Blocks and Bridges

Blocks and Bridges: World building in New Haven is a deep dive into discovering the practice of world building. Much like the building of a house, world building is the foundation where artists situate repeating formal and conceptual qualities in their practice: the who, what, where, and when of their stories. The exhibition wonders: What are these qualities, the marks made, of world building that are being explored in New Haven? Who are the repeating characters and settings that artists work with to explore a world that is lost, needed, escapist, imaginary, and found though art? World building is a mechanism to generate fictions in a time of policial, economic, and social uncertainty and brings these artists in conversation with each other over this common practice.

Opening Reception:

Blocks and Bridges is produced by Gabriel Sacco, Artspace’s former Visual Culture Producer in conjunction with Creative Arts Workshop Hilles Gallery.

Blocks and Bridges is on view at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St. New Haven CT

Image Credit: Edwin Gendron, Rabbitman Dreams of Dark Matter, 2022

Esthea Kim is an interdisciplinary artist integrating sculpture, installation and painting. Her works represent a captured notion from memories and express the sensed and theorized through fading and poetic imagery in a visually succinct way. Transposed from her perception, her painting transfers atmospheric vastness into repeated gestural brushstrokes and built up textures. While fleetingly capturing light in-between layers, these brushstrokes combine with hard-edged elements, condensing infinite views and the unseen into a single flattened composition. Esthea’s sculptural objects and installations are industrial yet organic. Focusing on the inherent qualities of materials, she expands the use of prefabricated and utilitarian items into more organic forms.

Ed Gendron is an independent artist, photographer, and filmmaker who currently resides in New Haven, CT. He received his MFA in Film and Photography from Radford University. His photographic work has been selected for juried exhibits at University of North Florida, Eastern Carolina University, Artspace New Haven, the Solaris Film Festival (Vienna, Austria), the Arts at Yale Health, and many more. He’s been invited to speak many times on his photography work and on his filmmaking/animation work.

Mosho’s (MO) practice explores themes of identity, power dynamics, and unconventional representations of the body. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of sources, I aim to create a unique artistic voice that reflects my exploration of inner landscapes. He graduated from Bard College. His work has been shown at CAW, New Haven; KIPP Gallery, Indiana; and The Residency Project x MOTOR, Los Angeles.

Pat Garcia is a latinx born and raised in California. He received his BFA from Humboldt State University and is an MFA candidate at the Yale School of Art. His work both embraces and reaches past limits of the photographic medium, meshing together traditional processes with various alternative modes of making, focusing on cameraless photography. His work touches on a variety of themes, from autobiographical work about himself, his family, and his surroundings, to more abstracted cameraless images, referencing his interest in the physics of sound and music theory.

Gerald Saladyga is a Connecticut native and currently lives in Hamden, CT, with a studio in the industrial part of New Haven. He received a BA from Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT and a MA equivalent teaching degree from Southern Connecticut State University. His major art education took place at the Art

Students’ League in New York City. He has received grants from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Commission on Arts and Culture, as well as the Commissions One Percent for the Arts; and a grant from the Weir Farm Trust Visiting Artists Program. He has also been a finalist in NYC’s One Percent for Public Art for the MTA Dobbs Ferry Train Station; and in 2017, NYC’s One Percent for Art for Public Schools, for PS 143Q, The Louis Armstrong School in Queens, NY.

Saladyga has exhibited extensively in his 50 year career throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York City. Among his Connecticut exhibitions, he has shown at the Harts Gallery, New Milford; The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sacred Heart University, Bridgeport; University of Connecticut at Stamford Art Gallery; the Arnold Bernhard Center for Arts and Humanities, University of Bridgeport, and the Housatonic

Community College Gallery, Bridgeport; Artspace and Kehler Liddell Galleries in New Haven, and the Silvermine Guild of Artists in New Canaan, where he also served on its Board of Directors and as Co-chair of the Gallery Committee. New York

City venues include the Brian Morris Gallery, the Scott Hanson Gallery, the Robertson Gallery, and the 22 Wooster Street Gallery. And in Massachusetts, at Gallery Bershad, Somerville; the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery, Bristol Community College, Fall River; and the Provincetown Art Association.

Jihyun Lee’s artistic focus has been centered on painting, involving the meticulous reconfiguration of surrealistic spaces. Over two decades, she has predominantly delved into paintings and drawings, intending to maximize the specific state between reverie and reality. Her work consistently occupies the ambiguous threshold where she interweaves her ceaseless daydreams with tangible life experiences. When observing her paintings, one’s gaze cannot remain stationary; it is inevitably drawn to zoom in and out, engaging with the multitude of ideas and thoughts that naturally flow through her mind. Similarly, her drawings, perhaps on a more personal level, reveal an ongoing yearning to immerse herself in both endless reveries and the corresponding reality. Imagine that memories are arranged along a linear timeline; Jihyun Lee, with her masterful hand and essential tools, vertically slices open the layered strata of memories. This grants access to the space filled with a plethora of distinct and unrelated images from her mind, making it both tangible and reachable.

On a single surface, she paints disparate scenes, creating a newfound depth composed of multiple layers. Her work invites viewers to delve into this unfamiliar depth, inserting their own memories between the layers to comprehend her art and construct their own narratives. Her drawings capture the sculptural objects she experiments with, serving as experimental bridges that seamlessly connect her thoughts by utilizing the simultaneity of the medium. The mirrored text within her work serves as a visual reflection of her studies, echoing into the realm beyond the threshold. Drawing has significantly documented the artist’s thoughts; through frenzied actions on paper, a drawing can vividly encapsulate what she aims to preserve.

Her most recent experimental practice involves object creation, specifically her Doll Shelf series (2018-2023). This series has evolved from Re-portal (2018), later becoming intertwined with her painting series, Red Scene. In this series, objects are submerged on wooden shelves beneath a semi-transparent, red-tinted plexiglass cover. These objects encapsulate memories of her mother’s motherhood and her son’s childhood, transcending any confinement to a singular perspective of her own upbringing or motherhood. In a similar vein, we do not consciously steer our dreams but rather observe them as spectators, often in a passive manner. On the shelves, she documents certain memories and generates new ones for the future, mirroring her approach in her paintings. The sculptural pieces offer limited viewing access once encased in their red-tinted nests, projecting a holographic appearance with three-dimensional facets, excluding the backside view. The objects that emerge in her large-scale paintings correspondingly share their narratives within the artworks, generating an endless cascade of future memories.