Artists Work Out The Daily Grind

The stripes of color Matthew Best paints are bold, yet a little haggard. It reads like quick work done by someone who knows what they’re doing. That impression continues when you see, on the walls of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street, that it isn’t alone.

Best has created a series of abstract paintings centered around the same formal themes, yet each with variations

“Matthew Best uses the painting process as a way to cope with the sheer uncertainty of life, his improvisational abstract works recording mental shifts and personal growth, move by move,” an accompanying note reads. It makes sense, and is an apt introduction to ​“The Daily,” a 16-person exhibition running until Feb. 16 that shows how artists can build a statement one day at a time.

The 16 artists involved — The Rick Albee, Eric Anthony Berdis, Matthew Best, Daniel Bohman, Shelby Charlesworth, Douglas Degges, Amy Faris, EK Lee, Cynthia Mason, Elizabeth Mead, Robert Oehl, Anne Russinof, Joseph Salerno, Jean Scott, Rita Valley, and Claire Watson — range across several styles of painting and sculpture, but all share a sense of constantly practicing their craft, which allows them to respond to changes in themselves and the world around them pretty much as they’re happening.

Joseph Salerno may have the most straightforward approach of all the artists in the show; as the accompanying note states, he ​“makes a small plein air landscape painting each day in the Vermont woods.” The paintings’ uniformity of shape and scale mean that the viewer can concentrate on the changes in the woods, from day to day, from season to season, almost like abstracted nature photography. But Salerno’s practice also appeared to be a way to confront something within himself: ​“In the middle years of our life I found myself in a dark wood,” he said of his work, quoting from The Divine Comedy. That dual sense of observation and introspective shows up elsewhere in the exhibit.

In terms of responding to the world around them, Rita Valley and Eric Anthony Berdis ​“have proudly political missions,” the accompanying note reads. ​“Valley, in despair over our ongoing political strife, hand-sews text-based fabric pieces with buzz phrases and hate words.” One of her pieces employs the word ​“libtard”; another embroiders the word ​“complicit.” These words are tossed around so carelessly; by contrast, in slowly stitching them into fabric, Valley is forcing herself to ruminate on them. In its practice, her work is a demand that people slow down and conside what it is they’re saying. After all, as a piece that feels like a summation states, words have consequences.

Moving from day to day isn’t just about following current events. Daniel Bohman, Shelby Charlesworth, and Amy Faris ​“are keen observers of the domestic world…. Faris’s drawings and installations examine monotony, utilizing the same repetitive processes she associates with tedious household tasks.” Faris and Valley use similar techniques to explore very different things, and while Valley’s ask for more deliberation, Faris’s seem to seek for greater energy. Does she want to break free from the monotony, or simple imbue the day-to-day with more vitality and meaning. Is there really a crucial difference between the two?

And moving from day to day can also mean moving away from a particularly dark chapter in one’s life, one step at a time. Jean Scott and EK Lee ​“have suggested that maintaining the daily ritual of making art has a healing effect in the face of loss and tragedy,” the accompanying note reads. Scott’s work balances a submerged energy with a relatively serene surface. It tilts somewhat against the cliche that time heals all wounds. Scott’s paintings suggess that perhaps time can make it easier to cope with something in the past, but that one also lives with the fact that the past can’t be changed; what happened, happened, and it’s a question of moving toward making peace with that, rather than simply erasing it.

Meanwhile, Lee’s sculptures find solace in the way things grow and change afterward; his sculpture is a delicate play on a bonsai tree, with an additional element of the gently comic.

Practicing art daily also lends itself to constant experimentation. ​“Rick Albee’s humble goal for his small-scale ceramic objects is simply to make something unexpected … by combining familiar forms in unforeseen ways,” the accompanying note reads. One also gets a sense of the sculptor’s pleasure in creating; the final result may be successful, but it’s as much about the joy in the process.

Cynthia Mason, meanwhile, is a foil to Albee; her ​“soft sculptures, based on household objects like shelves and ladders, droop and bend over time. Her interest lies in powerlessness and everyday failure.” If Albee’s pieces are about the spark of making new things, Mason’s are about the fine observation of the decay of older things. But in that case, the sculptures’ existences speak for themselves. Even if they’re failures, they’re still worth doing. There’s a quiet determination to keep going, no matter what. Practice never really makes perfect; but maybe the closest thing to perfect lies in doing the practice itself.