Sometimes a small space can host huge beginnings.

‘Playthings: the child we all carry inside … do you recall?,’ the latest exhibition at The Point of Contact gallery, features three relatively new artists.

‘Usually our shows feature artists already in our permanent collection, but this show was different. For Ami Suma, this is her first show at any gallery,’ said Tere Paniagua, the gallery’s director.

Suma, along with fellow artists Roy Bautista and Natalia Porter, arranged the show to reveal their views on childhood and growing up.

‘The special thing about this show is the fact that we are working with young artists at a very critical point in their careers,’ Paniagua said. ‘All of the shows up until now featured work by well-established artists, and this was wonderful, but there is something very exciting about working with a young artist.’

Bautista’s pieces in the show center on growth, life and how people learn new things from both. Most of Bautista’s art is created with a pencil or a ballpoint pen on scraps of paper, with a few computer and pastel images. Each acts as a testimonial for Bautista.

‘My individual drawings (are) incomplete fragments, lost stances and stanzas,’ Bautista said. ‘My drawings are a form of letters to my future self.’

Each ‘letter’ gives a different opinion of what has happened to him or a different goal for the future. ‘Things are going to be different this time,’ predicts one of the figures. Each one has a morose look, fearing and moping on what will and has happened.

‘My figures have a kind of dread about them and a panoply of eyes. Alarmed, I aim to understand fear,’ Bautista said.

Bautista has had several group and individual exhibitions since 2002, and is also a published writer who taught at Queens College as an adjunct assistant professor. Through his drawings, it is easy to see the trials and tribulations of growing up and learning to be a person.

Porter brings her Mexican heritage with her to the show. She attended Pratt Institute and received her master’s in industrial design, and in 2006 she received a master’s in fine arts from City University of New York. Since graduating, she has lived in Manhattan and continues to work there.

‘(I wanted to) create art that makes us reflect on our relationships with objects,’ Porter said. ‘On the significance and value we assign to them, particularly those we use everyday.’

Her pieces, created using computer vectors and pencils, mimic mountains of toys, including several actual toys in packaging from her homeland of Mexico. The flowing geometric shapes resemble those of a fantasy toy land on the edge of becoming a trash heap.

‘To me, these geographies can be read as descriptions of fantastic places that are in the border of being seen as landfills,’ Porter said.

Suma was born in Tokyo in 1976 and came to the United States for school. She received a bachelor’s degree in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City in 2000 and currently works in New York. She was an art and fashion writer for Japanese magazines including Elle Japan and the creative translator for L’Oreal, USA.

‘Before this show I was so timid about showing my work to people,’ Suma said. ‘I am no artist. Now that I have experienced this, I am eager to show my work to more people. It’s such a big change for me. I discovered the fun of showing, the reaction of others, and the reward of it all.’

Suma’s art is vastly different from the rest of the show. Her drawings and sculptures center around a conceptual idea for a toy.

The art plays at the spontaneity and ever-changing feelings of a child. Whereas the works of the other two artists center on emotions of the past, Suma is more concerned with satisfying a person’s inner child in the present day.

‘My obsession is to make you giggle, and remember your childhood, feeling disgusted, but liking something,’ Suma said. ‘The toys should stimulate children’s (and adults’) many senses.’

All in all, the show is a very interesting depiction of a childhood from the eyes of adults. Each artist in their own way conveys the needs and wants of a child, provoking nostalgia in those who view their work.

‘These three artists came to Syracuse without ever having seen the layout of the space, and they had to work based on what they encountered the moment the arrived,’ Paniagua said. ‘They had to improvise the installation, how it was to be done for this space. There is a sense of spontaneous creation with this exhibit that is very creative.’