Ely Center Orders Up Chaos

The gallery space is an exercise in sensory saturation. The walls are covered in vivid drawings, other images that hover somewhere between representation and schematics for circuitry. There is music to listen to, projections to follow. There’s a video game to play, like Doom but weirder and glitchier; it’s a game that loves but also mocks other games. And over in the corner is a glassed-in booth, a fortune-telling machine.

The only issue is that, as advertised, it dispenses bad advice. Hit a button and it dispenses tickets. When this reporter tried it, half of them said ​“give up.”

The machine and multimedia is the product of a collaboration of artists called FEED, just some of the creators in a riotous new double show at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street. Technically ECOCA is hosting two shows — ​“Fall Solos” and “#WIP” (a.k.a. works in progress) — both of which run through Nov. 14, and both of which have opening receptions this Sunday, Oct. 3. But in the experience of walking through the space, the two shows meld into one another, with parallels emerging among the artists as, with humor and energy, they reflect back the chaos of our current world.

Headed up by artists Aude Jomini and Eben Kling, ​“FEED’s interest lies at the intersection of digital forms, game design, printmaking and
painting,” an accompanying statement reveals. The pieces in the exhibit are from ​“a series of digital and physical works inspired by their interest in
video-game culture,” which they created in 2020 and 2021. The video game, called Doom-Haven, takes place in the now-departed Sports Haven and replaces the violence of the original Doom with something much more playful. Much of the artwork surrounding the game console emerges from the collective working on the game.

That the art is taking over the room isn’t an accident. ​“The artists are interested in forms of collective digital identity constructed from modular graphic units,” they write. ​“The project explores tensions between replication and mutation allowing forms to grow and reproduce. This work sets up structures for recombination of open source tiles to create a speculative digital world suggestive of genetic diversity, wild viral genomic expression and the corruption of identity, both digital and physical. Its imagery becomes a cultural virus of connective graphic mythology.” In a way, the artists are trying to create a much more benign pandemic to follow the devastation of Covid-19. Perhaps creativity can be made to be contagious.

FEED’s packed visual style finds an echo in Caroline Harmon’s pieces. Principles of Uncertainty appears to wrap up the past two years in one tumultuous, epic mural. She gets at the strange, almost paradoxical way that there was tremendous social upheaval at the same time that many people were effectively trapped in their houses. Tensions were both bottled up and unleashed, both potential and kinetic energy in play.

“Across the globe we are struggling with complex systems teetering on the edge of collapse. Our supply chains, economies, democracies, health care systems and rapidly changing climate are all in flux,” Harmon writes. ​“Rising temperatures are fueling environmental degradation, natural disasters, species and habitat loss, and food and water insecurity. Sea levels are rising, the arctic is melting, coral reefs are dying, oceans are acidifying and forests are burning. Rather than despair, I make paintings using geometry and color to weave a tapestry of truth about the struggle for survival, the necessity of adaptability and the deep connection and interdependence of every living thing on the planet … right now all of life hangs in the balance. Every day I fight against the feeling of powerlessness, and enter the studio with the hope of creating something so alive with truth and terrible beauty that it forces the world to wake up.”

{media 4}Similarly, Dennis Carroll creates art that covers the canvas with energetic figures, and transforms the space, making an unsettling version of a playroom. The discomfort is entirely intentional. ​“Recent work is heading in a grimy toxic direction pushing aside happy go lucky fun times,” Carroll writes. ​“I mainly start with drawing as the basis of all my artwork and find ways to color those drawings whether it be via painting, printmaking or photoshop. What’s a friendly scene? I find great interest in how easily we become accustomed to terrible situations. Feeling completely consumed by physical objects, digital/mental data and relationships. Being funny as a way to hide suffering from high anxiety, addiction and obsession. Dissecting personal past intimate situations usually awkward, sexual or fantasized.” Like Harmon, Carroll captures a sense of tensions mounting without resolution, tipping toward chaos.

