Origins is the second exhibition curated from Orchid Gallery’s 2024 Open Call and features artworks by Howard el-Yasin, Kaelynne Hernandez, Christopher Paul Jordan, Jasmine Nikole and Jason Ting. Orchid Gallery’s inaugural exhibition Gather showcased predominantly figurative artworks, inviting New Haven’s communities of color to readily see themselves reflected in the works on view. Building upon this engagement, Origins prioritizes conceptual artworks to expand discussion around identity representation within contemporary art. In a moment where Blackness is often tokenized by the mainstream art world, and depictions of BIPOC bodies are over consumed, Origins insists upon a slow, nuanced read. Posing more questions than it answers–such as how might conceptualism and a collective move away from figuration disrupt white supremacy within contemporary art?–this probing exhibition reclaims abstraction as a vital language of self expression and uplifts the rich personal, collective, and material origins of the featured artworks.

Howard el-Yasin traces the life cycles of domestic materials–which have been either inherited or scavenged–to materialize acts of remembrance and stoke the tensions between individual and popular value systems. Many of his featured works stem from an ongoing series for which he’s collected thousands of banana skins from members of his extended community through reciprocal exchange. Of his interest in bananas as physical and conceptual material, el-Yasin states, “Bananas signify many references; to culture, sex, labor and the global economy. Yet, in a speculative sense, [my] work reflects on the individual and collective histories of its many participants, which can be imagined in the diversity of shapes formed by the process of baking the banana skins.” In making work with actual bananas, as opposed to mere representations of them, el-Yasin literally infuses his pieces with the complicated racial and economic histories of the labor-intensive crop and encourages viewers to rethink ordinary materials in new ways.

Kaelynne Hernandez comments on Chicanismo–or pride in one’s heritage as a Mexican American–using her art to reclaim American indigeneity while also commenting on the interconnected origins of the universe beyond constructed borders. As a young person growing up in New Haven, Hernandez dreamed of being an astronomer, an interest that continually folds itself into her work today. Her wall sculptures–which are created from shredded newspaper that she grinds to a pulp, sculpts onto wood panels with clay, and then paints–depict imagery that “comes from an unconscious collective state of mind that we have in all of us.” She continues, “It’s recognizable because it’s ingrained in us as humans.” Through focusing on what connects rather than what divides us, Hernandez invites viewers to see ourselves in each other and reminds us of the importance of expanding one’s perspective while maintaining connection to one’s roots. 

Christopher Paul Jordan’s origin story begins in his hometown of Tacoma, Washington where he found artistic inspiration in a local scrapyard owned by Mr. Jones, whose daughter Gwen is featured in Untitled (Block). A local legend, Jones salvaged architectural and personal artifacts that were forcibly displaced by reckless practices of gentrification, often reconnecting them with their original owners. A scavenger and salvager in his own right, Jordan is, “interested in the afterlife of memory; in the ways oral tradition is altered and negotiated in conditions of diaspora.” He often uses repurposed window and door screens to peel and move paintings between surfaces, detaching them from their contexts of origin and asserting adaptation and evolution as necessary constants within our lives. In Untitled (Cousins), he depicts members of his extended family using colors that, when viewed through a camera’s accessibility filter, produce a dynamic inversion. Most poignantly, the white skin visible to the naked eye transforms into rich black through a technological process that both obscures and protects Blackness from consumption. 

Jasmine Nikole similarly interrogates her own origin story as a young Black girl often denied a sense of belonging within social and institutional spaces. Here, she depicts the journey of a group of friends, from youth to adulthood, and dares to envision inclusive space for unapologetic Blackness and sisterhood to thrive. An ode to her ancestral roots and love letter to all those struggling to find their place, her whimsical paintings celebrate four African women as they collectively navigate their homeland, guided by the element of water that weaves throughout as giver of life and community. Of her compulsion to paint through life’s challenges Nikole states, “Although my experience is unique to me, I know that people all over the world can relate to my struggles, joys, and pain and my hope is that you see yourself in my art, and that you see your strength through my art.” Here, one woman’s pain transforms into a point of origin for collective healing.

Jason Ting uses creative coding and other digital tools to produce animated visuals that are inspired by forces of nature such as, “the aesthetics of waves and fluid motion, gravitational and magnetic forces, sound vibrations yielding visual patterns, and the way light and color mix during sunsets.” Experimenting with light, color, and form, Ting energetically configures and reconfigures the foundational building blocks of art to produce dynamic works that are at once abstract and evocative of bodies and their auras. While Seed suggests the genesis of organic life, Worlds Within considers the, “formation of our celestial souls.” In both instances, Ting is more concerned with capturing the magnificence and wonder of these natural processes than he is wed to merely rendering their scientific aspects. His works–which are often made with TouchDesigner and minted as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, that can be traded and exchanged for various currencies–add an interesting dimension to this exhibition’s explorations of the concept of origins. As a dialogue on the important role abstraction and conceptualism play in visualizing some of life’s most challenging moments and unknowable phenomena, Origins celebrates artists who invite us to slow down, look deeper, and tap into our own powers of observation and intuition.

-  nico w. okoro | Founder & Principal, The Bldg Fund | Curator-at-Large, Orchid Gallery