A man stands in front of the bathroom mirror in a towel. He’s just getting in the shower, or just getting out. At first glance it might appear he’s shaving, or putting on cologne. But the object in his hand isn’t a razor or a bottle. It’s something else. And maybe that’s when you also notice the sink is overflowing with fruit. “Some people may not recognize it as an old fire extinguisher,” artist Merik Goma said of the object the man is holding, or “they may be drawn to the fruit.”
“Where is he going? What is that thing supposed to be? Is it a symbol? Is it literal?” Goma said. “It can mean a lot of things.” And that’s part of the point. Goma starts the story. It’s up to us to finish it.
Goma’s photograph is part of “Reflection,” featuring works by Goma and artist Remy Sosa, curated by Moshopefoluwa Olagunju. “Reflection” is itself part of a constellation of smaller shows running in parallel on the second floor of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street. All of the shows are running now through Jan. 5.
“Would you consider the bathroom a site of profound introspection? Drawing inspiration from Francis Bacon’s emotionally charged paintings of bathrooms, sinks, and washbasins, this exhibition delves into themes of identity, existentialism, and emotional landscapes,” an accompanying note states. “ ‘Reflection’ explores how bathrooms, traditionally spaces of physical necessity, also serve as metaphors for inner landscapes. The selected artworks transcend the mundane function of bathrooms to reveal the complex interplay between personal identity, emotional vulnerability, and the spaces we inhabit. Through mixed media, photography, and installation, the exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider the significance of everyday environments in shaping our inner lives, blurring inner thoughts and external realities.”In addition to his photograph, Goma’s other pieces are installations involving bathroom fixtures — a sink, a vanity, a bathroom, a shower curtain — and plant life. “I have, over the years, accumulated a lot of moss,” Goma said with a smile. “You’d be surprised how expensive moss can be.” As an artist, he’s interested in using “unusual elements of living matter,” putting “ephemeral objects in a scene that’s supposed to seem permanent.”
In a busy household, “sometimes the only time you can find peace is in the bathroom,” Goma said with a laugh. Being in the bathroom can thus be something of a teachable moment for the rest of life, of “finding time and space for yourself.” The bathroom, after all, is “a place where people aren’t going to question why you’re by yourself.” The artist’s sly humor and knowingness was evident in his voice and in his artwork.
Goma pointed out that the moment of reflection the exhibition focuses on is literal as well as figurative, since most bathrooms have mirrors, and most people probably spend the most amount of time looking at themselves in them there. “Sometimes when you’re washing your hands, you see yourself in the mirror,” and notice new details about your own face, or changes in your complexion, he said. “There’s a sense of reflecting on yourself, even just sitting there.”
With this sense of casually heightened awareness, in that space, Goma said, “is where you can let go,” where the mind can wander without overthinking. That means “sometimes things click when you’re in the shower,” Goma said. “I think there’s a Reddit page called ‘shower thoughts.’ ” And there are people “who can only sing in the shower.” It all contributes to bathrooms as “places of refuge,” mental “exploration, and inspiration.” It’s also a place of “preparation,” of practicing the “habits, rituals, and gestures we do in our own homes before we go out into the world, that make us feel most comfortable or safe to approach to world.” The reverse happens again at the end of the day, when we return home.
Our time in bathrooms thus also has something to say about the malleability — the slipperiness — of our senses of self. “The self is constantly changing,” Goma said. “The self I am in front of my friends is different from … who I am by myself.” It has to do with protection and social mores, and with personal history and experience. As our changing faces in the bathroom mirror suggest, “there’s always a sense of evolution. It’s naive to think you’ll always stay the same. The only constant in life is change. You either embrace it, or get swept up by it, or break under it.”
But change can be both exciting and frightening, an element that appears, with fecund results, in Goma’s work. In previous pieces, Goma has used moss to show “things that were not tended to,” he said. But over time he came to realize that including living matter in his artwork “was also a moment of the ephemeral,” of life developing.
The complex message suited Goma. “There’s so many ways to enter the works. Plants can be a symbol of cultivation and growth, but they can also be a symbol of disrepair.” He likes to “leave a lot of narrative open” for the viewer. The chances for multiple interpretations are “one of the core things I enjoy about engaging with art and making art.… I’ve created all the elements in the space for you to make a story.” For Goma, where the viewer goes with it after that is up to them. “It’s open enough that it can go in any direction,” based in the viewer’s “own experiences. Where else can you gather information from?” He has his own narratives for his pieces, but that’s not what they mean; he’s much more interested in how his pieces might foster reflection in others. Sometimes, at a gallery showing his work where people don’t know who he is, he eavesdrops while people talk about the pieces. “It’s one of my favorite things to do,” he said.
