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PARACHUTE FACTORY
Family Business at The Parachute Factory Gallery
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The Arts Council of Greater New Haven,
in collaboration with Yale Program for Recovery and Community
Health and the Community Services Network of Greater New Haven,
presents Family Business at The Parachute Factory
Gallery at Erector Square, 319 Peck Street, Building 1, New
Haven. The exhibit takes place from November 18 to February
27, with a reception on Tuesday, November 18, 5:30
to 7:30 pm. Prior to the reception at 4:30 pm, Joshua
Blaine, a recent Princeton graduate, will speak about his
experience coping with bipolar disorder and how it has affected
his social and familial network. There will also be an artists’
talk at 5:30 pm. The public is invited to attend. Regular
gallery hours are Wednesday, 10 am-2 pm; Thursday and Friday,
12-5 pm and by appointment.
Family Business brings together diverse artists and
mediums to explore the business of being a family. Family
structures—both traditional and unconventional—and
family dynamics—both functional and dysfunctional—are
explored in this engaging exhibition. Featured artists
include: Steven DiGiovanni, Larissa Hall, Joe Saccio,
Hrvoje Slovenc and the Broell Bresnick family of New Haven,
CT; Bob Gregson of Orange, CT; Erika Van Natta of Bethany,
CT; Thuan Vu of Hamden, CT; Gary Duehr, Kelly Sherman and
Paul Nash of Massachusetts; Judy Gelles of Pennsylvania; Lilianne
Milgrom of Maryland; James Montford of Rhode Island; and Yoon
Cho of New York. The exhibition was curated by Howard el-Yasin
and Debbie Hesse.
A unique new initiative of the Community Services Network
of Greater New Haven (CSN) and the Yale Program for Recovery
and Community Health (PRCH), The Parachute Factory seeks to
foster community health through the arts by sponsoring interdisciplinary,
artistic programs and collaborations that expand opportunity
for people within the greater New Haven community. PRCH conducts
research, training, education and policy development in the
field of behavioral health. Its guiding philosophy is recovery,
defined as the regaining of a person’s place in the
community as a way of living with and living beyond the experiences
of mental illness and addiction. The CSN, administered by
the Yale Department of Psychiatry through the Connecticut
Mental Health Center, is a consortium of 18 community-based
organizations that provide a variety of behavioral health
services to people throughout the greater New Haven area.
The mission of the CSN is to help families and individuals
enjoy meaningful and satisfying lives through the coordination
of recovery-oriented clinical, housing, social rehabilitation,
vocational, and other services.
For further information about this exhibition, please call
the Arts Council at 203-772-2788.
Description of Work
Family Business Part 1
Notions of what an ideal family might look like are seen in
Yoon Cho’s “Nuclear Family Project,”
a series of photographs that show two individuals working
together to build a new identity as a unit. In these photographs,
silhouettes of an imaginary baby are superimposed over the
artist’s “pre-baby” suburban life. In contrast,
Judy Gelles’s black and white photo series
“Family Portrait,” capture the messy reality of
daily family life—dirty diapers, dirty dishes, potty
training—moments not usually found in the typical family
album. James Montford’s video “Wife”
is about the person we marry, and the union and confluence
of family and identity. Montford’s family is white,
black and Native American.
Gender and role stereotypes are confronted in works by Lilianne
Milgrom and Hrvoje Slovenc. Slovenc
reconstructs Victorian-era portraits, substituting same-sex
couples for their heterosexual counterparts. Lilianne Milgrom
gives us a glimpse of a seemingly cohesive traditional family,
yet they are untraditional in appearance—sexy, relaxed,
hip and synchronized in movement.
Gary Duehr and Thuan Vu
explore memory and distortion in their work. Duehr, in his
photographic series Fracture, questions our memory
of events within a family, in his “autobiographical
fiction” displayed in gold frames. Trompe l’oeil
cracks in the glass, interrupting intact faces beneath, beg
the question ‘are these fissures in memory, or within
the family itself.’ Thuan Vu creates large scale “faux
ancestral” paintings of family members based on a traditional
Vietnamese technique, ve voi bot. Deliberately out
of focus and without detail, they seek to capture the idea
of losing a memory of a person.
Expressions of familial affection and devotion are noted in
works by Joe Saccio, Paul Nash
and Steven DiGiovanni. Joe Saccio commemorates
family events—prom night, birthdays—by creating
sculptural objects that he gives to family members to mark
their significance. These artifacts are representations of
expressions of love and exchange within a family. Paul Nash
captures ”snapshots” of his infant son daily in
a video documentation that condenses four years of face shots
into a two minute piece that is updated daily. Steven DiGiovanno’s
large scale figurative paintings of his partner Chisato and
her daughter serve as validation and acknowledgement of the
fundamentals that bond their uniquely blended family structure.
Family dysfunction dominates in works by Erika Van
Natta, Larissa Hall and Kelly
Sherman. Erika Van Natta's video, Grey Matters
to Me, focuses on three men, each with psychiatric disorders
or physical brain injuries, and the effects their conditions
have had on them and their family members. One vignette relates
the story of a man with schizophrenia, who dies of heat exhaustion
when removed from a bus, as told from his brother’s
perspective. Larissa Hall takes the family annual holiday
letter to convey how family stories are constructed to maintain
social networks. Hall, in her wall installation, offers a
glimpse of devastation in the life of a modern family. Kelly
Sherman quietly and coolly chronicles a divorce through diagrammatic
prints of changing floor plans, and moving and packing lists,
in her anthropological study of social networks.
Bob Gregson’s interactive installation
Because I Said So uses phrases familiar to most families.
His “bicker booth” allows the audience to become
active participants and role play family interactions with
ready-made “conversations.”
Family Business: Part 2
Family Business: Part 2 is a companion show that features
the Broell Bresnick Family and aims to show
how three generations of artists have influenced each others’
lives and each others’ art.
Technical support provided by Odonnell Company.
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