Artists Reflect On Isolation & More
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor —
The recent arctic cold and power blackouts brought to us an ever more immediate and painful experience of isolation than the pandemic originally created last year.
“It was worse than COVID,” said Patti Ruiz-Healy, the co-director of the Ruiz Healy Art gallery in Olmos Park. “Before, you could at least connect with people in some sort of way, even it wasn’t physical. You could text people, you could do Facetime. But with people losing power and trying to conserve what power they did have, it removed even those channels of communication. The feeling of being completely isolated and unable to go anywhere was very traumatic.”
Given that those experiences have been shared by all San Antonians and other Texans, it seems especially fitting that the new exhibit at the Ruiz-Healy Art explores issues of separation, distress and hardship. Called Plurality of Isolations, the show that opened Wednesday, features new works by eight prominent contemporary artists, including Jesse Amado, Ethel Shipton, Jenelle Esparza, Cecilia Paredes, Barbara Minarro, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, RF Alvarez and Carlos Rosales-Silva.
“So much about being an artist is sharing, and they couldn’t do much of that during this COVID year, explained Patti, who goes by her nickname to differentiate herself from her mother, Patricia Ruiz-Healy, who founded the business. “Now we are nearing the one-year anniversary of isolation. So, we wanted to do something in connection of this one-year anniversary of COVID isolation.”
All the artists in the show have a Texas connection of some sort and all have worked with Ruiz-Healy Art in the past. The gallery contacted them and gave them an idea of what it was looking for, which was basically works that reflect on the pandemic and the restrictions imposed on our lives. Needless to say, the responses vary widely, but collectively, their artistic responses touch upon a wide range of subject matter.
Describing his new work, for instance, native San Antonian and current Austin resident, RF Alvarez, explained his pandemic approach this way: “I’ve moved away from allegory, turned the lens onto the room I dream in rather than the dream itself. What dreams I do paint are distant now, faded, almost coming undone the longer time passes. These works represent a sampling of that sea-change, how a pandemic affects a studio practice.”
One of his paintings depicts a man – the artist, himself? – sitting on the floor of his bedroom, looking unmotivated and dejected. In another, he paints a small figure of a man near a green spot in a desolate landscape. No further explanation necessary.
On the opposite wall is a piece by San Antonian Jesse Amado, titled December 2020, a canvas painted blue, with a burn in one corner, with 2020 written on it. It’s strangely effective. The year that saw people’s dream, jobs, and peace of mind go up in “flames,” leaving emptiness behind. He has another eloquent piece in the show, Lives Matter (noose), a sculpture of sorts made of rope and Plexiglass. Again, hardly needs explanation at this time.
Not all works deal with the pandemic or recent events, however. Jennifer Ling Datchuk, a native Ohioan who lives in the Alamo City, created a piece that relates to her multi-ethnic heritage, Chinese and Caucasian. “My work has always dealt with identity, with the sense of being in-between, an impostor, neither fully Chinese nor Caucasian,” she writes. Her Flawless contribution to Plurality of Isolations is a porcelain, vaguely Asian face against a Plexiglass mirror, an affirmation of self.
Another San Antonian, Ethel Shipton, is represented by her well-known road- sign imagery, which she has reworked to connect with the history of South Texas. However, we are partial to her isolated signs pointing to “La Gloria” or “Eden.” So simple and so eloquent!
A completely abstract art by New Yorker, Carlos Rosales-Silva brings vivid color and an upbeat touch to his canvases, and there are quite a few of them. An arrangement of four smaller ones is named Border Exchange Studies.
A dose of optimism is injected by Corpus Christi native, Jenelle Esparza who says she is hoping “for things to get moving again in a new way.” A 2018 Artpace Artist-in-Residence, she’s represented in the show with a single work, Through the Treshold, which pays tribute to cotton pickers in the S. Texas cotton fields.
Asked which pieces she would buy for herself, Patti Ruiz-Healy pointed to Alvarez’s canvas, But I Remember Walking in Coyoacan With You,” the one showing a small figure of an isolated man in a vast scape, and Rosales-Silva’s quartet, Border Exchange Studies.
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Ruiz-Healy Art is open Wednesday-Saturday, 11a.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment. 201-A Olmos Drive, 78212; 210-804-2210. Portion of the sales from this show goes to the San Antonio Food Bank. Donations of non-perishable foods will be collected for the same purpose.