Two shows open Saturday, May 10, at Artspace in New Haven

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Forced Collaboration
David Politzer: Hyper Democratic Landscapes
May 10—June 28, 2014.
Opening: Sat., May 10, 5—8 p.m.

Artspace press release

Two shows open at Artspace Sat. night, May 10: the group show Forced Collaboration and David Politzer's Hyper Democratic Landscapes. The opening reception will occur from 5—8 p.m.

Forced Collaboration pairs 12 artists (6 collaborations) with wildly different practices. The artists are strangers to each other; selected by the curator (Jacob Rhodes) to exchange a finished work and to re-create that work by forcing themselves on it in any way they please. No preconceptions stain their attempts; no obligations of friendship or acquaintance constrain what they can or cannot do.

"Forced Collaboration"

In the highly competitive contemporary art world, both success and failure are continually on display and are often signaled by proximity to known successes or failures. A single group show with a known success can make a career. An unfortunate collaboration can break it.

Our novel form of interaction raises questions about the nature of collaboration and competition, success and failure. Is competition inherent in collaboration? Will the artists move toward unity and resolution, merging opposed disciplines, practices, and aesthetic sensibilities, or will they subjugate and corrupt the other artist’s work? And which would be best for each artist? Should they trust the other artist to treat their work in a collaborative way or should they forcibly impose their vision of how the other artist’s work ought to be?

Featured artists are Chris Bors, Daniel Bozhkov, Ilana Harris-Babou, Kerry Cox, Oliver Herring, David Humphrey, Bridget Mullen, Mariah Robertson, Mandolyn Wilson Rosen, Jen Schwarting, Mark Starling, J.R. Uretsky.

Hyper Democratic Landscapes is a 3-channel video installation of constantly changing, surreal landscape imagery. Politzer culled the images from Flickr using targeted searches for specific tags plus the word "landscape." For the Artspace Project Room installation, each channel is divided thematically based on those tags. The left channel is comprised of searches for "harsh," "rugged" or "barren," the middle channel "tallest," "biggest" and "highest," and the right channel "sublime," "heavenly" and "inspiring."

Politzer (ab)uses the HDR (High Dynamic Range) function in Photoshop to create composite images from several of the appropriated Flickr images, which he selects at random. Typically the HDR function is used to combine several images of the same scene taken from the same vantage point to make an enhanced, single photograph with an extremely wide tonal range. Rather, he creates a hybrid of 3-5 images of different scenes. The results are psychedelic compositions of saturated color that have multiple horizon lines and light sources. The status of each image changes from an authentic index to a fabricated digital artifact.

David Politzer: "Hyper Democratic Landscapes Video Still 7"

By misusing software, Politzer pushes the images beyond their intentions for realism, nostalgia, memory. These over-worked, conglomerate mashups resist the preciousness of an individual image, but create a new sense of romance for a fantastical place. The project also negotiates the impossibility of there being a simple one to one relationship between an image (sign) and a word (signifier). This realization suggests that imperfect fitting, choice and multiplicity are at the heart of what makes possible the notion of democracy.

For their debut at Artspace, Politzer has decided to install the videos above eye-level to suggest their position as stained glass windows inside of a cathedral. Their position up high in a darkened room encourages the viewer to enter more slowly, wait for his/her eyes to adjust to the light, and be open to the calm. The atypical shape of the rounded screens adds to their feeling as historic architectural elements or objects—emulating the frames of turn of the century illustrations, photographs and stereograms.

City-Wide Open Studios begins this Friday in New Haven!

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2013
Opening Reception: Fri., Oct. 4, 5—9 p.m.
Erector Square Weekend: Sat. and Sun., Oct. 12–13, Noon—5 p.m.
Passport Weekend: Sat. and Sun., Oct. 19–20, Noon—5 p.m.
Alternative Space Weekend: Sat. and Sun., Oct. 26–27, Noon—5 p.m.

