Inaugural Art Show Cracks Open The Questions

The figure stares out from the canvas, her pose ambiguous. Does it connote strength or vulnerability? Or both? Something more? There’s a sense of intrusion, of the viewer having discovered her. But the painter insures that we, the viewers, come bearing an offering; those are our hands in the lower part of the canvas. But still more is afoot. The blue rope twining out from the figure are intestines, but she’s none the worse for losing them. All of the elements in Blue (Affection) are potent images, but their relationships to one another aren’t clear. Meaning shifts as we construct it. 

The painting, by Moshopefoluwa ​“MO” Olanguju, is part of a larger series of artworks ​“designed to evoke varied narrative interpretations based on the arrangement of surrounding paintings,” MO writes. ​“Throughout the series, roses and guts emerge as recurring motifs, contributing to a thematic continuity within the narrative.”

Blue (Affection) is part of ​“Gather,” the inaugural exhibition at the Orchid Gallery at the Lab at ConnCORP in Newhall, which began development earlier this year. The show — featuring works by Kulimushi Barongozi, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Aisha Nailah, MO, Daniel ​“silencio” Ramirez, Liah Sinq, Arvia Walker, and Yves Wilson — ​“honors the work of artists who archive oral histories, collect and conserve artifacts, and otherwise assume the role of culture bearer — those who dutifully gather, reinterpret, and hold the stories and symbols that both define and enrich our communities,” curator nico w. okoro writes in an accompanying statement. ​“In its many forms, the act of gathering is about drawing and holding together. Like the tie that binds, this exhibition aspires to keep us together, purposefully, through ongoing self-reflection and community discourse.”

For okoro, MO and fellow artist Yves Wilson ​“consider gathering a radical act, one that challenges conventional power dynamics and dominant historical narratives by putting forth what Olanguju describes as ​‘unconventional representations of the body.’ Here, to gather is to summon intuitive, ancestral, and diasporic wisdom in assembling symbols that speak louder than words in telling our story.”

MO’s sense that his paintings can change meaning based on what they’re placed next to is apt, not only in the context of his own work, but in relation to the rest of the show, and in relation to the Orchid Gallery’s mission to show the work of ​“Black and Brown artists who are local, who deserve to be heard and seen,” as ConnCORP’s chief executive officer Eric Clemons put it in February. ​“We’re really interested in artists whose work is dealing with issues that our community is faced with. Not that challenging work can’t also be beautiful,” but​“we’re not just trying to make this space pretty for people who are passing through. We really want art that provokes questions, dialogue, reflection, observations on the challenges our community faces.” ​“Gather” succeeds on all of these fronts, as it brings together artists who all dive into the questions of who they are, where they come from, and where they’re going, without settling on easy answers.

In her pieces, Aisha Nailah is ​“exploring the idea of archetypes of humanity using various images of people from different African nations. It’s a take on the concept of the astral plane, the dimension in which the soul/consciousness resides, outside of the body in the ethers past, present and future. I’m combining various elements of painting like pointilism and image transfer techniques to create that feeling of an ​‘other’ dimensionality, like atoms transcending space,” the artist writes. 

Among other connotations, in their bold lines and sepia tones, the images convey a sense of being artifacts from another time — artifacts whose cultural power we feel but don’t fully understand. In that way, Nailah captures both the strong connection of ancestry and the way that cultural knowledge was utterly disrupted when Black people were brought to the United States against their will, and had to rebuild culture all over again. Those concerns find echoes in neighboring pieces, such as Arvia Walker’s lovingly detailed photographs of her older relatives’ hands, an aunt holding a bible, a grandfather holding a grandson’s hands inside his own.

But the exhibition as a whole also points out ways in which the cultural connection to Africa isn’t only historical. The pieces from the DRC-born artist Kulimushi Barongozi depict people in the near past; one shows the artist’s parents at their wedding reception, while another shows a mother and daughter on the shore of the longest lake in the world and the second-largest in Africa after Lake Victoria. Here, the connection to the past is both more recent and more personal, another twining tendril in the roots of cultural memory the exhibition as a whole portrays.

For curator okoro, Barongozi and fellow artists Daniel ​“silencio” Ramirez and Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez are working through similar ways of gathering, ​“through processes of identity exploration and material experimentation.” In doing so, they ​“embrace multiple ways of seeing and knowing.” In Ramirez and Gonzalez Hernandez’s pieces, it’s possible to see something of a change in the way art about exploring identity is made. A decade ago, much of the art on the walls of New Haven’s art shows was more declarative, straightforward; identity was often portrayed as a fixed, clear subject. In Ramirez’s and Gonzelez’s work, identity is shifting, amorphous, fluid. They may know who they are in relation to the world — they certainly know how they are perceived — but they also crack open the idea of identity to find an evolving complexity within. And maybe landing in a fixed spot doesn’t have to be a goal, after all. Maybe it’s the movement that matters.

“Gather” is running now at the Orchid Gallery in the Lab at ConnCORP, 496 Newhall St., Hamden. Visit it during normal business hours.