Ely Center Acts ​“Now”

There’s a protest in the backyard of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Cindy Tower’s piece is so chaotic and colorful that you can almost hear it. The seriousness of the subject is never in doubt, but the rendering is playful enough to be inviting — which is part of the point. The bench placed in front of the piece isn’t just for contemplation; on the bench are art supplies that let observers make and add their own signs, their own voices, so that the piece grows over time.

Tower’s piece is part of ​“Now,” running in and out of the gallery space at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Nov. 15. Curated by Margaret Roleke, the exhibit is true to its title, in the sense of giving the 17 participating artists a place to respond to the moment we live in. ​“This year has been and continues to be a turbulent and uncertain one,” the accompanying statement reads. ​“Covid-19 has entered our lives and turned everything upside down. Isolation, illness and too much togetherness has strained families and relationships. Add to all this an inept leader and police violence against people of color. Marches and protests against racism have finally started to get a dialogue going on systemic racism in this country. The artists of NOW have all reacted to these conditions in their own way.”

Some artists, like Duvian Montoya, focus in on the immediacy of the pandemic’s experience. To read the news is to be flooded with information about the policy responses or lacks thereof in the United States and around the world, civil unrest and protests across the country, and sobering figures of rising infection rates and death tolls. But amid all that is the daily, commonplace experience of simply being isolated from friends, family, and neighbors, and the simple desire to shake hands or hug.

Martha Lewis, who has been doing daily projections from her apartment window in East Rock, offers a slideshow of each day (she is currently approaching 200 message) that function not simply as advice to get through each day, but as a rolling commentary on the pandemic and civil unrest as they have unfolding. They mark the passage of time and the development of ideas, and viewing them all in a row, one is hit with a keen sense of the need to take things a day at a time while also slowly taking a longer view, making mental preparations for whatever is coming next.

Robert Brush’s neon sign at the top of the stairs makes a quick point; wait for a few seconds, and the first letter and last three letters blink off to reveal the word ​“hate.” Is apathy an advertisement for hatred? Are they both advertisements for some broader social malaise? Brush’s work asks us to ponder the connection between the two, and what that means for us as we try to move forward.

Meanwhile, in an installation that takes up a full room in the Ely Center (difficult to photograph), Howard El-Yasin seems to delve into his subconscious. ​“These black materials/textures/forms investigate precarity using accumulated detritus, and its remaking into new structures/bodies and relationships. The word/color black signifies race, power, rage, and strength … yet also marginality, which my work explores,” El-Yasin writes in an accompanying statement. The effect of wandering about the installation, as parts of it move in a breeze generated by a fan that’s part of the piece, is unsettling, perhaps in a constructive way. There is a sense of danger, yet also of humor, and working things out.

In the garden, near Tower’s piece, Yvonne Shortt makes a poignant point with a small piece that catches the eye in the sun. This bust is part of a series of small sculptures made from marble dust that Shortt gathers in her studio and then installs ​“guerrilla style” somewhere outside, she explains in a statement. ​“As a child I would see so many sculptures and fragments of sculptures in museums, mostly with features that did not resemble mine. Sometimes I would see features so over-exaggerated I would think, ​‘who were they supposed to resemble?’ Or, why were there rooms filled with Greek gods and none with people of color?

“I’m creating these fragments and putting them up in my community. I’m using marble dust to portray everyday people of color and objects used by people of color. I use marble dust because it is traditionally used in sculptures throughout the ages…. I feel like I’m at war with a social, economic, and political system that for centuries has devalued bodies and labor of people of color. Everything we touch should be marbleized; our features, skin, hair are beautiful.”

Likewise, Elizabeth White’s small installation feels quietly devastating. ​“I use burrs to signify uninvited things that may attach to our lives,” she writes in her accompanying statement. ​“Covid-19 invaded our family. My husband and I have regained our health. Sadly, my cousin, Michelle, never recovered. She did not die of a hoax.”

Susan McCaslin has created an installation out of a set of stairs descending to a small alleyway at the Ely Center’s basement level. She writes that her piece ​“addresses the un-structuring of the structure” and ​“prefers the viewer to come upon and discover her piece as part of the experience.”

There is something that feels not allowed about descending the stairs to effectively walk on McCaslin’s piece. The roofing material underneath is strange; it belongs on the roof, after all, not on the ground, or for that matter on the wall nearby to which it has been fixed in a feather-like pattern. McCaslin’s piece appeals in the same way that El-Yasin’s does; it works at the subconscious. Maybe you feel you shouldn’t be there. But you’ve been encouraged to go, and no one is telling you to leave. Then, when you turn around, the stairs you came down don’t look the same. Now they’re a way out.