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"Sprinkle Factory" Brings The Joy To Koffee?

Lucy Gellman | January 24th, 2023

Culture & Community  |  Painting  |  Arts & Culture  |  Visual Arts  |  Koffee? on Audubon

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Jisu Sheen on a recent Friday. Lucy Gellman Photos; all artwork by Jisu Sheen. 

The pig and giraffe stand snout to snout, their hooves planted squarely on an expanse of off white beneath them. At the left, the pig lifts his ears toward the sky; as he opens his mouth, it looks as though he is smiling. The giraffe leans in, and gives something just short of a nuzzle. Below them, the red, raised head of a five-pointed star catches in the light. An embroidery hoop neatly holds the tableau together.  

Welcome to Jisu Sheen’s Sprinkle Factory, running at Koffee? New Haven on Audubon Street through the end of January. Curated by artist Daniel Santiago, the exhibition marks Sheen’s first solo show in New Haven, and her first exploration into a looser, small-scale and at times very playful style.

The title comes from the works of art themselves, oil-on-canvas compositions that Sheen refers to as “Sprinkles” and “Pre-Sprinkles.” Most were created specifically for the show.

A closing reception will take place Friday Jan. 27 from 7 to 9 p.m. For more information, check out Sheen’s website. There is also information for Second Floor Hardware School, of which she is the co-founder. 

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“I’m trying to play with the idea of something really cute and happy, but then it’s trying to explain something serious,” Sheen said in an interview earlier this month at Koffee?, wrapping her hands around a mug of black coffee. “This decision to try to be wholesome, to me it’s not something that’s just frivolous or a mark of naivety. A lot of sources of societal sadness or pain are from not being able to express joy or express love, or be loved.” 

The show has been years in the making, a product of both Sheen’s work in the community and her day job at Artist & Craftsman Supply downtown. Months ago, she began pairing the small, plastic toy animals that Artist & Craftsman sells nose to nose, as if they were kissing. It was often a balancing act, she said: a short, squat animal like a fox might have to get on its hind legs or strike a certain pose to reach the pony she had paired it with. 

There was no rhyme or reason to the pairings: the unexpectedness was part of the point. Sheen took pictures of them, calling them her “Sprinkles” (she loves then enough that one is currently the lock screen on her phone). She placed them by the front register, where they were in plain view. When she noticed that they seemed to bring customers an outsized amount of joy, she kept making them. 

At the same time, she was showing work in New Haven, usually alongside fellow Second Floor Hardware School Co-Founder Kulimushi Barongozi. In July 2021, the two showed work at Volume Two: A Never Ending Books Collective on State Street. Santiago walked into the space “just out of circumstance,” they remembered—and Sheen invited them to stay. Months later, when Santiago started working at Koffee?, Sheen jumped to mind.

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Santiago, who holds an associate’s degree in studio art from Gateway Community College, specifically wanted to bring back Koffee?'s exhibition series. Now, they said they are excited to have Sheen’s work up in the space. They credited Rowan Heyse and Ashley Angeles, Koffee?’s “minister of propaganda,” for helping get the word out. 

“I love the variation of size and subject matter,” they wrote by text earlier this month. “Jisu has really put together a compelling body of work … It has been inspiring bearing witness to Jisu’s creativity and limitless expression.” 

Those words echo through Koffee? this month, where the exhibition stretches from the front register to the back room. At the front counter, stickers for Sprinkle Factory announce the show’s existence, blossoming into being. It is as if they have been waiting by the clear case of baked goods for just the right person. It’s an invitation right from the artist. 

It sticks, too. Koffee? is a rotating door of college kids, Neighborhood Music School and ECA students, frazzled parents, regulars, and passers-by who need their caffeine fix. It feels fitting that in the heart of the so-called "Arts District," it's this—the most nontraditional gallery space on the street—that has taken a leap of faith and landed squarely on both feet. 

Further back, the art looks like it has always belonged on the white- and oxblood-painted brick. Beneath an archway, viewers may recognize a few of Sheen’s canvases from “Folk Festival: A Festival for Folks,” a month-long exhibition and residency she and Barongozi held at Havenly last year. On opposite walls, two self-portraits look out, both bouncing between this universe and another one entirely. 

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But the small canvas “Sprinkles” are perhaps the stars of the show, framed neatly in embroidery hoops and bathed in the soft glow of white lights. At the center of each, animals kiss snout to snout, and a viewer can nearly feel their wet noses touching. The whimsy—there are chickens paired with walruses, unicorns and dinosaurs, fawns and koalas—is part of the point. 

Around each pairing, Sheen has embroidered the same dainty five-pointed star—sometimes two—in red thread. A flock of paper cranes hang suspended from the ceiling, so vibrant they look as though they might take flight. She said that she “wanted to make things float” as she brought her work into the space. 

“I see life through a lens of love,” she has written in an accompanying label. “Sometimes it feels like I split my time between serious work and wholesome nonsense, but it’s all the same. It’s about trying again and again to be wholesome in this world. In the depths of despair, sometimes all you can draw are happy doodles. ”

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The exhibition marks a full-circle kind of moment, she added. Sheen has loved Koffee? since discovering it as an undergraduate at Yale (she moved to New Haven almost a decade ago for school; read more about her upbringing here). In college, “I had a lot of first dates here,” and got to know its plush chairs, well-loved cushions and long tables like an old friend.

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, she had graduated and was freelancing in New Haven. The city she loved was suddenly closed. She found herself daydreaming of the day she could return, and curl up with a book and a steaming mug of coffee. 

Now, she can—and look at her own artwork on the walls. She loves the reminder of joy, she said, in part because the world can feel so dark. As she moves into the New Year, Sprinkle Factory is a way of passing that on.

“I feel like people see me as a happy and fun and like, wholesome person,” she said. “My truth that I hold is that is a very, very conscious choice.”

Santiago said that they are looking forward to continuing to curate the space into this year. 

“It's awesome seeing different work that artists are putting up,” they said.

A closing reception for Sprinkle Factory will take place on Jan. 27 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Koffee? New Haven, 104 Audubon St. in New Haven.