Painting | Visual Arts | Arts, Culture & Community | Sculpture | Gateway Community College | Graphic Design
Sculpture by Taina Jackson. Photos Kapp Singer.
Two model houses sit back-to-back. The structure on the left is austere, made entirely of glass and divided into four neat quadrants. Each room contains just a single piece of furniture: a glass bench, a glass bed, a glass table, and a glass closet. The angular, transparent panes are outlined with thin strokes of silver solder and bronze foil.
The building on the right tells a different story. Pine cone scales shingle the pointed roof. A lattice of popsicle sticks covers the rear facade. Triangular wooden tiles tessellate across the structure’s sides. And out of the front pours, well, everything. Beads, a rope ladder, bottle caps, a gear, a fork, a tiny clock that looks like an owl, a spool of thread, a metal moth, a miniature Rubik’s cube.
Sculpture by Taina Jackson.
Taina Jackson created the pair of objects for an assignment on opposites in Peter Bonadies’s sculpture class at Gateway Community College. Those works are now on view in Gateway’s NewAlliance Foundation Art Gallery as part of the 2024 Student Art Exhibition show. Located at 20 Church St. and curated by Noé Jimenez, the show runs through May 13 and features drawings, paintings, collages, sculptures, photographs, posters, and product designs from Gateway’s visual arts and graphic design students.
“I find the beauty in other peoples’ trash,” said Jackson at an opening reception on Wednesday. She collected the myriad objects packed into her sculpture over the last year. “I’ll pick up anything,” she said. “Today I found a bird egg. I also like collecting bugs.”
“This, I love,” said Brad Baker, CT State academic dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, pointing at Jackson’s work. “Almost every time this campus has an opening, I come—I just really like this campus and these instructors. It’s a good place.”
In another sculpture, Jackson fashioned the detritus she amassed into a series of small characters, each with a tiny set of wire legs. Sea glass and shells from a trip to the beach with her mom, bottle caps discarded on the street, small rocks, and a dried beetle march in a line towards a book.
“They are walking into my diary of memories,” said Jackson. “Each one is a different memory.”
Sculpture by Taina Jackson.
In a painting by Arwen LaPlant mounted across from Jackson’s sculptures, the city is rendered less as a collection of discrete recollections than a combination of senses. The piece shows two busy roads intersecting at a T. The sky and street converge in a muted gray. Tall buildings turn the street into a canyon. In the foreground, a series of what look to be yellow traffic lights, disembodied from their posts, lay scattered across a brown and tan field. Cars idle on the left side of the composition, rendered as gray and black smudges.
The scene has the quality of an Edward Hopper or Wayne Thiebaud streetscape—that certain emptiness, quietude, loneliness, even—but trades precision for a gestural haze. All the busyness of the scene unites in something like a visual analogue to the ambient noise of a downtown carved out for cars.
Painting by Arwen LaPlant.
The show also gave students an opportunity to showcase techniques they learned through a new partnership between Gateway and the Chapel Street maker space MakeHaven. The program, this year in its pilot phase, provides MakeHaven memberships to Gateway art students so that they can use tools like laser cutters, welders, sewing machines, and table saws.
Garments made at MakeHaven by Marisabel Sanchez, Alexandra Scialla, and Brianna Czar (left to right).
“Now that we're all one CT State, many of the other campuses have facilities, but we don’t have any making facilities, not in the arts,” said Gateway studio art instructor Peter Bonadies, referring to the July 2023 merger of Connecticut’s 12 community colleges.
This year, Bonadies’s introductory sculpture class was the first to participate in the MakeHaven partnership. The program, funded by a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, provided memberships for 15 students.
Not only does MakeHaven provide access to new tools, but the space is also open 24/7, which allowed students to dive deep into their projects. Many became obsessed, Bonadies said, staying late into the night to work on their own sculptures and teach their classmates how to use the tools. On view in the gallery were the fruits of their work—abstract metal constructions, a series of garments, and models of buildings.
Sculptures by Fiona Farrell (left) and Alexandra Scialla (right).
Currently, Bonadies is working with the Gateway administration to secure funding to continue the MakeHaven program, as he can only apply to the Community Foundation for a grant every other year.
“If I’m teaching sculpture, and [CT State] Middlesex has a full woodshop, and a metal shop, and a ceramics shop—well, that ain’t fair,” he said. “In lieu of saying ‘we need to build [a shop],’ which could take many years and millions of dollars, the nonprofit MakeHaven is right there down the street.”