Artists Surf For Political Unity

When he was a kid surfing three or four times a week on the California coast, Jeremy Wright waited for the perfect wave to come to him. Then he rode it, catching the next curl, and the next, with propulsive speed, hoping, of course, that it would never end.

As an artist, Wright takes a surfer’s approach to creating, waiting patiently for that first image to propel the rest. He arrived with boards full of colorful, wild images — his contribution to The Complexities of Unity.

It’s the thought-provoking new show at the Institute for Sacred Music’s long corridor gallery situated at the Yale Divinity School’s Sterling Quadrangle on upper Prospect Street, which runs through June 13.

Wright is one of six artists whom curator Jon Seals has brought together to explore one of art’s eternal, fundamental, and often elusive challenges: how to create unity out of complexity. If you’ve already drawn parallels to the current political situation, you’re on the right track.

The show’s first stirrings actually began last summer, Seals said, as the divisive political season heated up. Many people in Seals’s family and circle began to express highly divisive opinions for and against then-candidate Donald Trump.

It was ​“bonkers,” Seals said, as the fracturing around the family table began.

As Seals greeted Wright, who had just arrived from San Diego for the show’s opening reception on Thursday, Seals said, ​“the fibers were exposed, and these are people you love and may have a completely different way to look at things.”

So what was to be done?

Seals is a person who thinks art should not shy away from big subjects. Previously he had taken on perception itself in his first ISM show in 2015. Last year’s ​“Worship In The Face Of Death” was the subject a very un-grim visual exploration, occasioned by Seals’s own personal experience of the death of his brother in 2005.

“I went to what I know. Art. Artists are constantly reconciling differences,” Seals said.

But Seals didn’t want to hit the subject straight on. ​“A lot of artists are doing work that’s purely political,” Seals said.

“It plays well, it has an audience,” Wright added.

“But I didn’t want to go there,” Seals said.

The result is an ambitious show in which Seals has corralled Wright, Jane Winfield, Lily Kuonen, Esteban Cabeza De Baca, Edgard Rodriguez Luiggi, and local Westville-based Noé Jimenez — all artists in whose work Seals sees a grappling aesthetically with unity and complexity.

In many of the works, Seals was intrigued by borders or barriers created, then broken; gestures marshaled into visual packs of dots, strokes, or other shapes and then suddenly let loose, with varying visual rhythms.

He said he saw Winfield’s ​“Overgrowth” as a kind of ​“amoeba,” as if you were looking at cell division occurring within the frame.

He noted Jimenez’s absence of straight lines, including deliberately askew and lumpy frames, and he liked the completely unframed and never-ending quality of Wright’s panels.

Wright has created about 80 panels since 2004, shapes that, like Winfield’s, can seem as if you are viewing them through a microscope, although his palette is much brighter.

So where is the unity/complexity issue expressed in Wright’s work? The artist himself says that the propulsive whoosh of the movement, one image to the next, one panel to the next, is what brings unity to the individual parts. Seals agreed.

He also liked the way one panel’s blue image does not quite align with the twin image across the border or perforation of the adjacent panel, suggesting, perhaps, unity just missed.

“The thing about unity is that it’s complex!” Seals said. ​“If it’s too unified, it can get ugly and boring.” But too complex, then it’s chaotic and doesn’t hang together. The work must be ​“unified enough to keep you in, but complicated enough to keep you there,” he added.

This colorful show even feels optimistic. ​“For me, it’s the optimism of this edge,” Seals said, touching the end of one of the panels of Wright’s work, which he pronounced a fantastic project in part because it is intended simply to go on and on.

“It just doesn’t stop. There’s stuff that came before it, and stuff will come after,” he said. You could say that about the country and politics as well.

​“Complexities of Unity” is viewable at the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle until June 13, weekdays from 9:00 to 4:00 p.m.