On the day this reporter visited “Making and Unmaking” — a group show running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Jan. 26 — artist Barbara Harder’s installation intentionally drew attention to its incompleteness. Three pieces of decorated and textured paper, Harder’s chosen medium for decades, were artfully arranged into a collage of soft colors and jagged edges. But on it was also a sign, written on a piece of scrap paper: “In progress as usual!”
I was seeing the first iteration of Harder’s strategy for the month.
“Over the course of City Gallery’s ‘Making and Unmaking’ exhibition, I plan to do exactly that — make and unmake my wall collage,” Harder writes in an accompanying statement. “My studio is filled with items which provide much inspiration … beautiful Asian papers; objects directly from nature; scraps of past prints that invigorate new ideas; pages of old Japanese calligraphic books; leaves munched by insects, leaving very handsome edges and holes; a 1600’s French Concordia of the bible, whose pages are so delicate yet quite delicious surfaces to print upon. Odd connections develop between the beautiful and the odd or strange. The juxtaposition can lead to some very intriguing pathways for my art making journey.”
Harder’s approach to her part of the show is an apt introduction to the rest of the show, in which artists pick up pieces of the past and make them into something new.
Catharine Lavoie has a wide range of pieces in the show. Some are textile based and full of bright, geometric patterns. Others are in some ways their opposite: monochrome, dark, and chaotic, a collage that also resembles the piles of objects one might find in the basement of an abandoned house. “High tech power cords, plastic shopping bags and wedding dresses play important roles in our lives and then are discarded. I am interested in these objects and the stories they could tell. To repurpose an object that has been discarded is a challenge and a reminder to perhaps consume less and make better use of the items that we already have,” Lavoie writes in an accompanying statement. Her art in a a way asks us to take it a step further, to begin noticing the remnants of consumption others leave, and to question what that means.
Jennifer Davies works along similar lines, with a more industrial bent.
“In my work I gravitate toward discarded or little valued materials. There is a certain freedom in using that which is not deemed precious — after all, what’s to lose? So much the better if they bear the patina of the past,” Davies writes in an accompanying statement. “My chosen materials are humble — often string and paper pulp, hula hoops, and metal detritus shed from vehicles.… There is a certain refocusing of the eyes when material is presented in a different context, when it is no longer ‘trash,’ but ‘art.’… My interest is sparked by seeing some potential in a discard, setting into motion the process of making and unmaking or vice versa.”
Harder’s, Lavoie’s and Davies’s work is about picking up the scraps of previous labor and making something new from them through art. William Frucht’s photographs capture what happens when a similar process happens through nature. “People have always created things, discarded and forgotten them: this is why we have a science of archeology,” Frucht writes in an accompanying statement. “Over time, the things we discard and forget have grown larger and more complex. Once it was stone arrowheads, now it is houses, stores and factories. These things, once abandoned, immediately begin to vanish as nature begins the slow work of taking them back.”
“The presence of the people who lived and worked here is unavoidable: their lives had a meaning we can guess it but can never recapture,” Frucht continues. He is interested in “what they left behind, and what happened to it. What continues to happen to it. What we mistake for entropy is in fact a different order.… the slow transformation of straight lines into curves, and polished surfaces into rough, mottled ones; the unfastening of joints, the unweaving of cloth, the unmooring of words from meaning. Everything hard becomes soft, everything closed becomes open, everything barren becomes fertile.”
Frucht’s photographs are of a mansion in Pennsylvania and a factory in Detroit, but the pieces — alongside the works of the other artists in the show — capture something about being an artist in the New Haven area, a place full of the pieces left over from history. There are places in the world where the past is essentially erased, wiped clean, paved or built over. New Haven, like other places, isn’t like that; the layers of history are much more visible, from its colonial past to its urban renewal projects during the 20th century. The remnants of past ideas, successes and failures, are everywhere to see. If we pick them up again and arrange them into new shapes, what kinds of futures might we create?
“Making and Unmaking” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Jan. 26. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