“Look around,” says the text in one of Amira Brown’s many small paintings that appear throughout the main staircase of the building, ​“do you know where you are?” The question is rhetorical; the accompanying image seems to change shape as you look at it, suggesting that even if we thought we knew the place we were, it and we are changing fast enough that such recognition is fleeting. At the top of the stairs, Brown’s paintings are clustered on the wall, the text spelling out what the chaotic image suggests: ​“Sometimes rage is all we have.” But the idea isn’t destructive; rage is an energy, and it can used to create and transform.

“My paintings are inspired by the psychological aspects and factors that drive and liberate Black consciousness and articulate their depth. Academic essays and poetry such as Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake largely inspire my work,” Brown writes. ​“I focus on capturing the ambiguities of life, furthering the representational ideals of diversity and moving into unresolved and imaginative aspects of Blackness. By layering personal, psychological, social and recorded histories into my work I document the liminal minutiae of daily life and investigate the ambiguity and complexity of my existence through the Black imaginative lens. I believe by focusing and sifting through the daily trials, triumphs and
troughs I can pin the ontological fluidity of Black being and its sophisticated nuances in myself and therefore others.”

Matthew Dercole’s sculptures, meanwhile, first churn within their frames, and then burst through them. ​“I develop storylines stemming from the exploration of our relationships with ideas and imagery that are often overlooked, taken for granted, sometimes disturbing, and usually
misunderstood. Within these stories, I approach and investigate the dull, banal,and the obvious aspects of everyday life with a new curiosity,” Dercole writes. He reveals a mission similar to Brown’s. ​“The exploration of the self, the understanding of others, and the dynamics they create are an
underlying theme throughout my work,” he writes, though his inspirations differ: ​“Drawing from a fascination with biology, I create forms based on principles of nature coupled with the experience of thought and feeling. The works become combinations of the natural progression of life, such as growth and decomposition, and the human aspects of reason and ability. I am reacting to the way people think and feel about their identities, how the act of learning and the responsibility of knowledge affect our everyday lives.”

If many of the artists in the show lean into the chaos, others seek ways of responding to it that bring, if not order, at least more quiet and stillness — without shying away from the problems our society faces. ​“I give my work the job of capturing contemporary life, providing mementos of things the culture does or should feel for. I use imagery of places we want to be, and places we try to forget,” writes Ron Lambert. ​“Culture moves at an exhausting pace yet it is difficult to make art about flux, to make objects and images that ask the audience to remain still in a culture which constantly threatens to pass them by…. It is in the moments of the sublime experience that life slows down, if even for a second.”

“I continually draw inspiration from places around where I live, particularly sites in older areas hidden from the flow of traffic,” he continues. ​“My current work uses images of nature combined with constructed objects to examine our efforts to make sense and/or control our environment. I am inspired
by the sense of an American sublime vision as it is tied to western expansion, and depictions of the landscape as seen in movements like the Hudson Valley painters. Those visions of locational identity help to create a sense of ownership over what we feel the need to protect. I see this mindset as playing a role in the divisiveness in our culture today.”

Similarly, in both the process and product of her woven pieces, Kathie Halfin is looking for ways to bind together and move forward in the face of chaos. She ​“uses a Morse Code in several languages to create words and sentences,” she writes in an accompanying statement. ​“Creation of her coded, handmade fabrics is a meditative act of remolding of social construct in the self and vice versa. Kathie’s weavings reveal language as a powerful tool that shapes our identity and our way of being and becoming…. Constructing her fabrics that associate with the early 20th century conflicts and the activism of nowadays, Kathie invites the viewer to look closely at the ways the language can be used to incite resistance, empower, and heal…. Kathie’s weavings create space for more holistic and slow ways to define and judge words.”

{media_9}And Amelia Toelke’s clean, geometric forms, made from ornaments, remind us that there’s beauty in order, too — an order that connects us to who we were. ​“This innate human impulse to adorn frames how I understand the world, our past and our present. In my work, I borrow visual vocabulary from the languages of adornment and signage to explore the profound relationship between identity, culture, and ornament.” As the title of one of her works — Compass — suggests, the future may be as uncertain as ever, but knowing and understanding the past can help us find our way forward.

“Fall Solos” and “#WIP” run at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Nov. 14. Visit the center’s website for hours and more information about the shows and other events.