Ely Center Goes Solo

It’s a simple geometric design, just a grid of dark circles, but look closer and you see the abstraction is pulled out of something very concrete. Dan Gries’s 180 Cups of Coffee — part of the ​“Solos 2020” exhibition now running at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street through Feb. 21 — fits in with a theme that emerges among the six artists’ work in the exhibit, of using unorthodox materials and exploring the most basic ideas of our existence, like hunger, thirst, and the simple fact of living in our own bodies.

“I craft algorithms with computer code to produce high resolution archival prints, 3D printed objects, animations, and physical installations, and my background in mathematics often informs my work. I am particularly fascinated by imperfection and irregularity in shape, texture, color, and flow, and the human connection to this type of imperfection,” Gries writes in an accompanying statement. ​“My most recent work has focused on creating this kind of imperfection in simple line and circle shapes. In all of my work I employ random parameters so I can leave certain aspects of the images up to chance, and I can be surprised by the results. Variations in shape and color are turned over to the computer, and I become the curator of the results.” Beyond cups of coffee, other works become more abstract, as arrays of circles become bright patches of color, almost like fabric swatches.

It’s fitting, then, that Gries’s pieces are set near Melanie Carr’s, as those pieces likewise use fabric to create shapes that have definite edges yet feel mysterious. They’re presents we’re not allowed to unwrap, which lends them a certain allure. ​“In my studio practice, I am concerned and consumed with touch, geometry, interactivity, and human experience, yet driven by intuition,” Carr writes. ​“I study the world around me and represent it through abstract forms, shapes and colors that allow for a broad interpretation — one that takes thought, and imagination, on the part of the viewer. I make artwork that invites the mind to wander, and for the viewer to complete one’s own meaning, especially if we keep our minds open and consider that looking is not seeing.”

Leslie Fandrich also uses fabric but in a very different way. Her pieces fill the gallery space in a way that feels at once like a place to play and like a butcher shop. A long tube of pleasantly stuffed fabric lies tangled on the floor; on the ends are hands that look like puppet hands. It could be a toy or a pile of intestines. Elsewhere, a plush shape hangs from the ceiling like a piece of meat, to strange and compelling effect.

“I am interested in the boundaries of our bodies and how we are in relationship to our domestic spaces and to each other,” Fandrich writes. ​“I often use materials found in the home: blankets, pillows, clothing, furniture as well as books, paper ephemera and fabric patterns. I break these materials down and rebuild them into surreal and uncanny arrangements that are both familiar and strange. I think about the pregnant/nursing/mothering body and how it holds and cares for other bodies and how our bodies change, age and need repair.”

In an upstairs gallery, Henry Klimowicz’s pieces are so delicately rendered that it takes a minute to realize that they’re made from, of all things, cardboard. ​“My use of cardboard, a valueless material, releases me from the heart of this cultural confine,” he writes. ​“My interest in nature envelops my work over the last 12 years. Each piece is built by growing out of itself. Much like a wasp builds its nest, I build each sculpture. The work often feels like the work of insects. The pieces build upon themselves. They show the nature of their construction or accumulation…. Each piece works individually but each is also part of a flow of possible visual outcomes. I am a strong believer in not knowing what the outcome will be.” This process shows in each of his artistic results. The flowy shapes that Klimowicz creates seem lighter even than the material they’re made from; they seem light as flower petals, or air.

Next door, Brigid Kennedy’s pieces seem almost to be having a cocktail party. ​“I strive to carry the spirit of playfulness and exploration I had as a child into my work,” she writes. ​“I want the viewing of my work to raise more questions than it answers. I want my work to inform and delight…. I endeavor to ensure that the technical does not overshadow the sense of mystery and surprise that lives in the work…. I deliberately choose to work with simple, everyday materials and transform them into revelation.” Like Fandrich in a gallery downstairs, Kennedy succeeds in changing the room into something else, somewhere between a soiree and a dream.

While Kennedy’s pieces make the viewer want to wander around the gallery, Tony Saunders’s small pieces make the viewer get up close. ​“Painting presents a visual stimulus from which the viewer tries to ​‘make sense,’ looking for significance in patterns and trying to find a story even in the most abstract, or seemingly random, elements. My work is in the tradition of landscape painting, Japanese woodblock prints, 20-century abstraction, and street art, and aims to elicit the viewer’s tendency to derive narrative from painterly elements,” he writes. ​“Meaning is suggested but never explicit: The story takes place inside the viewer’s imagination, constructed when the materials at hand trigger the creative act of memory.” The shapes echo the borders of geographic areas. The patterns of color and shadow can feel like a map. They’re charting a course to no place we’ve seen, but we want to go.

“Solos 2020” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Feb. 21. Visit the center’s website for hours and more information.