Artists Take It Uneasy In Ely Center Solos” Exhibit

Matthew Dercole

Remnant 16.

Matthew Dercole’s artwork dramatizes a phase of biology that many find uncomfortable. His pieces are in a sense fungal; they’re full of life, but the kind of life that sprouts from death, that transforms flesh into something else. It’s the kind of reminder of mortality that many find unsettling. Dercole knows this; with his exquisitely detailed pieces, he seeks to both attract and repel.

Matthew Dercole

Remnant 8.

Dercole is one of three featured artists selected from the Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s 2021 open call whose work is exhibited in January Solos,” running now at the art space on Trumbull Street through Feb. 20. As an accompanying statement explains, Dercole creates forms with both organic and artificial materials to develop storylines. These artworks stem from the exploration of our relationships with ideas and imagery that are often overlooked, taken for granted, sometimes disturbing, and usually misunderstood. Within these stories, he approaches and investigates the dull, banal, and the obvious aspects of everyday life with a new curiosity. The works become combinations of the natural progression of life, such as growth and decomposition, and the human aspects of reason and ability; Matthew reacts to the way people think and feel about their identities, and how the act of learning and the responsibility of knowledge affect our everyday lives.”

K. Sarrantonio

The other two artists in the exhibit share Dercole’s impulse to unsettle. K Sarrantonio’s pieces take up the entire space of one of the Ely Center’s dimly lit galleries. Tiles are arranged on the floor depicting empty bedsheets, tangled after sleep or sex, that also give off the aura of a shroud. The projections floating in the suspended cubes offer a flash of buttocks; is the person whose buttocks they are being coy, or is it an invasion of privacy?

K. Sarrantonio

That kind of tension is what Sarrantonio wants; they’re striving to make artwork about the body without outright displaying the body, focusing on avoiding gender clarification and legibility,” an accompanying statement reads. Catholic imaginings of both ecstasy and agony — specifically in their echoes of homosocialism and homoeroticism — had a large impact on K’s work and the consequent reconceptualizing of queerness within their own artwork.” Like Dercole, Sarrantonio is drawn to actively changing, undefined spaces, places where words fail, and concepts that are usually depicted as opposites begin to connect and blur together.

Gary Sczerbaniewicz

Knee Vignette #1.

Finally, in an upstairs gallery, there’s a big viewfinder that shows a stunning miniature of a control room that appears to be embedded in a brain. In another viewfinder is a model of a cozy bedroom — except that the picture over the bed is melting into a tongue of gel. Gary Sczerbaniewicz’s practice involves an insatiable fascination with architectural spaces that evoke a sense of psychological unease,” the accompanying statement reads. He fabricates confined space environments which include scale-shifts, using architectural models blended into full-sized structures into which the viewer is invited to physically enter and explore.… He seeks to disorient the viewer in an attempt to break the staid, often detached, passive, and familiar approach to consuming artworks. He believes that it is in this hermetic space where authentic communication between artist and viewer occurs.”

Gary Sczerbaniewicz

Angel of God.

Sczerbaniewicz has a gift for creating Blob-like intrusions into his spaces. But sometimes he doesn’t even have to push it that far to create the disorientation he seeks. In Angel of God he depicts a vertiginous situation that could have come about from a sudden calamity (an earthquake, an explosion) or the decay of the building. Was everything normal a second ago, or has it been like this for years? And is it lucky that nobody was in the chair when it arrived at its current position, or did someone already fall out?

Dercole, Sarrantonio, and Sczerbaniewicz all revel in this kind of ambiguity. They know that horror and fascination are mixed; sometimes the things that unsetlle us the most are also the things we can’t look away from.

January Solos” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Feb. 20. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.

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