Press release from Artspace/CWOS

For art aficianados in the greater New Haven area, October is the highlight of the year. That's when Artspace sponsors City-Wide Open Studios (CWOS), a sprawling month-long festival that affords local artists the opportunity to not only exhibit their works in their studios or the alternative space but also to talk with the public about their art—what it means to them and how they go about creating it.

The festival kicks off this Friday with the opening of the Main Exhibition at Artspace in the Ninth Square. The opening coincides with the annual Ninth Square L.A.M.P. Festival (Light Artists Making Places), New England's premier light event.

• Opening Reception: Oct. 4, 5—9 p.m.

Celebrate the festival kickoff at Artspace (50 Orange Street) with all the artists! The central hub exhibition features one work by each of the CWOS participating artists. Pick up the Official Map & Guide. Bar will be open until 8 p.m.

• Erector Square Weekend: Oct. 12–13, Noon—5 p.m.

Erector Square (315 Peck Street) acts as a hub of artistic activity in Fair Haven. A high concentration of artist studios—housed in a former Erector Set factory—make it an especially exciting place to be during Open Studios. Explore the personal studios of hundreds of local artists on your own or through a guided tour. Artspace volunteers will be on hand with maps, schedules of demonstrations and directions for visitors. A curator-led preview tour and cocktail party will be held on Oct. 11. Further information about purchasing tickets will be available in September.

• Passport Weekend: Oct. 19–20, Noon—5 p.m.

Visit artists in their private studios throughout New Haven, West Haven, North Haven, and Hamden. Take this opportunity to see the spaces in which artists work all across the Greater New Haven area. Maps, signage, and guided tours will be provided. Special bike tours, led by Matt Feiner of the Devil's Gear Bike Shop, will be held on Saturday or Sunday. Check back for 2013 details soon. A series of curator-led preview tours and a reception at Artspace will be held on Oct. 17. Further information about purchasing tickets will be available in September.

• Alternative Space Weekend: Oct. 26–27, Noon—5 p.m.

The Alternative Space weekend sets New Haven’s CWOS apart from other open studio weekends by offering artists from across Connecticut, and those who are interested in creating site-specific works, a unique backdrop to showcase their talents. Each year the Alternative Space provides artists with the chance to show work in vacant historic properties throughout the city, connecting artists and visitors with different areas of New Haven. This year’s exhibition will take place in the Goffe Street Armory (290 Goffe Street, New Haven), a colonial armory full of rich New Haven history. At an area of 155,000 square feet, the Goffe Street Armory presents a unique backdrop for visual artists to showcase their ideas and for visitors to enjoy the art. Stop by between noon and 5 p.m.

Shows, including "Pop and Op," opening this Friday at Artspace in New Haven

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Artspace Summer Apprenticeship Program: Pop and Op
Dana Filibert: Cloud Form
Meghan Grubb: Aurora
Adam Brent: Thread
Crown Street Window Project: Luke Hanscom
Jul. 26—Sept. 7, 2013.
Opening: Fri., Jul. 26, 5—8 p.m.

Artspace Press release

Several new shows open this Friday at Artspace in New Haven, including Pop and Op, featuring work from the 13th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program. The opening reception will occur from 5—8 p.m.

Pop and Op

Each year Artspace brings New Haven high school students into its galleries for three weeks to work as apprentices with a Master Artist. The 13th annual Summer Apprenticeship Program, with Master Artist Erika Van Natta, will offer Apprentices collaborative opportunities to work in video, photography, and performance. The show’s theme, Pop and Op, reinterprets traditional portraiture by incorporating unconventional materials, such as popsicles, mirrors, and Op art- inspired patterns. By exploring the various roles behind and in front of the camera, Apprentices will help Van Natta to create a series of videos and portraits, which focus on identity construction, visual phenomenon, and the temporality of youth, summer and melting ice cream. An experimental sound piece, entitled "Pop Music," will be created entirely out of hand made “balloon instruments” and performed live at the opening.

Cloud Form

Intrigued by the phenomenon where instilling a corporeal preciousness in objects prevails as an unconscious human need to shape ones identity, Dana Filibert presents her Cloud Form series. These formations utilize iconic animal imagery that maintains a hold on popular culture commodities as fetishized consumer objects and found objects related to the presentation of an idealized image.

