Art with ‘HeART’ at the Silvermine
AN EMOTIONAL SILVERMINE EXHIBIT TOUCHES ON MENTAL HEALTH THEMES
The HeART & Mind exhibit currently at the Silvermine Art Center turns the usual gallery experience inside out.
The viewer doesn’t have to guess what the artists may have been thinking. They tell you in written statements often so soulrevealing that it borders on the disrespectful not to recognize each of the nearly two dozen contributors.
One of the most direct statements, and largest paintings, comes from Jay Petrow, a Westport artist who says he rediscovered painting as a way to express the emotional turmoil of trying to be a good father to an autistic son.
Typically Petrow’s paintings have been explosively abstract. But the big one, dominating the inner gallery at Silvermine, is of an instantly recognizable SpongeBob SquarePants hovering over a castle village protected by toy soldiers and circled by a model train set. A child’s arm reaches down, godlike, from the upper right quadrant of the sevenbyeightfoot canvas.
It is “my son’s hand directing his world,” Petrow writes in the exhibit online catalog.
Nearby is a series of painterly photographs by the South African artist Tsoku Maela that he writes is a reaction to his own manicdepression and the extra stigma of mental illness in black communities. Seemingly selfportraits, one shows a body curled in a fetal position; another a black arm reaching across a white table toward a red rose.
“We’ve been indoctrinated to run away from the dark and onwards the light,” Maela writes. “A little over a year ago I ran towards the darkness when I started in photography and it was the best decision of my life.”
His photographic series is in an exhibition category called “Depression and Hopefulness.” Petrow’s paintings (he has a second, more abstract, in vivid reds and yellows) are examples of “Isolation and Connection.” Other categories are “Love and Loss,” “Addiction and Recovery,” and “Trauma and Healing.”
Among the “Addiction” artists is Inez Andrucyk, a Silvermine faculty member who writes her paintings commemorate the life of her son, Reid, who died at age 22 of opioid poisoning. The largest, titled “Chemical Storm,” is a mixed media piece that depicts a fiery car crash and appears to incorporate a shirt her son might have worn.
Represented in “Trauma and Healing” is Ehren Tool, a Marine veteran of the 1991 Gulf War whose longrunning project has been to make and give away some 20,000 ceramic drinking cups, each bearing war warning slogans or images. Some 200 are in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian. At Silvermine, 36 are displayed in formation on a pedestal.
“The cups go into the world handtohand, one story at a time,” Tool writes. “I make work you can drink out of and hold, in the hope people will spend time with the work.”
Tool, according to a recent New York Times profile, supports his cup making with a paying job at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a master’s degree.
Robin Jaffee Frank, the newly named Silvermine director who curated the exhibit along with gallery director Roger Mudre, says the exhibit subthemes were chosen after a long search for artists. The exhibit itself, focused on mental health and the healing power of art, reflects a sort of expanded mission for Silvermine. It is the second in a series on societal issues. The first examined aging and the next, in fall 2020, will address immigration.
“Even if you’re not as passionate about contemporary art as we are, we think of Silvermine the way you would think of a library, as a gathering place where people can come together and have a conversation using art as a catalyst,” Frank says.
She confesses that the first time she ever cried openly in an art gallery was listening to two exhibit artists talk to each other about children they had lost.
The exhibit was done in coordination with the New Canaan Community Foundation. One of the takeaway messages was captured in Tsoku Maela’s statement: “Everyone is going through something, but you don’t have to go through it alone.”
Another is resilience. Frank says a slender wire sculpture titled “The Hole” was used as a branding image for the exhibition. “It shows one figure they’re androgynous reaching a hand down to almost touch someone who is down below in a hole. And what we’re trying to do is close that gap, between the person who’s reaching up and the person who’s reaching down to help.”
Located next to the gallery visitors desk, the “The Hole” is easy to miss. It is one of several pieces in the exhibit by Susan Clinard, artisan in residence at the Ely Whitney Museum in Hamden. Clinard’s largest piece, dedicated to survivors of sexual trauma, is impossible to miss.
It is a lifesize assemblage centered on a woman bent over a fliptop desk. Carved from wood, the woman’s head is turned toward the gallery main entrance, as if interrupted in her work by an intruding visitor.
The HeART & Mind exhibition closes Jan. 12 with a party from 3 to 5 p.m. where the artists will lead talks about their work.