Ely Center Keeps Its Ear To The Ground

Shapes undulate against a circus background. The green pods could be plants or bags. The lengths of cord could be a stem or a noose. Are the things inside the speech bubble plants or insects

Osvaldo Mesa’s Passing Glance needs more than that to be read fully, and is of a piece with ​“Ear to the Ground,” an exhibit running at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Feb. 21. Energetic, colorful, and off-kilter, the exhibit engages by balancing the playful and the sinister.

Some of the piece tend more toward the playful. Andrew Cunningham further enlivens a vibrant abstract color study by (it’s tempting to imagine) applying the paint thickly and wetly, letting it run a bit and then dry, and then repeating the process from another direction, giving the impression of a painting that hasn’t yet and perhaps will never fully settle.

Similarly, Scrapp Wren’s ideal motel siesta is a riotous collage that invites the viewer to look closer and closer at its many details, as pagodas and Virgin Marys find themselves neighbors and fish swim through cherry blossoms. There’s even a quickly rewarding Where’s Waldo?-like search to be done for the source of the piece’s title. Yoon Cho’s Fungi Field from the Desert Walk Series uses a mixture of photography and print to draw attention to the way rock formations and mushrooms can uncannily resermble one another. Geoffrey Detrani’s Stalemate Cosmology manages somehow to be explosive and precise at the same time, like a controlled demolition, suggesting both frantic energy and a draftsman’s table. Karl Goulet’s Peeling no. 10 is a painting that is literally lifting itself off the wall. It conveys a sense of book pages blown in a stiff wind, as though, if the viewer were stand and watch long enough, the outer layers would peel away entirely and reveal more layers below.

In all of this, guest curator Julie Torres shows a taste for visual art that conveys a sense of motion, instability, ambiguity, and life. Nothing seems to stand entirely still in any of the pieces in ​“Ear to the Ground,” and it makes a visit to the Ely Center a special form of eye candy. But the exhibit isn’t a circus. In many of the pieces, the motion conveys fear as much as joy, frenzy as much as ecstasy.

Lillian P.H. Kology’s Gilded Laundry suggests both a work shirt being tossed in the air and a piece of handmade high fashion, all shot through with a hint of violence.

Joan Wheeler’s Message in a Bottle captures a sense of whimsy and threat. Amid the rising waves and writhing serpents, the viewer still isn’t sure if the young woman at the center is in danger, or dangerous herself.

The title of Jamie Romanet’s Keep Quiet feels like a harsh command, the sentence perhaps given to a victim from her abuser, with the portrait showing how the silence can make the victim hazy, almost beginning to disappear.

McKenzie Chapman’s All That’s On My Mind, meanwhile, is an effective portrait of painful anxiety, the fingernails digging into the arm in the image mirroring the way the needle might push through the fabric to create the image.

The balance between playful and sinister is maybe at its most keen in Katie Jurkiewicz’s Nuclear Power Fuels the Countryside. Amid the dazzling pastoralia of flowers, farmhouses, and rolling fields, it may take a moment to see the cooling towers in the background, and another moment after that to see the colorful clouds that they’re emitting. That the towers and their product are rendered in the same style suddenly complicates the intention of the bright colors. Are they festive or radioactive? Is this countryside bursting with life or is it being irradiated into uninhabitability? Is the sky itself changing color? Where did the people who live in that house go? The piece won’t say, and we’re left to decide, drawn in by the swirls of color while also being reminded that maybe it’s unsafe to stay.

“Ear to the Ground” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St. Click here for hours and more information. The center also has a call out for its next exhibition, titled ​“Our Bodies Ourselves,” which runs until Feb. 25. Click here for submissions information. That exhibit will open Mar. 7.