Hartford

Back On Campus, New Encounters Invoke Old Friends

by Jamil Ragland | Nov 21, 2023 11:39 am

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Posted to: Visual Art

We Find Ourselves in This Place
Austin Arts Center
Trinity College
Hartford
Nov. 20, 2023

The current exhibit at the Austin Arts Center, We Find Ourselves in This Place, features artwork by Traé Brooks, Sophia DeJesus-Sabella and Kevin Hernández Rosa, who are all based in Hartford. By the time I arrived, I was awash in nostalgia, so I went with it. I didn’t try to determine what the art made me think, or even what it made me feel. Instead as I walked around the sunlit room, I was transported back in time by the artwork to what I remembered.

Something about being back at Trinity College for the first time since the pandemic took me out of my usual analytical headspace. I graduated from Trinity ten years ago, and worked there full time until 2016. i then worked there on special projects until the pandemic, so I have a lot of history there. All those memories came crashing back as I strolled down the Long Walk.

It felt good to be back.

I love table tennis. I started playing in high school, and by the time I got to Virginia Commonwealth University as a freshman, I was obsessed. My two closest friendships down there formed around a ping pong table. My first friend/opponent was a guy named Jose who was my next door neighbor in our dorm. After he left, I started playing with another student named Hylan. I played table tennis more than I went to class, which is a big part of the reason I ended up back home after my freshman year.

But I love video games even more than I love table tennis, and I’ve transferred that love to my son. Of course, he’s a hundred times better than me at games, and is always looking for a challenge. That brought him to a game called Eldin Ring, part of a series of games well known for their difficulty. My son didn’t just want the game though, he wanted the Collector’s Edition which came with a bunch of goodies, including a statue of a character in the game that wears a helmet that is strikingly similar to Brooks’ work. I remember that request because there were some tough years when my son was younger and I was struggling my way through Trinity, so I was happy that I could finally splurge on something he wanted.

I’ll say it right now: Terminator 2 is the best sequel of all time. It took what was a great sci-fi horror film and turned it into a meditation on fate and choice, the value of life and what love means. And oh yeah, there were tons of amazing fight scenes and explosions. I watched that movie with my father and brothers almost every weekend when I lived near Dutch Point in the ​’90s. We eventually destroyed the VHS tape with our repeated viewings. This piece reminds me of the moment when Miles Dyson gets a look at the arm from the first Terminator, and it certainly conveys the same sense of power. 

After my family moved from Hartford, I lived in Bloomfield until I graduated. I bounced around a lot, but the place that always felt like home was my grandfather’s apartment in Deer Meadow. My brothers and I played football with our friends almost nonstop, but on occasion we decided that it would be fun to play basketball. With no hoop to play on, we did what children have done for decades before us: we cut out the bottom of a milk crate and stuck it to the wall, in this case the side of the dumpster enclosure. I was the oldest and second tallest, so that made me one of the best players in the neighborhood. I rode that high all the way to the high school’s freshman basketball team, where I promptly met real basketball players and didn’t make the team.

I left the exhibit with a different feeling than I normally do. Instead of pondering intellectual puzzles or researching to contextualize, I was deep in thought about all my old friends. I went to visit my old professors and coworkers around campus. I never expected that I would see the past when I went to go see some art.

NEXT
The Austin Arts Center presents a discussion with music producer Frank Filipetti on Nov. 28.

Jamil goes to check out Gallery 66 in New Britain.