In Our Hands
Curated by nico w. okoro
Orchid Gallery/ ConnCORP
496 Newhall St.
Through July 3
The shot in Merik Goma’s photograph is cinematic, a bright light in a darkened room. You can’t see either of the people’s faces, but you don’t have to. The postures of their bodies, their heads close together, convey much of the emotion, as do the arms, interlocked.
The hands seal the deal, their gentle, firm grip, offering comfort, support. In the hands, you can see the weight of the moment, and the strength that helps both people to get through it.
Goma’s work is part of the show “In Our Hands,” curated by nico w. okoro, running now at the Orchid Gallery at ConnCORP. It “showcases artworks that consider the role hands play in identity formation, self-expression, and worldbuilding,” as an accompanying note explains. “Within an art context, the artist’s hand boldly produces culture, often shaping intangible ideas into tangible art objects. Within a broader context, hands shape our daily lives; they construct, animate, and destroy worlds on a spectrum of scale and visibility.”
The four artists in the show — Goma, Odette Chavez-Mayo, Tazje Henry-Phillip, and Brock Bowen — “mobilize this immense power, engaging hands — or the traces they leave behind — as a visual storytelling device. For them, hands are both medium and message; they reveal clues about one’s rich inner life, while also communicating a great deal about how one navigates the exterior world. If eyes are windows to the soul, then hands — with their infinite actions and gestures — are windows to human agency, where mind and body meet through the will to act.”
“I construct sets that the work inhabits and transform the space to create new narratives — they are intended to engage the viewer in their own personal dialogues and histories,” Goma states. Goma’s deeply humane images, toward the entrance to the gallery, set the tone for the show.
Where Goma’s images operate in a cinematic place, Odette Chavez-Mayo’s have more of a sense of a documentary. Chavez-Mayo’s “nostalgic black and white images — each of which is staged in nature and radiates soft, natural light — explore the contours of memory and her longing for her Mexican homeland,” an accompanying note states. Chavez-Mayo is quoted as saying that “central to my photographic practice is working with processes that take time. I use analog film and enjoy the physicality of making pictures come to life by laboring in the dark(room).” The attention Chavez-Mayo devotes to creating the images comes out in the work. Tu Mano is just a picture of a hand against a leafy background, but in its specificity, it evokes so much: a hand extended to help, offering a connection that, in the picture, isn’t realized. Is the person reaching out to someone else, just out of the frame? Or is the other person distant, completely out of reach?
Tazje Henry-Phillip’s Pear for Your Thoughts (pictured below), meanwhile, is akin to her other paintings in the show as depicting a contentedness and calm. In her paintings, “the environments themselves conjure a delightfully sleepy Sunday afternoon,” the notes state. In its depiction of hands, we get to remember how strong yet delicate they can be, pulling a pear off a tree without breaking the fruit’s skin.
Perhaps the most vivid images in the show belong to Brock Bowen — “the first local high school student to exhibit at Orchid Gallery,” the accompanying notes tell us. In his work, he explores “paper as a mode of self-expression, illustrating how the medium can be used to morph a person’s image, as a catalyst for creativity, and as a way to preserve memories and experiences.” Each of his images burst with palpable energy and remind us just how closely connected our hands are to our thoughts, and how much we use them. It may be that we imagine the changes we want to make in the world first in our minds, but it’s so often through our hands that we make it so.
