OCEANS APART

Artspace exhibits explore the world we’ve known and the new world of tech, media we’re entering

It’s been said that every age gets the art it deserves.

It’s to that concern that the group of artists included in “Strange Loops” and “Do Plankton Have Feelings?” — the current exhibits at Artspace in New Haven through Feb. 29 — explore the conflicting emotions and anxieties as well as the significant implications of an everexpanding universe of 21stcentury media. In that culture, the human experience is sometimes tied to and challenged by such technological change.

Using a variety of media — including machines, moving images, painting, sculpture and performance — these artists create systems, instruments and objects as they seek identity and expression. With what purpose in mind? To reevaluate the boundaries of art and humanity in an effort to determine what will define us.

Many of the artists find new expression through virtual reality, installation, interactive and collaborative partnerships.

Teddy Mathias’s fascinating interactive installations look to the present and the future while simultaneously conjuring up the past.

Mathias gives new life to slabs of excavated asphalt and bits of clay

impressions made from materials like pieces of hydrants and manhole covers collected from New Haven street.

By interacting with these seemingly fossillike objects via a mobile scanning, diviningrod device, Mathias creates an augmented reality where participants are able to achieve newly coded spatial sounds and vibrations; and these old fossils become the modern sounds of the city.

An artists collective known as Virtual Dream Center points to a potential future where individual artmaking and its recognition give way to collaborative endeavors.

Here a threedimensional digital rendering of Artspace becomes a new version of itself, as a participant outfitted with a virtual reality headset and controls is invited to manipulate and navigate an altered virtual space in which the likes of palm trees and other scenic wonders appear on its walls.

Some artists remind us of the humanity of past communication.

In two wallsize, scrumptiously textural oil paintings of typewriters, Sam Messer shows us that although our abandonment of a bygone era, both in the instruments we used and the manner in which we communicated, may be reality, the grandeur remains. The enormous scale, vibrant coloration and anthropomorphic demeanor of these works continue to elevate them to the respected heights they deserve.

The exhibit is curated by Johannes DeYoung and Federico Solmi.

The companion show in the project room, “Do Plankton Have Feelings?” also speaks to the question of where are we now and where will we be, along with how can we get there.

Cynthia Beth Rubin, in collaboration with the MendenDeuer lab at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, integrates new media with handdrawn design and printing techniques in order to explore a concern for the care of our global ecosystem.

With a focus on plankton, a group of marine organisms that drift along ocean currents, and whose abundance is decreasing due to climate change, Rubin looks to humanize and create empathy for essential oceanic life.

In five largescale depictions on fabric banners that combine photographic detail with painterly gesture, Rubin pays lovely homage to these organisms, infusing them with a convincing sense of lifelike presence and feeling. The primordial mass of swirling color and form, at once vividly naturalistic and boldly abstract, reveal graceful visions of color, form and movement — inviting the viewer to enter their world.

Rubin’s clear command of her medium, in which imagery is manipulated through a creative collaborative process between that which is inside and outside the computer, succeeds in bringing the viewer to a satisfying place of belief and concern. It made this reviewer convinced that whether plankton have feelings or not, they certainly manage to evoke them in others.

Both exhibits succeed in saying much about today. And tomorrow.

Artspace / Contributed photo Cynthia Beth Rubin’s untitled drawing at Artspace, above, and ciliate drawing, below left, done in collaboration with the MendenDeuer lab at the University of Rhode Island. Below right, Blinn & Lambert’s “Romantic Love.”