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Art Boom Sound and fury signifying something. By Stephen Vincent Kobasa February 1 2007 LOUD Through Feb. 4 at Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL), Erector Square, Building 2, 319 Peck St., New Haven. (203) 671-5175, allgallery.org. The volume is not turned up equally for each piece in the show LOUD at the Arts + Literature Laboratory, but every one of them can be heard clearly enough. And as various as the works are, there is no cacophony. The gathering of art here is by vote of members of ALL—evidence that curating does not have to be totalitarian to succeed—although the wonderfully arranged hanging of the show is by the gallery director, Howard el-Yasin. Begin with any work, and the sense of relationship with all the others is immediately apparent. Donatello explodes in Michael Galvin’s “David with the Head of Goliath,” peeled like one of M.C. Escher’s floating forms, tentacles in penile array embracing the headless and beheaded figures, all circled by bacteria-like constellations. Looking as if it were about to trundle off its nearby pedestal, “Shock and Awe” by Gerrit Van Ness might be a toy cannon, but its bulbous comedy is malevolent, like a prop for a murderous Buster Keaton. The flag emerging from its muzzle with its printed “KABOOM!” is the simplest summary of the war in Iraq. The hopelessness of violence makes its way into a watercolor by Valerie Patterson, where a scene from a Timothy O’Sullivan photograph of the dead at Gettysburg is visited by a child-witch who dances at the edge of the carnage—”Too Late,” as its title suggests. No small-scale reproduction could make sense of Corey Escoto’s “Xenophobia and You,” a brutally enlarged image of a videocassette, made huge by its angry subject, too painful to rewind and play back. Contrast this with the ziggurat of beer cans in the center of the gallery—David Coon’s “Amazing Beeramid”—the heaped intoxication of society, with its ongoing temptation to be toppled. “Oops!,” in acrylic and ink by Mark Penner-Howell, has children at play in some underground fantasy: A bomb shelter that fails, with a prism turning to stars. The title of Christopher Olszewski’s “Silenced by Red Tape-Rage” is not entirely accurate—the beastly fury leaks through, like the smile behind Hannibal Lecter’s mask. There is a more pacific visage in the stitched paper canvas of Marlon Ismalon’s “Defense,” a variation on Vishnu with its arms the only limbs, and its face embroidered into transcendence. Sex has its voice here, too, in a Cara Vickers-Kane digital inkjet print “Untitled from the White Series,” that is naked with a vengeance, small whispers of terror in the almost invisible scars, while the untitled mixed media piece by Dana Filbert suggests an option for Viagra, or a baby bottle for some alien hatchling. The paint itself is loud in the energized abstraction of Nina Ozbey’s evocation of De Kooning and the Paul Klee-like dark outlines over color in David Taylor’s “Naughty Bunny”—as if Crusader Rabbit had come to a bad end. But the most noise comes from the smallest piece in the show: a cell phone photograph by Keith Adams, framed by the patch of darkness that is the photographer. While an umbrella that can not be seen haloes her head with shadow, a child turns incandescent—as if the image was a frame stuck in a movie projector and about to burn. All that can be seen on the walls here is threaded together by a kind of selflessness, with no confessions of private affairs, but a clear look at the ways of the world—and a gift for making sounds out of silence. ● skobasa@snet.net Copyright © 2007, New Haven Advocate |
