Audubon Arts | Creative Arts Workshop | Arts & Culture | Artspace New Haven | Visual Arts
Kapp Singer Photos. All work by artists Xiao Ma and Steffen Pollock. Impossible Souls runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Oct. 29.
Dozens of photographs hang from the ceiling, each suspended by an almost-invisible piece of twine. They sway back and forth, nudged by a draft or bumped by the shoulder of someone traversing the gallery. In one image, a woman looks pensively out over a field of grass. In another, two figures sit on a large boulder by the edge of a river. A third is simple and abstract, just a cloudy sky backlit by the sun.
In their new mixed-media show Impossible Souls, artists Xiao Ma and Steffen Pollock wanted to curate an experience that involved more than just looking at art. “I feel like the materiality of things is very important,” Ma said at an opening last Saturday. “I think when things are on the wall it feels like there’s a distance between the audience and the artwork, and here, having them in the middle, just decreases that hierarchy.”
“Please touch the art,” Pollock added. “Have a human connection—these aren’t products.”
Impossible Souls runs Sept. 25 to Oct. 29 in the second-floor of Creative Arts Workshop on 80 Audubon St. Curated by Gabriel Sacco and organized by Artspace New Haven, the show uses CAW’s Audubon Street space as a gallery after Artspace closed its own brick-and-mortar location on Orange Street in June.
Steffen Pollock and Xiao Ma.
The exhibition is inspired by the Chinese cultural concept of 缘分 (“yuan fen”), or “fateful coincidence,” which Ma and Pollock interpret through Sufjan Steven’s 25-minute song Impossible Soul—the namesake of the exhibit. As noted in a press release, the show uses these touchpoints to “call out multiplicities of shared experience, stories of memory and loss, and explore place and home as a way to access entanglement.”
It's an abstract and theoretical gambit, but Ma and Pollock approach such conceptual depth with tact and simplicity. After all, the genesis of the show was quite straightforward: “We just wanted to do a show together,” Ma said. The two artists met via mutual friends at an art opening—a fateful coincidence in itself—and, after becoming close friends, decided they wanted to exhibit work alongside each other.
“Part of the show was figuring out where our work overlapped, and what themes we wanted to explore,” Pollock said. Rather than coming together with a specific end goal in mind, the two just let their collaborative process guide the theme of Impossible Souls.
As such, walking through the gallery feels a whirlwind tour through a mind-meld of Ma and Pollock. Photos, textiles, paintings, prints, and everyday objects like plates and bells dangle in the air, sit on the ground, and hang on the walls. Projectors splash warbling patterns of light at odd angles. The artists decided to eschew any kind of system for labeling the artwork, instead leaving the provenance of each piece ambiguous.
“It makes more sense when you see everything together rather than just one piece at a time,” Ma said.
At the opening last weekend, viewers drifted around the gallery, sometimes bumping into one another as they wove their way through the work. “Because these pieces are spread out and they’re at different heights, it causes you to move through the space in a different way,” explained Pollock.
“The more you get to interact with the space and the artwork, the more beautiful it is for you,” Ma added. “A lot about my work is how I want to share it with the audience, how I want to share it with people.”
Of particular interest to visitors were several tall, white wooden boxes dispersed across the floor of the gallery. Each is covered with blue handwritten notes by the two artists—short reflections, musings, diary entries. They catalog personal fears, favorite songs—Stevens’ Impossible Soul, naturally—and childhood memories. Screenshots of old text conversations and email threads accompany the text.
There isn’t any kind of coherent narrative, but, like the other pieces throughout the show, they are small windows into Pollock and Ma’s lives.
“It feels like a confession … it’s very raw,” Ma noted. “It’s important to acknowledge the parts that we want to ignore.”
As the two artists watched a visitor turn over and rearrange a series of photos displayed on a table, they smiled, and Ma offered a few final words of reflection.
“It is our show, but it’s also beyond us—the reflection of human connections in general, and how complex we are as beings.”