histories and the importance of storytelling and privacy today. Amartya wonders where images intersect with memory, his upbringing, playing on the streets, working in the construction industry, to his changing relationships with his friends, family, acquaintances and spaces as life thickens out. Looking at the form of his work through photography, its limitations and strengths, as a direct continuous engagement with the world, while thinking of its role or ability to aid in transformation. He actively uses movement, writes and finds company which could then be shared with a previous self or another.” 

Fittingly, in another statement in the exhibition itself, De places the brassworker depicted in the picture in the context of his other pieces, which, taken in their entirety, offer a glimpse into the complexity of Indian society as it emerged from colonialism two generations ago. It’s also a glance at the place that made De the kind of artist he is.

Lesley Finn is ​“a creative working in the overlap of writing, visual art, and research” who makes work that ​“traces how narratives, categories, and belief systems shape our lives.” Thus, Finn writes, ​“books and other technologies of communication and information fascinate me. I could say that my visual work uses and takes inspiration from their materials while my written work explores their psychology, but the reverse is equally true.”

For this show, Finn honed in not on her own home, but the house she was staying in. ​“The building is named after a man who lived in it for a handful of years,” she writes of the John Slade Ely House. ​“His wife, Grace Taylor Ely, called it home for half a century and created a trust to make it an art center after her death. Despite this, it is his portrait that hangs in the house, not hers. The tension between presence, gender, and naming guides the work I contributed to the show.”

The sly sarcasm in Men of Progress 1898 is evident from the start; open the book, and the inside covers are inhabited entirely by women, their constant, invisible domestic work being the foundation for what makes the men’s public work possible. Finn’s most incisive move, meanwhile, lies in the removal of the pages of the book, a jabbing question asking just how much the work of those men amounted to, in the end.

In that way, Finn also finds a way to connect the work back to her own history, too. In a few pieces, the lace that appears ​“belonged to my great-grandmother, a contemporary of Grace Taylor Ely’s.” In an interesting parallel between Ely and Finn’s own residency in the house — the artist studios were in the house’s expansive attic — Finn writes that her great-grandmother was ​“forced to quit her job when she married because her income exceeded her husband’s.” She then ​“lived a quiet, domestic life, the last decade of which she spent in the attic of my mother’s childhood home sewing and mending clothes for the family.”

The statement points toward Finn’s own pieces for the exhibit. She worked in the attic, but gets to show what she did, and the work of the women who came before her. She lets us see what used to be hidden.

Unlike De and Finn, Vera Wu isn’t given to personal statements. Her website elaborates only on the technique of painting she uses, without expounding on her choice of subject or its importance to her. But the work itself — often lavish painted depictions of flowers — does the talking. Wu’s vivid colors make the walls of ECOCA pop, but it’s when they’re applied to Visions of My Flower, a specific installation, that they’re perhaps most effective. Here Wu’s pieces are most at one with the house, in a way that feels fragile and transitory. Her piece both obscures and adds to the view from the window; in turn, the light through the window illuminates and washes out the work. 

None of it can last. The piece won’t hang in the window much longer. If it did, the light would eventually bleach out almost all the colors anyway. Keep expanding the time frame, and similar ideas about temporariness emerge. Someday we won’t be there. Someday — even though the John Slade Ely House has been saved a few times over in recent years, first by ACES, then by ECOCA — the house won’t be there either. On the scale of a human lifetime, a home can feel almost permanent, a fixed point of origin. Go beyond that, though, and there’s no telling how long it lasts. What does home mean then?

“Home” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Jan. 14. Visit the center’s website for hours and more information.