It was wonderful to discover an insightful review of
Harmonious Discord, currently on display at Whitney Center in New Haven, Connecticut - thank you,
Florence McBride, for sending it to me!
Thank you so much,
Kathy Leonard Czepiel of
The Daily Nutmeg, for penning this reflective, balanced summary of the show. And thank you to
Debbie Hess and
Maxim Schmidt from
Ely Center for Contemporary Art for curating the show.
 |
| Harmonious Discord, Perspectives Gallery, Whitney Center, Hamden, Connecticut |
You can click on the "Messengers" link below to see the story.
Messengers
You can also read it here (but do go online to see all the photos):
Messengers
“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed back in 1964. It’s a useful line to carry into
Harmonious Discord,
the latest exhibition at Whitney Center’s Perspectives gallery in
Hamden, curated by Debbie Hesse and Maxim Schmidt of the Ely Center of
Contemporary Art. The show’s five artists all take up different media
that, as McLuhan would suggest, are inseparable from the content of
their work. Viewed together, that message is amplified, creating a
lively interplay among disparate works.
The
marriage of media and message is most evident in the work of Marsha
Borden, whose material of choice is the plastic bag. In her
Plastic Planet
series, the horizontal weave of a single color—blue newspaper sleeves,
yellow or gray shopping bags—creates a flaglike field, in each case
punctuated by a single emblem, a lopsided earth made of tightly braided
bags. The message is undeniable: We are a society made of, even
patriotic about, plastic. It’s tempting to give ourselves a little pat
on the back, knowing that Borden’s medium is becoming a precious
commodity, to be phased out statewide by 2021 and already banned in
Hamden. But the subtitles of Borden’s work remind us of so much work
still to be done:
Lost at Sea,
Feel the Heat,
Scorched.
Phyllis Crowley’s impressionistic photographs hang in a nearby corner
seating area, beginning with the most enigmatic. Are we looking through a
dirty window? A glaze of rain? And what is that stripe of light? By the
time we reach
Gritty City, we can see well enough what’s
behind the scrim of grime. There’s blue sky, sunlight on the face of a
building. Vehicles are parked in a driveway. But now the obscuring film
seems less to be on a window or the camera’s lens and more on the
emulsion of the print itself, a sticky substance which is peeled away
here and there to give us jagged little peeks at the still-blurry
subjects behind. Except what’s behind isn’t so much the subject, we now
understand. It’s the “grit” itself. The effect is both to obscure and to
invite us closer as we strain to see.
This same effect in Crowley’s panoramic triptych
Crossing is
stunning. Here the obscuring element is more familiar—melting ice and
snow smearing down a windshield. In the large central panel, a street
scene bleeds through; in two smaller side panels of differing widths,
bright pink splotches that could be taillights and a glossy red that
could be a traffic signal are refracted by the glistening, faceted
slush. The texture of these prints almost gives them melting motion, and
their slick, silvery sparkle illuminates the beauty in the everyday.
Alan Neider’s
Paint + Jewelry series brings a playful, even humorous ingredient to
Harmonious Discord.
His series title purports to name his media, but Neider’s multimedia
works are built of paper, thread, newsprint, probably some glue and some
kind of stiff, padded material. While there’s certainly “paint”
involved, the “jewelry” is made of paper and padding onto which Neider
has drawn multi-faceted stones and gilded links in intricate detail.
What makes these six pieces so compelling is their layers. In
Paint + Jewelry #1,
part of a woman’s smiling face, perhaps from a magazine photograph,
peeks from behind the chunky chain of an emerald necklace cut from that
stiff padding. Its pendant hangs beside a gray painted bulge, perhaps
suggesting a woman’s breast. The shape of the necklace is loosely echoed
by another cutout, something like a pattern for the necklace itself,
though its shape is distinctly different, and it’s coated with a hastily
painted green-on-green veneer. Both necklace and “pattern” are
machine-sewn to several layers of paper backing, rough-edged and askew.
The materials progress from crude background to polished foreground, as
if to suggest the process of creation. Or perhaps there’s an attempt to
cover up all that rough-edged messiness behind the esteemed product of
the jeweled necklace.
Paint + Jewelry #6 plays much the same
game, but here the bracelet or necklace is cut off, leaving the left
side of the picture more exposed, as if the game is up.
Harmonious Discord also includes four beautiful pieces in wood
by Stephen Klema that play with stacking designs and branching forms
evoking the trees the material came from as well as human arms and
hands. In
Wood’s Revenge, thick trees close their ranks,
interlocking like puzzle pieces as if to bar entrance—to the artist? to
us?—as their roots form a solid, creeping base. And Heidi Lewis Coleman
contributes five intriguing symmetrical collages that read like the view
through a kaleidoscope but depend on an unusual medium: the artist’s
own stylized writing, derived from abstract languages she created as
part of “an ongoing exploration into the aesthetics of using language in
art,” her artist’s statement explains.
Curator Hesse has been bringing local artists into the Whitney Center
retirement community space for about eight years, offering three shows a
year. The gallery was designed as a wide, tiled hallway that links two
buildings. That means residents pass by the art daily. “I’ve gotten to
know the place well,” Hesse says, adding that she thinks carefully about
“what is appropriate in a setting where people live and the public
comes and goes” as well as “a variety of artwork that is going to feel
fresh” even after four months of continuous viewing. A neighboring space
displays the work of resident artists and collectors and turns over its
exhibitions at the same time.
The Whitney Center location can’t be beat when it comes to the free,
easy parking. Drive in the south entrance and follow signs to the left
to park. The gallery is located just inside the main entrance to the
right. Well-spaced upholstered chairs along the hallway make it easy to
sit and contemplate—both the media and the messages.
