Allison Baker’s installation transforms the front gallery of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street into something between a playground and an uneasy dream. All is glittering, but also unnaturally balloon-like — whether it’s immediately recognizable objects such as hangers, brassieres, and cleaning gloves, or less obvious (but no less glittery) shapes strewn on the floor and suspended from the ceiling. Further exploration reveals that the installation spills over into the next room, taking over half the first floor of the building. It’s fun, yes, but threatening in its entertainment. Everything is fine. Everything is wrong.
“My creative research is firmly rooted in feminist scholarship,” Baker writes in an accompanying statement. “Sculptural feminist praxis … reveals what our previously considered ‘safe’ and ‘sterile’ domestic spaces, objects, and bodies really are: semi-monstrous organic communities, of which ‘we’ are only one tiny, post-human part.” She continues: “A thematic subtext of my work revolves around cleaning, caregiving, and labor. I’ve been unintentionally making work about class and gendered poverty from a position of lived experience. Not with a laser-focused clarity or awareness of my intentions and material choices, but … because I’m trailer trash who lives shiny things and trashy things and nacho cheese.”
Baker’s installation is part of “Solos 2021,” running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Aug. 22 and featuring the work of Baker, Kevin Van Aelst, John Arabolos, Gordon Skinner, and Jeff Slomba. Appropriate enough to the title, there isn’t a theme that unites the artists’ work, nor should there be. What does unite them is an ability to grab the viewer by the emotions. The pieces have a powerful effect first, and thus inspire new thoughts.
On the second floor, Gordon Skinner’s pieces jump from the walls, filled with raw energy. Of the more than a dozen untitled pieces in Skinner’s part of the show, some are savagely funny, others almost painful to look at. The style, akin to folk art, works entirely in the pieces’ favor. They feel as though they were created in a breathless fervor, and that passion is transferred to us, the visual equivalent of raucous laughter, open weeping, howls of rage.
Skinner’s art, an accompanying statement reads, is “exploring the oppression of Black communities, specifically in reference to Black creatives.” In the pieces in the show — titled 3/5’s of a man poor-traits, “the concept or idea involved in his work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. 3/5’s speaks to lack of inclusion and underrrepresentation of Black artists in museums and other artistic institutions, not as a complaint but as a powerful display of proud individuality…. Art is not just a pretty picture, but rather a unique snapshot or point of view of how the individual’s world and personal experiences shape and inform creative expression.” It’s not surprising, in that sense, that the pieces in the show were all created in 2020. They’re ripped from the headlines, the expressions of someone plugged into last year’s tumult of history, perhaps whether they wanted to be or not.
John Arabolos’s installation, Covid-19 — Spiral of Fire is likewise a response to the events of last year, from a different perspective. Arabolos’s statement begins by explaining that, as a college professor, he worked 12-hour days during the pandemic covering significantly less material in his classes while also looking for ways to be social during isolation. “At the end of most work days,” he writes, “I would find my release of the stress and anxieties by starting a fire in my fireplace in my den and sitting and falling asleep in my recliner in front of the fire with one of my cats on my lap and an occasional brandy in my snifter. This was my time and my way to recover from the burnout wrought by the pandemic and would ultimately serve as a therapeutic resource.”
The resulting installation — made from the remnants of logs found in the morning in his fireplace — took a year to finish, with Arabolos arranging the pieces in a spiral to connote the way the pandemic took over the world. The shape invokes the sense of being helpless before an expanding, all-enveloping force. But it also can be understood in reverse, as a piece inviting the viewer to look inward, toward the stillness in the center. The charred logs are a testament to the damage done, but also to the warmth provided.
Kevin Van Aelst, meanwhile, fills his gallery space with playfully surreal images: chess pieces on a quest in a land of puzzles, a pencil growing thorns, a globe sporting fangs, a pair of scissors with one handle turned into a bubble wand. “My artwork is an attempt to reconcile my physical surroundings with the fears, fascinations, curiosities, and daydreams occupying my mind,” Van Aelst writes. “The images aim to examine the distance between where my mind wanders and the material objects that inspire those fixations…. This work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness, and also hints that the minutiae all around us is capable of communicating much larger ideas.” In their balance of using a very clean presentation to show objects of real whimsy, Van Aelst offers both disorientation and comfort. In his pieces, it’s okay to be lost.
Jeff Slomba’s sculptures are similarly inviting, even as the images within his small plastic buckets offer no easy interpretations. There are jawbones built around broken architecture, a songbird perched on the cheekbone of a skull, a snake handler, a man with a head of smoke. “This recent series of small sculptures is made with an analog-to-digital-to-analog process to collage narrative vignettes that depict figures seeking or facing states of transformation,” Slomba writes. He explains further that the structure of the pieces is inspired by medieval and Renaissance art, even as the materials used to create them are as modern as they come. “These narrative puzzles invite the viewer to ponder the promise and peril of contemporary material transience.” In using the materials he did, Slomba, like Baker, invites us to find the beauty in plastic. He joins all of the artists in looking askance at the world around us, perhaps with an eye to changing it.
“Solos 2021” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Aug. 22. Visit ECOCA’s website for hours and more information.
