Cracked Open
Artspace Gallery
Hartford
March 24, 2025
I found the most striking piece of the “Cracked Open” exhibit currently at Artspace Gallery, to be Love, Loss and the Book of Walks by Deb Todd Wheeler, which was co-created as a community grief ritual. Her 18-year-old son died in 2017. She invited her community to share and light candles, and Wheeler played a song that she wrote. They left behind the artifacts of their ceremony, forming a collage of a life I never interacted with, yet still feel like I know in some way.
Artist Brooke Toczylowski was originally offered the exhibit space at the Artspace Gallery in Hartford to show her own works at this exhibit. She decided to include other works from across the country. In total, 14 women are exhibited in the space, including Brooke herself, in her first experience as a curator.
“I asked myself, ‘What kind of works do I want to be in conversation with?’” she explained.
The show she ended up choosing primarily shows how the artists deal with grief. Appropriately, it serves as the unveiling site for a mural of Tao LaBossiere, a well-known figure in the Hartford arts community who also poured his energy along with his wife, Amy, into making the Artspace gallery one of the premier art spaces in the city. His plaque was unveiled two weeks ago, and his name still adorns the ladders and easels in the space.
Another piece that caught my eye was Long Slumber by Julie Chen. I’ve had the privilege of being on WNPRa couple times with Julie, but I’m going to be honest and say that at first, I thought the idea behind her piece was pretty strange. It is composed of bedsheets and pajamas that her late mother once used. I thought: Shouldn’t things like this remain private?
But then I had another thought: What if the entire point of the show is to take the private and make it public? Like Brooke said, the exhibit is about dealing with grief, and that’s a process which never stops. We often feel like we’re required to be alone in our grief so that we don’t impose on others or show weakness. Chen’s work is not only saying that imposition and discomfort are OK, but that they are the literal point. I’ve been so disconnected from my own emotions that I feel uneasy about even acknowledging the reality of death, much less seeing the clothes of a dead woman.
The last pieces that held my attention were Brooke’s, hanging near the center of the room. Shroud #5 is to her left, and Shroud #9 is to her right. She explained to me that a shroud is a cover for a dead person, and that her work represents an intersection between personal loss and the tragedies of war and conflict that take so many lives around the world. The borders of her work are decorated with fences and gates to symbolize the power that seeks to constrain both people and property behind arbitrary barriers.
Brooke is very explicit about her work and the exhibition being a rejection of the status quo.
“If you look around, there are no prices,” she said. “This is not about capital. This is not about a desire to commercialize art.”
I suppose one of the powers of art is its ability to transmogrify the most impossible emotions into something almost manageable. Brooke said to me during the tour that the only thing we know for certain about our lives is that one day they will end, which makes the heaviness of grief and loss unavoidable. It’s one of the great ironies of the universe that our tenacious will to live dooms us to lament the inevitable so fiercely.
This is what Albert Camus referred to as the “absurd”- how do we interact intellectually, emotionally, with a universe that from all appearances is completely indifferent to our lives and suffering?
The answer to that question is art. It’s the only way to communicate with the universe in a way that bypasses our fallible human intelligence and sidesteps our human ego to connect us with forces and feelings that have been buried deep within us by post-Enlightenment thought.
NEXTCracked Open will have an artist’s panel talk and closing reception on March 30.
Jamil is heading to Trinity College for a new organ show.
