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In "Sunlight & Candlelight," Fantasy & Reality Collide

Lucy Gellman | September 25th, 2024

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Culture & Community  |  Downtown  |  Arts & Culture  |  Visual Arts  |  Gateway Community College

LiahSinq_Topper

Liah Sinq's work comes from her altar series. Sunlight & Candlelight runs at CT State Gateway through Oct. 4.

At first, it’s just the dad and the son against the world, doing that epic, laughter-flecked, gentle kind of wrestling that makes reality fade away and seem close all at once. Sunlight pours through the window, falling in thick slices onto the mattress. A bare tree waves its seasonal hello from the street. If you lean in close to the work, hung unadorned on the wall, you can nearly hear the giggles.

And then you see him: the second child, hanging on to his dad’s left leg as if it is the only support that he will ever need in the world. This is a matching pajamas and banana pancakes sort of morning. It is a laugh-until-your-cheeks-hum sort of morning. It is holy, because it is everything everyone here needs.

Liah Sinq’s untitled photograph is part of Sunlight & Candlelight, an intimate, animated group show running at CT State Community College - Gateway (formerly Gateway Community College) through Oct. 4. Installed in the NewAlliance Foundation Art Gallery, the exhibition is as whimsical as it is contemplative, with pieces from Sinq, Grace Hager, and Sophia DeJesus-Sabella that converse with each other from where they are hung on the walls and installed on the floor.

The gallery is located at 20 Church St. in downtown New Haven and open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays. For more information, click here

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Curator Noé Jimenez at an opening reception. Sophia DeJesus-Sabella's Hoping Machine is pictured in the background. Lucy Gellman Photo.

“This kind of idea of a fantasy world came into my head as I was looking at each artist’s work and what they wanted to show,” said curator Noé Jimenez at an opening reception last week. “That’s kind of what I went with. It’s like being in a little art bog or something here, a little special place that you’re hanging out in. It’s dewy and dark, and the sunlight, the natural light, is exposing the warmth.”

A viewer can see that as soon as they walk in, with works that talk to each other across the space. Close to the entrance, Sinq’s photograph of a father and his kids playing draws a viewer in close, letting them peek in on a moment that is normally private, sacred. Beyond a sliver of doorway that is still visible, a dad lifts his son with both arms, the boy suspended in space.

Between them, the air seems electric, waiting for the pull of gravity to break the moment. But for the viewer, that doesn’t have to come: Sinq’s shutter clicks, freezing the scene. 

There’s something so intimate and also universal there, that moment of forgetting the world is a broken thing, because you have your people around you. The play of light and dark is delicious: the father’s face almost completely shrouded. A sheaf of light falls right over his son’s silhouette. Meanwhile, the room’s shadows give it all a sense of witness and discovery, with a vibe that is both church service and hide and seek.

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DeJesus-Sabella’s It takes two.

Behind it, DeJesus-Sabella’s It takes two hangs over two discarded sawhorses, a wholly different medium with that same sense of something familiar, but also not. From afar, it appears that a long, droopy ping-pong table has simply materialized in the gallery, rackets placed gingerly on its far sides. But the closer one gets, the more it seems off: the table sags and drapes in a deep U shape, leaving the white net suspended above.

Its edges are fringed, more like a shawl than a landing place for a ball. A rock—Jimenez’ intervention, DeJesus-Sabella said—sits beside the piece where a hollow ball might otherwise be.

It’s recognizable, but no longer utilitarian, given an artistic value where there once was a recreational one. In flipping the script, DeJesus-Sabella pushes her viewer to think about work and play, about artifice and reality, about the sheer labor that has gone into the piece. The gallery, meanwhile, is small enough for a viewer to get up close, studying the intricate weaving that has gone into the installation.

“I love it,” DeJesus-Sabella, who works on a floor loom, said of the exhibition at an opening last week. “I love that this is an all-woman show, I love that it’s very subtle, very emotional.”

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Top: Liah Sinq (at right) talks to attendees about a photograph capturing her cousin, Caroline, on the beach. Grace Hager's Flare.

Just across the gallery—which is mere feet, rather than a sprawling or labyrinthine museum space—Hager also plays with that kind of contrast, her 2024 sculpture Flare nested in mounds of sand. Atop a trio of ceramic logs, flames curl upward in brilliant shades of blue, orange, and purple. Around them, the sand winds over a squat, long pedestal in an S shape, and it’s easy to think about it as a land-locked jetty, suddenly out of place and also exactly where it should be.

On a wall nearby, Sinq’s portrait of her cousin Caroline stares out at the ceramic flames, as if she might put down her cigarette, look up from the pages in her hand and start a conversation with the viewer. Inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With Wolves, the work is meant to capture the multitudes that the subject contains. Sinq has photographed her many times, she said, often in that liminal space between performing femininity and getting at its rough and gritty underbelly. 

“It’s this cross between feminine and kind of … I refer to it as this ravenous, wild being,” Sinq said at the opening reception. “She holds a lot of that power and represents it for me. In the book, they talk about how it’s not by accident that nature is being pushed out and overrun, as we see old women pushed out of their important roles in society … I’ve been trying to kind of capture the mirror between the two.”    

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Sophia DeJesus-Sabella's Hoping Machine and Liah Sinq's photograph of Westvillians at Broken Umbrella. 

For two still works of art, the interplay is surprisingly animated, conjuring long, lazy summer days and evenings that have no sort of timeline. From Hager, it’s the crackle and dance of fire that can seem so other-worldly, turned into an aesthetic object that is still entirely fantastical. So too at walls of windows facing George Street, where Sinq’s photograph of Westville architecture captures a decay that feels as organic as Hager’s pieces on a pedestal next to it.

The show’s small size, meanwhile, works to its advantage: these artists ask a viewer to linger, and viewers are rewarded if they do. In one corner of the gallery, DeJesus-Sabella’s Hoping Machine seems to emanate light itself, as though the artist has captured a sunrise and stretched it across her floor loom. Beside it, Sinq has captured an audience beneath twinkling white lights, watching a performance from A Broken Umbrella Theatre.

The pieces seem to converse happily, as do Hoping Machine and Sinq’s portrait of a friend in her kitchen, bleaching her hair beneath a plastic bag. There's a metaphor for society somewhere in there, DeJesus-Sabella said: she attempted to dye the piece naturally, with marigold and cochineal, and found that the colors just wouldn’t do what she needed them to do.GatewaySept24 - 9

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 Top: Artist Ed Gendron looks at Sinq's work. Bottom: a detail of baby blue collar.

Ultimately, she worked with chemical, store-bought dyes—taking advantage of the very commercialism she had hoped to avoid. Around a corner, her baby blue collar waits patiently for its turn in the spotlight. The work, an homage to family and her working-class upbringing, is woven from disassembled polyethylene tarps.

Jimenez, who will celebrate one year at the gallery this winter, said he’s excited to share the show with the wider community. As he was knitting Sunlight & Candlelight together, he did studio visits with Hager and DeJesus-Sabella, who are currently based in Maine in Hartford respectively (he has known Sinq, who is based in Westville, for much longer).

That’s one of his favorite parts of the gig: he’s constantly learning about new work and the artists bringing it into being.

A year in, “I feel way more comfortable doing the shows,” he said. “There was a learning curve coming to this institution, and I definitely was working on that for a little while. Now I feel like it’s more just the curating, finding artists, and growing relationships with them.”