NXTHVN Goes For The Heart

Yvette Mayorga’s Homeland Promised Land is as colorful as a birthday cake and as sharp as the knife that cuts it. Its central figure is assailed by a whirlwind of fake Fanta bottles and cell phones, held captive by it all. But the artist isn’t just painting a screed against consumerism. There’s strength in the way she makes her art. Her style is asserting its own kind of resistance. When that figure in the center rises, maybe all those colors will burst from the frame, and take over — letting all of us live in a better place.

Mayorga is one of eight artists — including Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candace Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, H’u’ong Ngo, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa — participating in ​“Material Intimacies,” the exhibition at NXTHVN in Dixwell running now through Jan. 18, 2021.

“This exhibition brings together artists who materialize, or make tangible, intimacies forged and ruptured by colonialism,” write curators Michelle Phuong Ting and Claire Kim in an accompanying statement. ​“Their work puts forth redemptive ways to relate to desire, kinship, vulnerability, sensuality, land, and touch. Through radical softness and bold revision, each artist offers a path to healing, one that restores the humanity of the colonized and yields new narratives of power and communion.”

The artists, the curators continue, ​“salvage the very materials fractured and commodified for the colonial project — such as porcelain, plants, bodies, and breath — in order to recover their potential for resistance. Imbued with new life, these remnants summon us to feel and come close. Here, we recognize that Layli Long Soldier calls the break. We sense a phantom mending, and what comes into view is an image of regeneration: fragments and echoes of a prior wholeness longing to be rejoined.”

That starts with Homeland Promised Land, which, the curators write, ​“elicits the false sweetness migrants feel once immersed in America’s culture of materialism, racism, and xenophobia.” But Mayorga’s painting, created from that perspective, is more than just a critique. The painting, on its face, is riotous and colorful; Mayorga has found a way to make resistance fun. Her painting may be laced with sarcasm and anger, but it’s also a party that everyone would want to be invited to.

Similarly, as the curators write, Candace Lin ​“repurposes porcelain to highlight the West’s fantasies of purity and whiteness.” Three of Lin’s porcelain vessels are on display, one labeled ​“Hierarchical Potion of Power,” another labeled ​“Dr. Paul Schreber’s Renowned Corpse Potion,” and the third labeled ​“Clairvoyant Testosterone.” ​“Each vessel,” the curators write, ​“hold an herbal tincture dervied from plants and gems with hormonal, healing, and psychic properties. In labeling the vessels’ contents, Lin leads us to question the confines racism and patriarchy impose on the body.” More simply, Lin’s porcelain pieces are funny, making their serious points through humor. They take us back to the days of snake-oil salesmen and bogus herbal remedies. We might also wonder how much has really changed — and how much they owe their persistence to the continued exoticization of Black and Brown people.

Wesley Chavis’s Remnants of a Mythical Man, occupying a corner of the gallery, is a case of how the process of making the piece is the art. The first thing one sees is a large cloth sheet with a hole in it; it used to be white but is now marked with splotches of gray, giving it an appearance somewhere between a dropcloth and a shroud. To the left is an endearing picture of an older woman cradling a nearly newborn infant. The woman is looking at the baby. The baby is looking at the camera. It’s a picture of Chavis when he was an infant, ​“lathered in baby oil and cradled by his grandmother,” the curators’ note explains. There’s a hole in the fabric hanging in the corner. ​“Through this aperture, Chavis is seen dancing, praising, and communing with God.” And what about the cloth? ​“Shortly after the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, the artist drew a charcoal outline of his body on the canvas. Interested in the threshold between being seen as beloved and being seen as a threat, Chavis soaked and cleansed the cloth in bathwater, enacting a ritual of healing that counters the overexposure to images of Black death.”

Stephanie A. Lindquist’s prints turn out to be a method of preservation. As the curators’ note explains, ​“the plants depicted here were grown and harvested by Lindquist,” and ​“the artist attached and pressed the inked plants to a hard surface to reveal the image.” The art is part of a larger project; ​“Lindquist is invested in reviving indigenous foodways, cutlures, and crops endangered or maligned by capitalist agribusiness.” Lindquist’s art can also be seen as walking a fine line — a plant covered in ink and pressed to paper is a plant that probably then can’t be eaten — but overall the power of the message is worth the single specimen’s sacrifice.

Outside the gallery, in another room off from the main entranceway, Zina Saro-Wiwa’s series of short documentaries, collectively titled Eaten by the Heart, offers a charming, funny, and often very moving perspective on the experiences of Africans and African-Americans that effectively ties together much of the exhibition. The first segment of the film, ​“How Do Africans Kiss?” is a series of interviews that reveals to those who did not know (including this reporter) that Africans across a few different countries customarily don’t kiss in public, and that the custom is itself an import from other cultures. The second film, ​“Damien,” does the simple thing of having us watch as a single tear falls down a young man’s face. Finally, ​“Breathing Orchestra” overlaps the voices of the many interviewees in a sound collage to give a snapshot of their struggles to find peace, in the world and in themselves. ​“My parents loved each other very much,” one person says. ​“I think their love was annihilating.” Another speaks of a world that seems only just out of reach, in which ​“fathers aren’t missing, brothers aren’t gone. We’re right here, and we’re prepared to give love, Black love, to anyone who wants it.”

The final statement sums up the exhibition as well as anything. ​“Each of us are fractured,” the interviewee says, ​“but we bring something beautiful to the table, only if we look inside.”

“Material Intimacies” runs at NXTHVN, 169 Henry St., through Jan. 21, 2020. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.