In Ely Center Exhibition, Artists Explore What Lies Beneath

The title of Sarah Schneiderman’s piece at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street — The State of Health Care in the United States of America #4 — makes the target of the artist’s intentions clear, and it gets at something about the overall effects of certain aspects of our healthcare system, creating a country awash in prescription medication and, as recent high-profile lawsuits have shown, far too many addicts in the process. But Schneiderman’s piece also gets at something even broader than that. Its depiction of the flag itself It aptly illustrates the way the past couple years has seen the nation change shape, bending and warping, struggling to turn into something else under the most fractious politics seen in a long time. Schneiderman kept her eyes on her intended subject, but touched on something deeper as well.

That’s all too fitting for ​“Undercurrents,” the latest show at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, running now through April 24. This vibrant exhibit, consisting of the work of 43 different artists, captures something deeper about the tumult of our times.

“The challenges of the last two years living with the pall of a global pandemic and the heaviness of racial fury in this nation has forced us to reimagine connectivity, community, and intimacy. While reviewing the over 400 works submitted for the Ely Center’s Open Call, I couldn’t help but feel a profound connection to work that seemed to be exploring this moment, even if some of them were created pre-pandemic. Maybe I was projecting my own emotional state, but after selecting the 46 pieces for the exhibition and then looking at them collectively, I knew that they belonged together. These works needed to share space with each other, to have proximity to each other’s visual stories, to be in community,” writes curator Kristina Newman-Scott in an accompanying statement. ​“There may never be a return to what we have collectively assumed as ​‘normal.’ These past years have shown us that there is always something hiding under the surface. This is where we find thoughts that convey joy, that consume trust and concede suffering. I’m hoping that the work in this exhibit might remind us of the beauty, pain, loneliness, and joy that we have been experiencing. We have all been carrying active feelings under the surface. These are our undercurrents. We are alive, and it is wonderful.”

The approach of ​“Undercurrents” sets it apart from a lot of recent exhibits in town taking on current events. Many exhibits — and, for that matter, the news — acknowledge the upheaval as a grotesque fluorescence of multiple upheavals, compounding and magnifying one another. In focusing on the emotional results of living through times like these, ​“Undercurrents” deftly asks the viewer to consider all these things as a totality, to imagine them as parts of a whole, perhaps even intertwined to the point where to tease them all apart is to lose a little insight as to what has made it all happen at once, and how it is we’re supposed to address it all now. That begins with Elizabeth Knowles’s Impulses and Encrustations, a piece that mesmerizes with its sense of scale, surreality, and perceived stickiness. Is it growing up from the floor? Down from the ceiling? Is it moving and growing? The sense of an invasive species taking over the gallery as a parasite might enter our bodies is palpable. 

Daniella Dooling’s piece certainly isn’t the first piece artists have made about masks — it isn’t even the first one ECOCA has put on its walls — but it is one of the first to capture them like pinned bugs in an entomological exhibit. In turning the masks into specimens devoid of immediate context, Dooling’s piece reminds us that, at some point, we will stop wearing masks for good, stop having them in the car, or ready to go in the house. What will happen to them all, when they’re no longer a part of our daily lives? Where will we be when we can see each other more clearly again?

On the second floor, Anthony Warnick’s video installation — 15 24-Hr. News Sources — stays true to its title to great, headache-inducing effect. In it, 15 news channels overlap so as to be illegible, while the collective din of the audio renders all of it unintelligible and also extremely irritating. It’s a simple but highly effective conceit, amply demonstrating what it can feel like to consume too much news, ending up saturated with information and, at the same time, completely unable to digest any of it. What does it mean that we’ve been living this way for years?

Then there are the pieces that exist among of the deeper connections that the curator seeks to explore with the show. Katie Hovencamp’s pieces might be, at first glance, almost comical, in a Looney Tunes kind of way. But then which way can the satire point? It could go to the diet industry, a playful pun on ​“calorie bombs.” But, even though it was made in 2021, it finds sudden resonance with the war in Ukraine, in which ordinary civilians are currently making Molotov cocktails. Perhaps even deeper, it suggests the ways in which our homes have been weaponized, first because we were expected to stay in them, now because we’re being coaxed to leave them again to return to work. Perhaps, whether we’re seeking to return to something like whatever ​“normal” meant before or trying to use the upheaval as a chance to reorder our own lives, the home is both the ultimate battlefield of that and the last line of defense.

For other artists — and for many non-artists — the past couple years became a time to look within, to reassess priorities. For some that meant reconnecting with the past. As artist Melissa Sutherland Moss points out, our ancestors can be those we’re related to by blood (as, one assumes, is the case between the artist and Sister Delfina), people who did powerful things generations ago that we can draw strength from today. But our ancestors can also be ones we choose, people whose past action and artistry can inspire us to do our best work now.

Meanwhile, Rima Day’s works reminds us that, in the end, the past few years was at its simplest and most devastating, about mortality. Death was closer even than it usually is, and in contemplating that, we were forced to examine and contend with the limitations of our bodies in ways that we didn’t necessarily have to before. Day’s work may be made of fabric, but in the literally visceral way the piece hangs from the pages, there’s a startling call. Our flesh and blood became open books, but ones whose narratives — whose meanings — are still up to us. What histories did we find ourselves living. And what stories might we find ourselves writing from here?

“Undercurrents” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through April 24. Visit the center’s website for hours and more information.