Sculptor and installation artist Dana Filibert received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an MA and MFA. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Her work invokes humor, creating sculpture that plays with contradictions of attraction and repulsion. Pieces consist primarily of painted sculpture formed using metal, carved foam, and found objects.

Aurora

The Aurora project specifically responds to aspects of the perceptual experience of the Aurora Borealis, as observed in rural northern Norway on the last day of the six-week long polar night in January 2013, and is part of research into the human experience of light in environments that witness extreme daylight conditions. Developing from practices in art, architecture and design, and research into perceptual psychology, optics, and the environment, Meghan Grubb's (Web) work explores questions about how a powerful and mysterious non-physical response may be stirred by the experience of physical space, and how this kind of experience may be translated to, described in, or provoked by a work of art.

Thread

Best described as a joint venture; Thread consists of three major works of the same size and shape. Along with accompanying sculptures Adam Brent will exhibit three versions of a braided rug, each utilizing a different artistic method, continuing his interest in domestic situations and iconography. The work will employ traditional hand braiding and sewing, 3D printing for plastic components, and the hand carving. At roughly 52 inches in diameter, each rug follows the same pattern—designed by the artist in CAD software. Brent’s collaboration with his father sits at the heart of this exhibition; his choice to both carve and print versions of the rug is as much about skill as it is about exhibiting the labor associated with maintaining the bonds that tie families together.

n his solo practice, Adam Brent creates sculptural installations that combine architectural and organic elements to explore issues of nature, reflection, interiors, and structure. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1995 and his MFA in sculpture from Parsons The New School For Design in 2001. His work has been exhibited at such notable museums, institutions, and galleries as The Islip Art Museum, The Bronx Museum for Contemporary Art, The Aldrich Museum For Contemporary Art, The New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, and the New York Public Library. His individual and collective work has received critical attention from the Village Voice, The NY Press, Art Critical, Architect Magazine, and the New York Times.

Crown Street Window Project: Luke Hanscom

The Crown Street Window Project invites artists to make street-facing installations along the Crown Street side of Artspace's gallery. Artists create unique works of art in dialogue with the street and the community, utilizing the visibility offered by this location. This summer, the window features the work of local artist Luke Hanscom.

Luke Hanscom grew up in Houston, TX until he moved to Santa Barbara, CA to attend the Brooks Institute of Photography in 2002. Hanscom left California for New York City in 2005, where he worked with leading industry photographers such as Richard Pierce, Peggy Sirota, and Annie Leibovitz. While currently living and working in the Westville Village of New Haven, Hanscom's fine art mixes multiple mediums while placing an emphasis on his strong photographic background and the use of both digital and analogue techniques.

Two shows open at Artspace in New Haven Saturday night

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
The Figure Eight
Figurative Metonymy
Feb. 9—Mar. 16, 2013.
Opening: Sat., Feb. 9, 6—8 p.m.

Artspace Press release

Two shows open at Artspace this Saturday night, Feb. 9: The Figure Eight and Figurative Metonymy. The opening reception will occur from 6—8 p.m.

The Figure Eight, organized by artist and Artspace Visual Arts Committee member Kwadwo Adae, will run at Artspace from Feb. 9—March 16, 2013. In this exhibition, depictions of figuration encompass the continuum from the traditional to the abstract, the scientific to the animalistic, and address the historical as well as societal aspects of artistic relationships with the viewer. Each artist employs innovative approaches to the traditional concept of the figure in aspects of form, social commentary, and the willful transformation of materials. The exhibition will be supplemented with community programming to engage the general public in these questions of figuration. Weekly figure drawing classes with live models, free and open to the public in the gallery at Artspace, will span the duration of this exhibition.

About the Artists:

Sophia Wallace is an award-winning and critically acclaimed photographer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In Wallace's body of work titled On Beauty she skillfully focuses attention on societal perceptions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality by creating photographs of male models that objectify them in ways similar to the societally accepted practice of the objectification of women across artistic media.

