“Forest bathing” is the practice of spending time in the forest, soaking up nature to attain a more mindful and connected state of being. Forest Bathing, a group exhibition at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through October 27, hopes to conjure such a state without the literal forest. Though it incorporates some forest-related imagery, the show, curated by Alex Santana, is more broadly about meditating on issues of humanity and civilization.
Of the works by 26 artists—chosen from more than 600 submissions to an open call, more than any other hosted by the gallery—my favorite piece was one that’s actually set in a forest: a fantastical, thrilling hybrid live-action/animated short video titled Dendrostalkers. Creator Julia Oldham combines footage from the Coburg Hills in her home state of Oregon (including the scene pictured above) with hand-drawn and digital animations to tell the story of dangerous, highly evolved trees that grow, reassemble into geometric abstractions, regress and disappear into blackness spontaneously, as an adaptation to avoid human destruction. It’s not hard to discern the allegorical references here, but the folkloric premise, documentary-style imagery and overall sense of menace and mystery rival anything in The Ritual or The Blair Witch Project.
Dual Mexican and American citizen Alondra M. Garza’s four exhibition pieces—Fire Nail Set, Flammin Hair, Body Flammin Hot and ItsSpicyInThere—are impressionistic, pointillistic images created with scarlet Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust on canvas. She manipulates these treats like charcoal sticks or brushes, sometimes moistening them for watercolor effects. Garza sees these snacks as a metaphor for how Latina women are often stereotyped, invoking what she refers to as the “Latina Hot Cheeto Trope”: a woman who is “spicy, excessive, hyper-feminine and steeped in street culture.” Her goal is to satirize that trope by using Cheetos to “create images that are authentic and empowering.”
The phantasmagorical oils of Chinese artist Xuanyi Aura Wang, meanwhile, remind of a macabre acid trip. Her work, she says, “stimulates the fear of death and abject horror, mixing them with cultural and visual design that signifies beauty. This process creates a liminal space for the viewers to question their understanding of the body and the ego.” She blends Western and Chinese techniques in depictions of human anatomy meant to portray similarities between diverse cultures, religions and mythologies. In Highway, a catatonic-looking face is stretched into a hillock over a supporting structure of spinal columns, while in Dreamspace, a floating eye shoots colorful beams of energy around a nude torso.
Nostalgic realism, not unsettling surrealism, is the approach of fellow Chinese artist and Hartford resident Ying Ye’s interactive installations. Born into a family of cooks and farmers, she explores the impact of those roles on her life as an immigrant. We Need Each Other to Stay Alive offers a display of tofu skins suspended on meat hooks like floating jellyfish alongside a bucket of soy sauce. Day to Day Life Inside the Tofu Press is a jaw-dropping 300-pound pine wood recreation of a press filled with a block of foam tofu. The foam is inlaid with photos of her family at work, and the press is set atop a vinyl-encased bed of water accompanied by sounds of water dripping. It’s an immersive experience that left me glad I wasn’t wearing spike heels.
I almost wanted to cuddle Brooklyn artist Kristen Heritage’s soft sculptures Where Are We Going and Did You Honestly Think, an inappropriate response given that the former features a car embroidered with skeletons and the latter has a featureless figure sitting on the keyboard of a laptop, the images on the screen reflecting little of significance beyond, perhaps, their insignificance. “I am deeply fascinated by the absurdity and complexity of daily life in industrialized society, the objects that dominate it, and the personal mythologies we construct to make sense of it all,” Heritage writes.
Meanwhile, another sculptor, Loretta Violante, retools the forgotten debris of our industrialized lives, creating colorful, playful oversized sculptures like the gravity-defying Do you wanna come ova? and the oversized arch of Wanda out of found materials collected from the waterways surrounding New York City.
I was especially touched by two relatively straightforward projects. One is Austin Bryant’s Where They Still Remain, a photographic chronicle of the African American and Wampanoag indigenous communities that have coexisted for more than 100 years—closer to 200 now—on Martha’s Vineyard. Bryant, who writes that he “attempt[s] to make the unseen seen,” is a descendant of the African Americans who have lived there since before Emancipation.
The other, in the Ely Center’s entryway, is an installation by New Haven chef/artist Nadine Nelson, the self-described “Green Queen of Cuisine” and creator of the Global Local Gourmet roving community-supported kitchen. Originally meant to be part of a larger companion exhibit to Forest Bathing, Nelson’s work celebrates forest-dwelling freedom fighters Harriet Tubman and Jamaica’s Nanny of the Maroons and recontextualizes the forest as a place of sanctuary, not danger, including via displays of woodland-based foodstuffs and medicinal items.
I viewed this and other pieces before the exhibit’s official opening, and while the show had not yet fully come together, I wound up dazzled. I plan to revisit Forest Bathing upon its opening reception this Sunday, September 8, in the hope of losing myself even further in its woods.
Written by Patricia Grandjean. Image 1 (source: @juliaoldham) features a still from Julia Oldham’s Dendrostalkers. Image 2 (source: www.aurawang23.com) features Xuanyi Aura Wang’s’s Highway. Image 3 (photographed by Patricia Grandjean) features Ying Ye’s Day to Day Life Inside the Tofu Press in situ. Image 4 (source: ECOCA) features Kristen Heritage’s Where Are We Going in situ. Image 5 (source: ECOCA) features Loretta Violante’s Wanda (foreground) in situ. Image 6 (source: www.ausbry.com) features an image from Austin Bryant’s series Where They Still Remain.
