The look of Jihyun Lee’s Doll Shelf partakes at once of the past and an imagined future.
The collection of objects has the feel of a cabinet of curiosities, the contents of the shelves of an old house, even maybe a beloved junk shop. But the red tint gives it a science fiction twist. They could be as much artifacts of the future as of the past. Or perhaps that tint transports us into the future, looking back at the fleeting present.
This scrambling of time and memory, it turns out, is part of the point. A note in Lee’s artistic statement explains that the objects “encapsulate memories” of Lee’s “mother’s motherhood and her son’s childhood, transcending any confinement to a singular perspective of her own upbringing or motherhood.… On the shelves, she documents certain memories and generates new ones for the future.”
Doll Shelf fits snugly into the larger theme of “Blocks and Bridges: World building in New Haven,” running now on the first floor of the Hilles Gallery of Creative Arts Workshop at 80 Audubon St. through Oct. 29. An accompanying statement describes the show as “a deep dive into discovering the practice of world building. Much like the building of a house, world building is the foundation where artists situate repeating formal and conceptual qualities in their practice: the who, what, where, and when of their stories. The exhibition wonders: What are these qualities, the marks made, of world building that are being explored in New Haven? Who are the repeating characters and settings that artists work with to explore a world that is lost, needed, escapist, imaginary, and found though art? World building is a mechanism to generate fictions in a time of political, economic, and social uncertainty and brings these artists in conversation with each other over this common practice.”
Featuring art from Lee, Esthea Kim, MO, Pat Garcia, Gerald Saladyga, and Ed Gendron, “Blocks and Bridges” is produced by Gabriel Sacco, Artspace’s former visual culture producer, in conjunction with Creative Arts Workshop’s Hilles Gallery. In addition to offering a sample of the way artists create worlds for themselves generally, it allows viewers to peek into each of those artists’ individual worlds — almost creating a kind of multiverse, alternate takes on reality in which we can reflect on our own memories of the past and thoughts about the future.
Among those snapshots are a series of simple, evocative images from Pat Garcia. The black-and-white tone and the illustration style, partaking of an old cartoon, make it tempting to imagine them as being memories from the past, or even imagined memories from a previous generation, when ashtrays and phones with cords were ubiquitous in people’s homes. Reaching into the past for these small but important changes comprises a statement about personal origin, and the distance traveled to get to the present.
The context of the exhibition offers a fresh angle of approach on Esthea Kim’s work, which has been appearing at shows around town lately. It’s easy to layer labels like “gauzy” and “ethereal” onto Kim’s pieces, but doing so doesn’t give enough credit to the difficulty of the technique on display to create those effects, and the resultant toughness underneath the exterior beauty. The fragments she puts on the wall bring that toughness to the fore. If this is a show about constructing worlds from memories and visions, Kim’s piece comments on the difficulty of that. The contents of each fragment are unknowable, unreadable, and their jagged edges suggest that if you hold them too close, they’ll cut you.
Meanwhile, MO’s painting, vibrating with vivid colors, frankly sexual, and possibly exhibitionist — the lovers are on a blanket in what could be a park — imagines a world, in the end, of dramatic acceptance, of celebration of ourselves and others and what we can do for (and with, and to) one another. MO’s matter-of-fact depiction suggests that this world isn’t so far away from the one we currently live in, and that acceptance and artmaking to some extent go hand in hand. They both involve first letting down your guard.
“Blocks and Bridges” runs on the first floor of the Hilles Gallery of Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Oct. 29. Visit Artspace’s website for more information.