Jaclyn Conley is a figurative painter who lives and works in New Haven, CT. Conley's work is driven by fragments of jpeg images cultivated from the internet and explores the line between the human figure and animal figure, asking which aspects of human behavior are animalistic and what aspects of animalism are human in nature.

Gerri Davis (Web) is a painter living and working in Manhattan, NY. In her series Iteration she renders awe-inspiring, spatially perverse, monumentally sized figurative pieces in oil paint. These works are comprised of the exploration of staccato moments of time and space, echoing masterpieces of classical artistic expressions of portraiture.

Gaviero Umami is the moniker for the collaborative team of sculptors, Eoin Burke and Jim Dessicino. They live in New Haven, CT and work in Brooklyn, NY. They render innovative forms by utilizing aspects of the figure as a vehicle for the exploration of ideas, leading to conceptual creations of figurative entities that are simultaneously abjectly familiar and impossibly alien.

Gregory Santos, an artist who works predominantly in printmaking, lives and works in Manhattan, NY. In Santos' body of work entitled Movements, he explores and portrays intimate interpersonal relationships by reducing figurative form to the rudimentary building blocks of color, shape, size, and space. These simplified forms capture complex aspects of personality, mood, and the vibrancy of human gesture.

Ryan and Trevor Oakes (Web) are multidisciplinary, collaborative, twin artists living and working in Manhattan. In their series Vision they explore fundamental aspects of visual perception by utilizing a special concave easel (specifically designed for the cranial measurements of these identical twins) with concave paper surfaces that are analogous to the spherical shape of the human eye. These masterful concave drawings take into account the technical aspects of the perception of the viewer to create surprisingly accurate freehand ink drawings of interior and exterior spaces.

About the Organizer:

Kwadwo Adae is an award-winning abstract painter, teacher, and member of the Visual Arts Committee, Artspace’s peer review artist board. Adae is the founder of Adae Fine Art Academy, a small art school and studio dedicated to providing individualized instruction in drawing and painting in the community through afterschool art programs, assisted living centers, and rest homes for the mentally ill. He holds a Masters in Art from New York University.

•••

Figurative Metonymy is the first to be organized at Artspace by the University of Connecticut's Advanced Photography Class, led by professor Cara Vickers-Kane (Web). Metonymy, a linguistic device used in rhetoric in which one thing is named or referred to by the name of another, forms the thesis of this show. The exhibition features five artists whose images coalesce to form a pictorial response to the work in the surrounding space. Learn more about the exhibition on the Figurative Metonymy blog. Opening on February 9, 2013.

Participating artists are Joan Fitzsimmons (Web), Carolyn Monastra (Web), Christopher Beauchamp (Web), Keith Johnson (Web) and David Coon (Web).

CWOS Alternative Space weekend

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2012
Through Oct. 21, 2012.
Weekend 3 Report: Sunday

Finally getting to wrap up my coverage of this year's "Crystal Anniversary" City-Wide Open Studios. (I missed the middle weekend, focusing on artists in Erector Square, because I was laid up with a cold.)

It was a trip to wander through the former New Haven Register building, getting a little lost in the maze of hallways and in the presence of the mammoth—and now silent—presses. There were too many artists for me to comment on more than a few who grabbed my attention. My silence on so many of them should not be construed as critical judgment.

•••

It was New Canaan artist Camille Eskell's first time participating in City-Wide Open Studios. Her sculptures of the female torso were attention-grabbers and I stopped to chat with her about her work. She said her work "is all about emotional states of being. It's been the core of my work for 20-something years."

"Tattooed Lady: Coming Up Roses" was especially striking, seeing as how the softly curved nude female form—emblazoned with a floral tattoo drape—was rent from collarbone to lower abdomen with a gaping wound studded with yellowing teeth.

Camille Eskell: "Tattooed Lady: Coming Up Roses"

It is powerful sculptural imagery, the beauty of the female form and the decorative roses—Eskell says she uses "a lot of florals and botanicals to represent irrepressible life"—juxtaposed with the torn opening lined with teeth. The sculpture was cast in aqua resin and fiberglas from her original wax sculpture. The "sub-subtext" of the work, according to Eskell, was her sister's struggle at the time with terminal cancer. Eskell said that her sister's battle with cancer wasn't consciously in her mind as she made the work. It was only afterward that she saw intimations of her sister's pain in the mutilated body.

