Menemsha artist Colin Ruel’s immersive exhibition “The Light Is Returning” evokes sorrow for those who have struggled to remain on the Vineyard after many generations, or who have been forced to leave the home they love. The show, in the Waggaman Community Gallery at the M.V. Museum through August 16, navigates the tension between continuity and fracture. “We’re not just losing generational Islanders,” Ruel says, “we’re losing generational connection and culture.”
Ruel steers clear of didactic messaging. Instead, he fills the room with his art, his grandfather’s boat models and other carved items, family photographs, audio recordings, old home movies, and recent video footage that subtly compare Ruel’s life and work in Menemsha beside that of his grandfather. Capt. James Douglas Morgan was a family man, a fisherman until he was 81, and a folk artist who continued carving, drawing, and painting long after retiring.
Ruel writes in his introductory label, “As a child, I slept in the same bedroom he had grown up in, with a window facing, as it did for him, the turning beam of the Gay Head Lighthouse — a navigational beacon in the darkness. I’d watch the light disappear and return: a visible circle, a promise of recurrence.”
But Ruel poignantly continues, “This collection of work laments that the circle has been broken. It speaks to the attempt to navigate by an old light in an ocean that has changed. Once, rural life here offered a path: a cycle of birth, childhood, labor, home, parenthood, death … and birth again. Today, that continuity is destabilized. Housing is unattainable for working families. Rural identity is aestheticized and sold, while the people who formed it are displaced. What once required endurance and community now requires capital.”
Ruel elaborates when sharing about the show’s origins: “It comes from my rising frustration with what’s happening for so long, as far as lack of affordable housing and wealth inequity and the pushing out of old generational Islanders, and losing their stories and culture. I want to show those who just moved here or are summer residents what this place really was. In my grandfather’s time, you could buy a house; the year-round community was so thriving and intertwined and had these ties that went back forever.”
Ruel conveys his message without maps, statistics, or diagrams. Instead, he draws us close to his life and his family’s through several generations: “Rather than telling a vast, sweeping story, I can tell this really personal one, and hope it helps people feel it.” He intersperses paintings from his life with items from past generations that, through inference, speak to change over time. For example, displayed on the wall is his grandfather’s old carved wooden model of his beloved fishing boat, Mary & Verna, its actual wheel, which is all that remains of the vessel, and Ruel’s contemporary painting of the same boat motoring off into the sunset.
Sound is essential to the exhibition, both in the overall soundtrack heard in the gallery and the conversations you can hear on headphones at the listening stations. In one recording, you hear Ruel’s grandfather speak about how, in his day, you could work for a week, and that would be a down payment for a house. Ruel says, “He talks about how during the Depression, he didn’t know he was poor because everyone was a fisherman and took care of each other. You also hear my mom talking about how hard it is now for young people to have a house. And my youngest son talks about his worry that we were going to have to move off the Island.”
Speaking about the loss of generational culture, Ruel gives an example of how, in the past, someone driving by in Menemsha would wave at him. “I would know them because I grew up with them, and they would know my mom. Their grandfather was a fisherman with my grandfather and great-grandfather. All that is a web of connections.”
Today, Ruel runs his gallery in the same building in Menemsha that was once his great-grandfather’s garage, and later became the shop where his grandmother sold items she made, including Raggedy Andys and quilts, as well as his grandfather’s ship models. But while there is generational continuity here, Ruel says that not having stable housing is terrifying: “And that pressure, the constant anxiety it produces, is so overwhelmingly hard.” He conveys these feelings in a painted image of seagulls flying, slowly dissolving into the distance. “They represent the shame around wanting to provide for my family, but I couldn’t work hard enough to afford anything. Like seagulls, we’ve been made into beggars. We work hard and want to afford a house, but can’t. When we were younger, you could find a garden shed to live in in the summer. Then in the winter, you could live somewhere. But now winter rentals are astronomical. And if you find one, I don’t know where you’re going to go in the summer.”
The second-to-last painting is a powerful image of Ruel’s family on their boat looking back at the Island on fire. He says, “It’s the death of this place we love.” Yet the last work, a diptych, is one of hope. Two houses perched on a piece of land overlooking the ocean have wisps of smoke arching between their chimneys. “I made this for my kids so that when they get older and go off on their own, the picture will only be complete when they are together. The smoke is an ethereal bond, a prayer that I hope keeps them together. It’s about hope for the future.”
Of his show, Ruel says, “I want people to see that there is a culture here beyond the super-wealthy. There are still some of us who are trying to hold on. And if they do have houses here, to see the pain and struggle many people go through. They can love visiting this place in the summer. Still, it pales compared to the connection I’m talking about — the fear of losing the continuation of year-rounders’ stories, generational connection, and community.”
“Colin Ruel: The Light Is Returning” is on view through August 16. For more information, visit mvmuseum.org.