Dixwell | NXTHVN | Arts & Culture
Isaac Bloodworth's installation. Chris Gardner Photos Courtesy of NXTHVN.
Imagine cerulean waters on a bright, sunny day. A young Black man sporting hot pink swim trunks floats on a yellow tube, one foot submerged in the water. Swirls of sun rays surround a yellow sun, mimicking the movement of the water below. The scene feels calm and youthful.
The Adventures of Joy Da Black Boi—a vinyl window installation by New Haven-based artist Isaac Bloodworth—is part of Deserve What You Dream, a group show on view at the Dixwell neighborhood art space NXTHVN through September 1 of this year. In the show, four artists explore the seasonal emphasis on relaxation. They include Derrick Adams, Isaac Bloodworth, Jihyun Lee, and Sarah Zapata.
Curator Marissa Del Toro, NXTHVN’s assistant director of programs and exhibitions, drew inspiration from Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry. In the 2022 book, Hersey prompts readers to consider rest as a powerful way to disrupt capitalism. In stark opposition to “grind culture,” Hersey has prioritized quality sleep as a pivotal social justice issue, one that disproportionately impacts Black people.
Echoing the Nap Ministry’s thesis, Del Toro encourages visitors to use the exhibition space to contemplate and engage in various forms of leisure. Three questions on the show’s title wall spark self-reflection: Why do you dream? How do you dream? What do you dream of? The answers are personal; the ability to respond, a privilege.
Chris Gardner Photos Courtesy of NXTHVN.
For those in need of ideas or for anyone associating reading with R & R, a small bookcase inside the gallery contains several shelves of donations from New Haven Reads, a local nonprofit that aims to spread a love for reading through free tutoring and other programming. The selection ranges from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to a book about yoga for kids. Visitors can leaf through a book as they take in the artwork inside the space, sitting on one of the two chairs here, or take something home with them.
Just inside the main entrance, additional reading materials purchased from the local bookstore Possible Futures await visitors, though these books are intended to be perused inside the building.
Another opportunity for repose is found within Sarah Zapata’s quirky installation, A resilience of things not seen. Fat brown and black stripes delineate the perimeter of the work, which contains three generic chairs with puffy, light blue cushions and several black floor pillows. A small table with brown booklets invites visitors to sketch (and tag the group @NewHavenSketchers). Rectangular forms covered in latch-hook rugs with freehand designs protrude from the ceiling overhead. Gazing above, the repetitive act of making these intricate works evinces the Peruvian-American artist’s labor intensive and meditative practice.
Look closely and you will see small glints from exposed staples and flashes of blue painter’s tape. This evidence of the installation’s construction clues a visitor into the speed at which the installation was created or perhaps the posture of the artist to leave these elements visible.
Chris Gardner Photos Courtesy of NXTHVN.
Two small textile assemblages inside Zapata’s installation reappear elsewhere in similar forms inside the gallery—on the front wall near the bookcase and nearly hidden along the back wall. Seemingly made from reused upholstery fabrics, these wall or floor-mounted works mash up purple, beige, and brown stripes, reconstructed in irregular, soft blobs that hug corners and nest along edges. In the adjoining room, called the Aula, there are several more large handwoven wall hangings by Zapata, as well as additional paintings by New Haven-based artist Jihyun Lee in a sprawling extension of the show.
Back in the main exhibition space are three mixed-media paintings on unprimed canvases by Lee. Born in Seoul, she combines imaginative and idiosyncratic scenes and leaves large sections of her compositions untouched, making visual space for viewers to rest their eyes. Recurring motifs—stripes, schematic drawings of architectural spaces, writing, loose renderings of figures—connect to broad the themes of movement and identity. Taken as a whole, her paintings feel akin to daydreams, with a breezy, oneiric vibe.
While Lee’s works evoke the feeling of fantasy, two brilliantly-hued paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams bring a viewer closer to reality with his representational depictions of rest, specifically poolside people. Both works in the show are from the artist’s “Floater” series, a body of mixed-media collages on paper that show people floating on water with inflatables. Adams breaks the figures into facets, modulating large shapes of flat color to render his geometric volumes.
Chris Gardner Photos Courtesy of NXTHVN.
On the back wall, which has been painted a shockingly wakeful lime green, Floater 49 portrays a bearded Black man sitting on a hot pink floatie. The long neck of a flamingo frames the right side of the composition, while the figure on the left gazes away from the viewer. His face seems expressionless, as if entranced in some way, while the sky appears cloudless and opaque. His bathing suit, composed of pieces of fabric affixed to the paper support, contains flashes of red, green, black, and yellow in a bold pattern.
Adams’s practice is devoted to leisure, focusing on Black subjects who have been historically underrepresented at rest within art history. His passion for this topic spurred Adams to found The Last Resort Artists Retreat in 2020. This sanctuary features an all-star art collection installed in an expansive house with a generous outdoor space. The building and grounds were envisioned as a site for rest and rejuvenation for Black creative professionals, located in Adams’s hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. This haven allows others to decompress— potentially inspiring fellow artists and writers to make and share representations of these contented experiences, as Adams has.
Undergirding Deserve What You Dream is the notion that joy exists in tandem with rest. Zapata and Lee present more personalized and abstract reveries. Yet for Bloodworth and Adams, representing Black individuals relaxing is a more charged endeavor because of its scarcity. Pictures of Black leisure are far from abundant in art history.
A takeaway for visitors to the show is that your experience of bliss expands with your ability to recuperate from everyday troubles and extraordinary traumas. Making time to sleep means making time to dream, and this show is a starting place.
Deserve What You Dream continues through September 1, 2024, at NXTHVN, 169 Henry Street, New Haven, CT.