The walls of mActivity — like the walls of other New Haven-area businesses — keep getting a little brighter, thanks to an embrace of public art that is now transforming buildings outside and in. In the case of mActivity, the art is the result of series that began in 2017. Curated by Barbara Hawes, the series has hosted a wide array of New Haven-based artists, from public art maestro Kwadwo Adae to graffiti artist Michael Deangelo, from photographers Phyllis Crowley and Sean Kernan to painters Vienna Hinkson and William McCarthy.
For the rest of the month of September, visitors can now see the works of artists Esthea Kim and Eliza Shaw Valk, whose work mirrors the mood of the hottest season and, in keeping with the fitness center’s mission, captures some of the renewed spirit many have found in exercise during the pandemc.
Both artists have been working in their respective modes for a number of years. Kim, as a statement from Citywide Open Studios a few years ago describes it, “captures the visual circumstances from moments of inspiration and creates a visual remnant of lingering thoughts and emotions. For this reason, her works often depict a cloud, a sky, and a window or random texts she had read. While the subject of inspiration is transported to a choice of medium, her use of monotone or dual-tone color palette and heavy textures transfer her thoughts and emotions in a succinct manner.”
Meanwhile, Valk “works in installation, photography, drawing, movement, and performance, navigating the tension between form and ephemerality. Through massing and reordering mundane, often rejected, materials, her work explores structure and improvisation, the materials acting as registrations of mechanical processes and the mechanism for capturing transitory events.”
Many of the specific pieces in the show are from a series called “Homing,” which, Valk explains on her website, “came about from the first month or so when I first moved into my apartment in New Haven. A lot of the furnishings were from the previous tenant who had wonderful taste, but I felt strange, almost like I was visiting, laying my things with hers, now mine, and figuring out my place in this place. These photos are visual notes of this and there, looking out, looking in, sheltering, claiming and loosening — those moments before one fully inhabits and forgets the darling details, or becomes so accustomed to the new geometry and choreography of living that one slips across its surface like the interior of a shell.”
The passage of time — and their placement on the walls of a fitness center — have given Kim’s and Valk’s work a new context, and in some sense new meanings. Hawes has mixed and matched them on the walls, where they complement one another. They share an air of whimsy and an undercurrent of meditation. They’re lighthearted and wistful, encouraging viewers to linger for a moment, to slow down a little.
It helps set the tone, in other words, for a more thoughtful kind of exercise. mActivity advertises itself as a “fitness center, gym, physical therapy, and health club,” but also as “a community hub for your physical, social, and emotional well-being.” Kim’s and Valk’s art helps clarify the connections among those facets of wellness, which resonates with many who have developed lasting exercise habits during the pandemic. There are, of course, plenty of valid and purely physical reasons to exercise — to feel better, to get stronger. But Kim’s and Valk’s positive, contemplative pieces on the walls are a reminder that physical exercise is also mental and emotional exercise. It’s about pushing yourself, but also learning when enough is enough. It’s about practicing and developing determination and focus as much as it is about building muscle and lung capacity. And it’s also about taking care of yourself, in all ways. The equipment at the end of the hallway is there to get your heart rate up; the art in the hallway on the way in and out helps cool you down.
mActivity’s summer exhibition runs at the fitness center at 285 Nicoll St. through the end of September. Visit mActivity’s website for hours and more information.