The same sense of playful yet serious reflection emerges in Remy Sosa’s work. “I learned how to draw from my mother who was an architect, but really, I got into art after learning I could draw with an eraser,” Sosa writes in an personal statement. “I was raised in a male-dominant environment where I couldn’t speak unless spoken to and could never raise my voice, so art became my favorite way to scream. It’s my language.”
The moment of reflection is in many ways built into the artist’s practice. “I wanted to be an artist because art became my way to find myself,” Sosa writes. “I use mixed media to explore interiority and emotional intelligence. My style of deconstruction and layering of elements combines painting and a variety of materials — acrylic, oil, charcoal as well as everyday household items — leading to a creative reinterpretation of portraiture that reflects the malleability and fragility of humans.”Down the hall from “Reflection” is the show “Be Longing,” featuring works by Frank De León Jones and Shanti Grumbine. “Those who live in glass houses (goes the saying) should not throw stones,” an accompanying statement reads. “But we surround ourselves daily with glass: buildings and touchscreens, windshields, and lenses. The modern condition is to invent more and more profound insides and then try to name the ache for the outsides we created by default. A global pandemic underscored this pain, the world without forbidden by the noble desire to protect what we love. Cameras and windows — Plato’s shadows of the outside — became a way through if not truly out.” Jones’s photographs and Grumbine’s drawings provide a “glimpse through a glass — darkly, sometimes, but also playfully, slyly, hopefully … distorting and retelling what is meant to be seen.”
De León Jones’s photographs feel both literal and figurative; they could simply by images taken on a very foggy day, but they carry the veneer of memories, hazily recalled but somehow vivid all the same. The pang of longing comes from the tension inherent in all of it.Meanwhile, Grumbine’s gel pen drawings put the viewer in ambiguous places that also feel decidedly urban. The windows in the drawings are perhaps all too familiar to anyone who has lived in apartments that look and feel like that. But if we’re in a room, why are the lights off? The longer we stay with the image, the more that question nags. Maybe we’re just on the verge of sleep, either losing consciousness or gaining it. But what if we’re spending a while in a darkened room wide awake, on purpose?
In another room of the gallery are New Haven-based photographer Leigh Busby’s “Dude Portraits,” which, as the playful name implies, are pictures of men Busby has taken around the city. “I felt men are getting a bad, unfair image right now and there is not enough great portrayal, so I dove into a project by accident while doing street photography,” Busby explains in a personal statement about his motivations for doing “Dude Portraits.” “I started seeing brothers in a new light, a positive light, a beautiful, masculine energetic force, and I wanted to show the world what I captured through my camera lens. I pray you see what I see as well and leave here today with a positive view of men, especially our Black men.”
Busby’s photographs are illuminating in a few different ways. Some of the pictures are of public figures — New Haven mayor Justin Elicker, former public official and current theater owner Rafael Ramos — while others are simply of men who caught Busby’s eye. In a grand tradition of street photography, Busby treats everyone the same, with the same attention and affection, the same eye for detail. He gives us the chance to linger over their faces, appreciate the curl of a mustache, or the shine in someone’s eye. He captures a glimpse of the personalities within them all, and makes it that much easier to connect. What if we saw people the same way, without the camera involved?
Finally, in the hallway, Vincent Dion’s show “Count to Ten” presents the viewer with a series of tests, each with no easy answer. The paintings are “based on color perception studies and color psychology,” Dion writes in an accompanying statement. “Containing provocative and contemplative phrases from sources of various repute, I refer to what I see disappearing both personally and globally. The catalyst for this work was the onset of a vision problem, the Covid lock down and no gainful employment. I created ‘My Serenity’ ” — the first painting he created in the series — because of a question he couldn’t answer for himself: “had I been given too much serenity, or was it completely taken away?”
“The work speaks to what we share and how differently we see from each other. I strive to combine painting skills with a conceptualist conceit and produce beautifully crafted objects that often play mind games with the viewer,” Dion concludes. But the paintings function somewhat like the bathroom mirror, in which the questions they ask function on both a literal and figurative level. Our strengths, our weaknesses: do we see them in ourselves? Are we able to see them properly? Or is our perception of them a little flawed?
“Reflection,” “Be Longing,” “Dude Portraits,” and “Count to Ten” are all running at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Jan. 5. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
