YCBA Opens The Door Wider

Tall plants wave in wind whipped by fire. Someone approaches an old house. A hand grasps a tree branch with determination. Tracey Moffatt’s Plantation images seem like stills from an old documentary, of an episode in a colonized place that didn’t necessarily end well for the colonizers. It’s part of the Yale Center for British Art​‘s exhibition of its latest acquisitions — entitled ​“Photographs | Contemporary Art: Recent Gifts and Acquisitions” — running at the museum on Chapel Street through Sept. 8.

Tracy Moffatt is an Australian artist who ​“approaches her photographic work like a film director, constructing elaborately staged tableaux with many possible narrative threads,” the accompanying note explains. The images on the wall ​“simmer with tension and Hitchcockian suspense: a run-down colonial house, burning sugercane fields, a dark-skinned man watching from the margins.”

“Moffatt’s own Aboriginal background might suggest one reading in terms of Australian history and indigenous subjugation, but there is a delibrate lack of locality to these dreamlike scenes, which she insists might be set in Australia’s tropical north, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, or the American Deep South — any place indelibly shaped by the British plantation economy and its legacies of enslaved and indentured labor.”

Moffatt’s decidedly postcolonial approach to her art is mirrored in a few of the other artists featured in the exhibit. There’s a series of arresting photographs by Neeta Madahar. They’re portraits that explode with color and whimsy, yet have weight to them as well. It turns out the subjects of the photographs are friends of the artist. The images, the accompanying note explains, ​“are constructed through a collaborative exchange between artist and sitter. Each sitter selected a flower around which to build a fantasy persona, painstakingly staged via a extravagant costumes, theatrically contrived backdrops, flamboyant hair and makeup, and controlled studio lighting but without digital retouching of any kind.

“These works reference the stylized femininity in the work of society portrait photographers of the 1930s – 1950s … but the intimacy and trust between Madahar and her friends produces an extreme version of femininity that is more accepting of bodily lived experience.”

Then there are Barbara Walker’s large-scale drawings from her Shock and Awes series, which ​“salutes and remembers the black servicemen and women who have served in Britain’s Armed Forces.” In that context, the positions of the soldiers — at rest, but a little guarded, maybe even wary of the artist reproducing their image — make even more sense. It highlights the precariousness of their position in the society they’re possibly going to lay down their lives for.

As one might expect from a show that’s called ​“recent gifts and acquisitions,” the show doesn’t have a unifying theme, though there are pleasant surprises aplenty. There are photographs of David Bowie and Johnny Rotten, relics from the early punk era, a drawing of Tony Blair, a scooter made out of cardboard, and — near to the aforementioned pieces that lead the exhibit — some sterling examples of very early British photography. It’s these photographs that help unify the exhibit by placing it in the greater context of the Yale Center for British Art’s greater collection.

After all, much of the art on permanent display in the YCBA hearkens from before the 20th century, which means that it documents — though not necessarily celebrates — Britain’s former status as a major colonial power, a power it held for centuries. Going through the rest of the museum, amid portraits of lords and ladies and depictions of gorgeous landscapes and fierce sea battles, one can pick up a steady thread of British artists encountering and trying to capture the far-flung people and places in Britain’s former empire. There is a portrait of a dancing girl in India from 1772. A landscape of the Marmalong Bridge in Calcutta from about 1783 shows a low span over a calm river, with people on the shore carrying water away in jugs on their heads. In a portrait of an Indian official from 1772, the man stares the artist down, confident, maybe even a little defiant. But in all these cases, it’s white British artists making the art. Their colonial subjects may get to appear in the portraits and landscapes, but they never seem to get to paint them.

The museum’s latest round of acquisitions is helping to balance that score, particularly as the artists in the exhibit join other African and Indian artists who are already a part of the Center for British Art’s permanent collection. It is interesting that the works on display in the museum’s contemporary section are themselves more colorful, more vivid, more varied than the artwork on the floors above. That partly reflects the all-out riot that was 20th century visual art, a trend that continues into the present as artists continue to experiment with form, structure, and the definition of art itself. But it’s easy to see that it also reflects the greater diversity of visions that has entered the YCBA collection — and the art world more generally. The delights in the exhibit make this reviewer want to kick the door open even wider. What would we see if everyone in the world had a paintbrush, a ball of clay, or a camera, and made whatever they wanted?

“Photographs | Contemporary Art: Recent Gifts and Acquisitions” runs at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through Sept. 8. Admission is free. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.