City-Wide Open Studios in New Haven this weekend; "Dispersion" opens at Artspace

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios
Oct. 2-4, 2009
Dispersion: The City-Wide Open Studios Juried Exhibition
Sept. 17-Oct. 31, 2009
Opening Reception and CWOS Festival Kickoff Party: Fri., Oct. 2, 6-8 p.m.

Press release

For the past twelve years, Artspace has supported local Connecticut artists by promoting artistic discourse within the greater community and hosting new events and forums during City-Wide Open Studios (CWOS). Artspace is pleased to announce the opening reception for the City-Wide Open Studios juried exhibition, Dispersion, on Friday, October 2, 2009 from 6-8 pm at Artspace in conjunction with the Open Studios Kickoff Party. As the term "dispersion" refers to the process by which a wavelength of light can refract to produce a prism effect, the exhibition explores how artists disperse objects and messages to form variations on indexical relationships and narrative structures. The exhibition will focus on the diverse methods of twenty-seven artists' approaches to space and material relationships.

The artists featured in Dispersion are: Kwadwo Adae, Amy Arledge, John Bent, Meg Bloom, Frank Bruckmann, Matthew Capezzuto, Dave Coon, Courtney Dauwalder, Leila Daw, Geoffrey Detrani, Frank Gardner, Barbara Hocker, Andrew Hogan, Brian Huff, John Jessen, Robert Kirschbaum, Jaime Kriksciun, Barbara O'Shea, Suzan Shutan, Joseph Smolinski, Robert Thomas, Rita Valley, Kevin Van Aelst, Cara Vickers-Kane, Jonathan Weinberg and Christopher White. You can find out more about each artist—and all other artists participating in City-Wide Open Studios—in the CWOS Directory.

Artspace is also pleased to introduce Dina Deitsch, Assistant Curator of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts, as this year's guest juror. Deitsch has chosen the twenty-seven artists from our CWOS pool of two hundred and forty artist profiles to present in five Artspace galleries.

Ms. Deitsch is currently working on her Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in New York City, and holds an M.A. in art history from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She has coordinated and curated several award-winning exhibitions including Carlson/Strom: New Performance Video; Old, Weird America; many annual exhibitions at the DeCordova, and an upcoming 2010 DeCordova Biennial. Her writing has been featured in Phaidon Press's Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography; Visualizing Rituals: Critical Analysis of Art and Ritual Practice; in various art magazines and journals including Art Papers, C Magazine, Art Fairs International, Threshold, NY Arts, Big Red and Shiny: An Art Journal; and in many exhibition catalogues including Laylah Ali Note Drawings (2008). Dispersion is intended to provide an unbiased, scholarly position on contemporary art, to further engage the local arts community, and to support Connecticut's emerging artists.

In addition to the Dispersion exhibition, Artspace will coordinate the Open Studios Weekend on Sat., Oct. 3rd and Sun., Oct. 4th. During these two days, all participating artists will open their studio doors throughout New Haven and surrounding areas for public viewing. This year, Artspace has updated the CWOS website and artist directory at www.cwos.org, a resource where artists are represented by their own customized web addresses throughout the year. The CWOS website will also function as a hub of information for the Open Studios Weekend where visitors can map their own routes to artists' studios. It is continuously being updated with new images and information from artists.

As Connecticut's leading visual arts festival, and also one of the largest Open Studios programs in the country, CWOS celebrates contemporary art in all its myriad forms and unites hundreds of local artists with the greater New Haven community. Artspace is committed to providing opportunities for artists to network with each other, for curators and collectors to meet artists in person, and for the general public to engage in educational experiences. Artspace is a Connecticut non-profit organization that presents local and national visual art, and provides access, excellence, and education for the benefit of the public and the arts community free of charge. CWOS has drawn thousands of visitors to explore New Haven's neighborhoods while discovering artists, galleries, and the many treasures of our city. Artists and visitors are encouraged to attend the Open Studios Kickoff Party at Artspace on Fri., Oct. 2, from 6-8 p.m. and the Open Studios Weekend from Oct. 3-4.