Adae Bid Farewell;
Ficre’s Works Resurface

It felt like opening night Saturday on Orange Street. But alas, it was a closing — a double closing — and the shows went out with a bang. The Figure Eight exhibit at New Haven’s Artspace gallery, an eclectic but highly focused group show, featured both two and three dimensional works and was curated by teacher and Artspace Visual Arts Committee member Kwadwo Adae. 

The party Saturday evening was at Orange and Crown streets at Artspace, where both shows were housed — just as two additional exhibits opened in town.

The Figure Eight exhibit was augmented by free weekly figure drawing classes held at Artspace. Saturday’s closing event drew hundreds. It was abuzz with all the excitement one associates with an exhibition opening, but with a bittersweet undertone and realization that within hours, a magnificent collection of works brought together in celebration of the figure, would soon be dismantled.

The impetus for organizing the Figure Eight exhibit (read more about the art here), according to Adae, was a reaction to a perceived trend of less exhibition programming devoted to the contemporary figure in favor of ubiquitous conceptual art programming found in many art-centric locales like New York City.

“My focus was to counter this trend and turn focus away from the type of conceptual art where ideas behind the work seemed more profound than the work itself,” he said. Adae’s awareness of artists creating figurative work in ​“mutual exclusion” of one another was an issue to be addressed. ​“Their work had connections and contrasting presentations rich in innovation, spoken through diverse visual languages that loudly resonated chords of similarity and cohesion within.” 

Built on strong showings by eight individual and collaborative pairings, the exhibit included works by New York-based photographer Sophia Wallace displaying a photographic thesis, ​“On Beauty,” that explores perceptions of masculinity, femininity and sexuality; New Haven figurative painter Jaclyn Conley, whose painterly figurative images extend to animal forms juxtaposed within human settings and spaces; Manhattan painter Gerri Davis’s multi-spatial figurative compositions; New Haven/Brooklyn-based ​“Gaviero Umami,” a collaborative pairing of Eoin Burke and Jim Dessicino, whose sculptures explore realism, abstraction and conceptual modes; twin brothers Ryan and Trevor Oakes of Manhattan, who presented concave drawings joining mathematical visual perspective and optical physics; and Manhattan artist Gregory Santos presenting paintings broaching on abstraction — forms reduced to their poetic visual and gestural essence.

If you missed the Figure Eight Exhibit, you most likely also missed the concurrent Artspace exhibit, ​“Figurative Metonymy — A Flatfile Show,” a tasty sampler of images by five accomplished photographers in an exhibit organized by the University of Connecticut’s Advanced Photography Class led by Cara Vickers-Kane. Represented in the mini exhibit were Joan Fitzsimmons, Christopher Beauchamp, Carolyn Monastra, Keith Johnson, and David Coon.

As Artspace prepares for its next show on March 30, ​“Polychromasia,” works by the late New Haven artist Ficre Ghebreyesus, the importance of the gallery as an institution and anchor of the arts scene in New Haven cannot be overstated. During the breath-catching lull between Artspace shows and beyond, there is much to see in venues across the city. As the Figure Eight show was closing, at least two other arts venues in the city were opening with one-person exhibits. At The Grove, New Haven’s collaboration workspace just a few steps from Artspace, 27-year-old artist Raheem Nelson was showing his iPad-illustrated ​“cartoon” portraits of characters from the AMC cable series show ​“Breaking Bad,” from which he has drawn inspiration and subject matter.

Across town in Westville, DaSilva Gallery’s works-on-paper theme for this year continued with ​“Then and Now,” an exhibit of the work prolific New Haven artist Fethi Meghelli, whose show is a compendium of printmaking techniques with images dating from the ​‘80s to the present. 

As some familiar faces moved from exhibit-to-exhibit during Saturday evening’s arts offering in a kind of unofficial gallery crawl, the notion of New Haven as a major arts and cultural center was palpably reinforced. The arts are an inextricable part of the profile of a city yearning to live up to its potential as it embraces the many assets with which it has been blessed.