Yvonne Shortt’s Material Investigations at the Ely is simple yet evocative — a system of ropes that Shortt is slowly transforming over time into something else. The patterns she’s creating remind one of braids, or farther toward the floor, maybe cascading dreadlocks. The knotting she’s doing is a simple macrame, but also the pattern for the beads on a shekere. All these evocations are in play; she “investigates hair and cultural mindsets using rope, repetition, various other materials, and historical context,” she writes. But the rope serves another purpose, to bind together all the artwork around it, in form, process, and function.
“Hair @ Ely,” running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Feb. 20, was put together using a modification to the traditional open call, developed by Shortt and artist Daria Dorosh. Rather than the gallery issuing the call and curating selections, artists themselves decided on the topic. The process was designed to be more inclusive; “you select yourself so you are in,” the guidelines to the process read. Just as important, however, was that participating artists had to commit to the weekly meetings to “share their thoughts on the topic to inspire each other’s development of the work and strengthen ideas.” To create “Hair @ Ely,” “artists Sherese Francis, Alana Ladson, Candace Leslie, Jennifer McCandless, Abigail Simon, Megan Shaughnessy, Yvonne Shortt, and Christine Tyler came together in a virtual space every week beginning in November 2021 to discuss their work and create a space for artistic discovery. In addition, they will be making space together in the gallery and audience members will witness the transformation between artists as they engage in creativity,” an accompanying text reads.
The results of that process are visible, as the transitions from one artist’s work to the next are nearly seamless. It’s all too tempting to use hair-related verbs to describe it — braided together, for example — but it’s altogether appropriate, as the artists’ work taken as a whole create a sense of what hair can mean, from its blunt physicality, to the many ways it signifies sexuality, to the various ways it is tamed and untamed across culture and generations.
Candace Leslie’s painting serves as an introduction to the exhibit, as it’s the first piece viewers see as they take the stairs to the second-floor gallery that houses the exhibit. In her piece, Leslie is “exploring the symbiotic relationships evident in motherhood, haircare and the manifold forms of blackness. A self-taught oil painter and collage artist … she cultivated a strong appreciation for plant life, natural elements and fable and folklore.” She examines “nurturing aspects of haircare and rite of passing on cultural knowledge” as it is “transmitted across generations through women and children.”
At the top of the stairs, meanwhile, Megan Shaughnessy’s Sexy Beast is a pink box mounted to the wall with a peephole in it. On the floor in front of the box are a few circular red cushions. A sign next to the box instructs viewers to kneel. Looking into the box reveals a model of a woman’s pubic hair. It’s matter-of-fact. The context of it makes it sexual, but its place in the gallery makes us perhaps a little too aware of the sexualization. That uncomfortableness has a lesson to impart. Shaughnessy “started working with hair after the birth of her first child,” an accompanying statement reads. “In 2018 she cut off all her hair and used it to create a series of self-portraits that opened up a dialogue around biased notions of hair, particularly concerning gender roles and identity within modern society.” Sexy Beast continues that dialogue in a frank and forward way.
The introductory pieces establish the themes of physicality and sexuality, of family and culture. In the gallery itself, those themes swirl around one another. Christine Lee Tyler’s surreal Outgrown pours off the walls and creeps across the floor. Tyler’s art “addresses the mundanity and impermanence of existence through a female lens.… Her process involves utilizing patterns in a repetitive manner to drive the discourse of repression found in domestication,” an accompanying statement reads. Outgrown suggests the ultimate futility of that repression. No matter how it is contained, hair will keep growing; no matter what domestic constraints are put on women, their minds, their imaginations, keep going. Is the hair spilling across the floor funny or threatening, or a mixture of both? Perhaps it depends on one’s feelings about domesticity and the dismantling of it.
Two of Sherese Francis’s pieces — Samson/SameSun/SamSung/SameSong and Ntutu Isi Nkemdiche, which translates to “hair on my head, my uniqueness” — stand in the center of the gallery. “Sherese Francis is an Alkymist of the I‑Magination,” an accompanying statement reads. “Her(e) work takes inspiration from her Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology.” Ntutu Isi Nkemdiche, hovering from the ceiling, gets inside the figure’s head to reveal him not as a source of strength, but of anxiety, someone constantly afraid of losing his power. Meanwhile, Samson shows hair as a source of inspiration, a book of hair that can’t contain its pages, a language written on those pages we can’t yet decipher, though the energy of creation is clear.
The experience and work of illustrator and character designer Alana Ladson is “rooted in the arts, education and advocacy — she loves working with youth, making art and sharing what her students call ‘sage-wisdom,’” an accompanying statement reads. Her graphic triptych is redolent of religious iconography, but repurposed to something much more tangible, more grounded in day-to-day reality. It suggests that the passing on of knowledge from one person to the next, whether it’s in words, or art, or simply teaching someone to care for their hair, has the touch of a small miracle about it.
Jennifer McCandless’s pieces, meanwhile, are so playful and textural that it’s hard at first to believe they’re made from ceramics. She transforms her medium, turning hard clay into something that looks like it would ripple in the wind. In the context of the other pieces in the exhibit, its humor is a gentle reminder that for all the meaning we freight with hair — the racial, sexual, and gender politics caught up in it — hair is also, at its most basic level, fun. We run our fingers through it, we twirl it when we’re on the phone, we make it into interesting shapes and colors, and sometimes it doesn’t mean anything at all, except joy, entertainment, bemusement, pleasure.
All of these ideas seem to come to a swirling head in Abigail Simon’s piece. Simon is “actively researching how to dismantle flawed social systems and neutralize toxic histories. Through experimentation with materials, technologies, language, traditional crafts and radical spiritual practices she challenges the claustrophobic aesthetic/values of the present in order to conjure the compassionate future in which her essential optimism is justified.” The centerpiece of her installation, which looks a bit like a torture device if you’re unfamiliar with it, is in fact an antique hair curler, and it looks like it may have had an escapee. The dolls that are part of the installation suggest a frayed innocence lost. The collages of ads for hair products of the past are both fun to mock but also a reminder of just how much hair care was expected of women — and how much is still expected now, in different forms. Simon’s piece is a testament to how we have perhaps moved closer to the future she hopes for. It’s also a reminder that some of the obstacles to achieving it are still there, in different forms, waiting to be overcome. Before we can do that, however, we must first discover them, and drag them into the light.
“Hair @ Ely” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Feb. 20. For hours and more information, visit the gallery’s website.
