Past Exhibitions

We Find Ourselves In This Place

November 13 – December 18, 2023

We Find Ourselves In This Place features work by Traé Brooks, Sophia DeJesus-Sabella, and Kevin Hernández Rosa, three Hartford-based artists producing sculpture, assemblage, drawing, and weaving works that engage with how identity is shaped by—and in turn shapes— history and culture.

Many of the exhibited artworks are made with everyday materials and objects—such as kitchen tools, window fans, and clothing. With these often discarded or mundane things, the three artists engage with complex issues of identity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. The found objects hold only so much cultural information on their own. Looking at how the artists transform these materials, we begin to see subjects—memory, trauma, labor, agency—in actions including impressing, indenting, pulling, erasing, wrapping, covering, and stacking. These sculptural works appear malleable and show records of constant formation. The past is seen in residual imprints of things no longer present, or glimpses of what’s hidden within the folds of something new.

The sculptures signal that we absorb and transform the influences around us. When DeJesus-Sabella weaves the image of floorboards on a loom, what is hard becomes soft. Different kinds of labor used to produce art and buildings are presented as fluidly interdependent. In the work of Hernández Rosa, letters are removed from a Little Debbie brand snack box, an industrial pipe is encrusted with sea debris, and an ornament is inverted into a new organic form filled with Utz cheese balls. One system’s failure appears to be poetically opening space for a new language to assert itself in strange forms. The clothing and utensils hammered into welding scraps in the work of Brooks show us aggregate figures full of both invisibility and visibility. The slag dust from welding is smeared as the start, not end, of his portraits forming and falling off paper.

We Find Ourselves In This Place. This title refers to either a place in history or a location—maybe this gallery, a home, a city. Whatever this place is, in different ways, it influences us. In turn, our presence in this place also creates change. The transformed things in the exhibition —whether a fork, a wheel, or a bucket—all seem to operate as stand-ins for the self in how they are altered, as well as positioned like bodies in space. Each object seems to operate as the shifting site of the individual, variably registering place and in turn uniquely standing in place.

Curated by Lynn Sullivan, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts

Jenny Wu: Otherly

September 25 – October 23, 2023

Otherly includes abstract sculptural paintings by Visiting Assistant Professor in Fine Arts Jenny Wu. Like the exhibition’s title, Wu’s work physically, visually, and thematically refers to the state of being something else – an unrecognizable art form, an indefinable artistic style, or an individual outside of a socially or politically defined group.

Through a process of pouring, slicing, and manipulating paint, Wu transforms the two-dimensional medium to a palpable, malleable material that defies categorization. The resulting patterns display repeated but subtly differing timelines of her process, measuring change and progress over time and coalescing into new, cohesive wholes.

Wu invites gallery visitors to participate in Art for the People, \ˈtü\, an interactive, collaborative art project. From a large pile atop a pedestal, visitors may select and take home a tiny cube, comprised of segmented slices of Wu’s poured paint. They are asked to send her a photograph of the cube in its new home, which will be added to an ever-growing online gallery. Here, tiny cubes can be seen resting on leaves or windowsills, traversing nature atop a hiking stick, or interacting with other works of art in galleries. The inclusive project, like Wu’s sculptural paintings, carries themes of regeneration and interconnectedness, as each fragment takes on a life of its own while becoming a part of a new online community.

Curated by Lisa Lynch, Director, Widener Gallery

 

“The Aesthetics of Information”: No Olvidaremos, An Exhibition by María Verónica San Martín

March 13 – May 13, 2023

Chilean artist María Verónica San Martín commemorates the 50th anniversary of the U.S. supported military coup d’etat in Chile, which overthrew the democratically elected president and imposed a regime of repression, human rights violations and political torture. At Trinity, San Martín brings together several projects that grapple with and memorialize this history: Dignidad (2018), The Javelin Project (2021), and examples from her Moving Memorial series (2012-ongoing).

The exhibition is co-hosted by the Department of Fine Arts/Studio Arts Program and The Watkinson Library, where additional artworks are on display.

Curated by Erica Wessmann

 

Extrusions

November 7, 2022 – December 12, 2022

Extrusions features the work of Oscar Rene Cornejo, Res, Jessica Vaughn, and Anne Wu.

Activating a boundary – in one sense – gives rise to form.  Edges and limits work to define or identify, to name.  The solidification of form can be empowering, unifying, and moving.  It can be seen as the point of transformation, when one steps into their own and finds themselves.  The boundary can be revelatory.

Amidst the current immigration crisis, the nationwide attacks on trans-rights and narrowing availability of gender-affirming procedures, and affirmative action on the cusp of being overturned in the United States, each of the four artists represented in Extrusions quietly and powerfully address how material, form, space and community take shape in this often inhospitable climate.  By highlighting both what is and what is not there, giving weight to absence, each artist shines a light on our assumptions creating space for flexibility in what often feels like an inflexible world.

Curated by Erica Wessmann.

Divine Theory

May 20, 2022 – September 30, 2022

In Divine Theory, Jerome Sicard’s large, stoic sculptures are flanked by the quiet wall works of Brea Campbell-Stewart and bathed in the cassette-recorded sounds of original compositions by artist and musician Miguel Mathias. Together, these visual and auditory components create and aura of sanctity — borrowing the aesthetic power and calculated opacity of the religious only to deploy them at the contemporary intersections of craft, commerce, and appropriation.

Curated by the Trinity Studio Arts Program’s 2021-2022 post-baccalaureate fellow Harrison Kinnane Smith.