African, Irish Influence in 'Seven'

With no titles to label them, the artwork featured in “Seven” serves as an invitation to journey into the lives of the unidentified people within them. The exhibit—presented by Harvard Real Estate Services in Holyoke Center Arcade through March 4—features pieces by Keina Davis Elswick from the past seven years.

Elswick uses portraiture to add an element of the poetic to the everyday. The color blue, a color that Elswick likes for its ability to communicate melancholy, is used throughout her work. The emotion conveyed through the artwork transforms her paintings and their subjects—a woman standing on a winding road, a mother and a daughter, a man with his head in his hand—into melancholic songs. The lyricism emanates from the careful attention given to the eyes; the observer can see into the souls of the characters and enter into their journey.

Portraiture has been the focus of Elswick’s work throughout her career. “I’ve always loved portraiture,” she says. “I wanted to focus on faces, because I wanted to focus on the eyes and capture a pivotal moment in a person’s journey in life.”

Elswick’s attention to eyes serves as one of the strongest elements of the exhibit. Along with the absence of titles, the eyes encourage spectators to bring their own experiences to the painting while trying to discover what the character is experiencing and feeling at that moment. The ability to bring individual experiences to the work and create a unique vision of the piece allows the viewer to take on an authorial role in the construction of the characters represented.

“I want people to be able to bring their own experience to a piece without me guiding them,” Elswick says. “I like the initial response from what somebody’s thinking. It can be something completely different from what I was trying to do.”

In addition to the portraits, Elswick has included her recent multimedia pieces, which focus on the contemporary ties between African and Irish culture. One piece includes a picture from a newspaper article about the first school comprised of only African immigrants in Ireland cut into the shape of a shamrock and framed by a school shaped house. Another piece uses both fabric and paint to depict an African woman wearing a heart shaped necklace of the Irish flag. These works show how Ireland has become home to many people of African descent in recent years.

While the multimedia pieces that include the use of paint, fabric, photography, and wood invite the spectator to share in the story it portrays, the portraits are the strong point of the exhibit. In the acrylic portraits the characters appear alive and present without any separation of distance or time.

The placard accompanying the exhibit says that Elswick wants the work to inspire us to make connections between our ancestors and ourselves, between one culture and another, between the community and the individual.” The engaging portraits encourage the spectator to interpret an unknown world while coloring it with individual experience, creating both a private and communal connection to the artwork.

—Staff writer Melanie E. Long can be reached at long2@fas.harvard.edu.