Regarding the teeth, which Eskell told me symbolized a "gnawing anxiety," Eskell said they were leftover dentures given to her some ten years prior by a dentist she knew. Eskell says she hoards lots of outré materials: "You know when you're going to have to use something and just wait until the moment is right." She mixes media but usually tries to incorporate drawing, which she describes as her greatest strength.

•••

Graham D. Honaker II described his mixed media paintings as "Pop Art with a sentimental flourish." By the word "sentimental," Honaker means to convey affection rather than irony toward the imagery he incorporates into his works.

Honaker suspends collage, latex paint, artist-grade paint and found objects between layers of polymer emulsion epoxy. Each layer of epoxy, he told me, is equivalent to approximately 50 layers of varnish. Honaker uses old magazine imagery, consumer product ephemera and labels and his own hand-cut stencils of iconic faces past and present: 1960's model Twiggy, Black radical George Jackson, Che Guevara, Charles Manson, Al Sharpton and James Brown's mug shot, to name a few.

"My pieces were very textural. People wanted to touch them and I wanted to find a way to make the surface level so the textural surface would be denied to the viewer," Honaker told me. Was he trying to protect the surface?

"It was a little bit of both. I wanted it to be that forbidden fruit kind of thing. Your mind tells you that you can feel this object but when you go to touch it, it's smooth," Honaker explained.

Honaker says a process of evolution led him to thicker and thicker pieces as he got interested in exploring the perception of depth and the way he could play with the light and shadows he was creating in the layers. Honaker has been meshing the collage, abstract mark-making and stencil work for about four years but says it has just been during the past two years that he has added the use of epoxy as a key element in his compositions.

Graham D. Honaker II

"There's so many possibilities, so many objects I can collect and little pieces of ephemera that can be put into a painting," Honaker said. "It's blurring the edge of 3-D to 2-D and I'm really fascinated by that." Honaker's works evoke box assemblages while remaining paintings.

Honaker continues his experimentation. He told me has dabbled in installing lighting sources in his paintings. In one of the works he had on display at the Register building, Honaker implanted LED lights in the painting, which can be turned on by being plugged into a wall outlet. And there are "interactive elements" in some of the works, too. To demonstrate, Honaker took "Redwood Reliever" off the wall and tilted it so that the soy sauce in a little packet buried in the yellowed epoxy swirled around.

•••

Artist Rita Valley didn't take it personally when she was told that her location in the Register alternative space was in a cage of sorts. It was a perfect fit with her anarchic sense of humor. Valley's installation, "(Show Us the Way) Out of Our Darkness," played off the wire fencing.

The sculptural work employed about ¼-mile of electric fencing (not plugged in for this show although Valley said she might do that in the future), rope lighting, 200 feet of clothesline covered in clear tape, fluorescent light tubes, a plastic security mirror and the lights she uses in her studio to photograph art. And piled around the base of the work was snow drifts of salt (chosen over sugar because salt "has so many historic references").

Rita Valley: "(Show Us the Way) Out of Our Darkness"

Valley said "It became like a drawing." In particular, she noted, that she had artist Cy Twombly's line work in mind when stringing the electric fence wire around the steel armature built by her husband, sculptor Bob Keating.

CWOS, Weekend 1, Sunday, two visits

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2012
Through Oct. 21, 2012.
Weekend 1 Report: Sunday

Allan Greenier: "Bicycle"

Day job work commitments last Sunday limited the amount of visits I was able to make. I stop in to one of the ArLow residences in Westville, visiting first with Allan Greenier. Greenier has a room in which to show examples of both his block prints—similar to woodcuts but using a far less expensive material manufactured for countertops—and manipulated photographs.

Greenier's prints have a strong graphic quality and also something of a subversive imagination. In the 1970's and 1980's, Greenier was active in the underground mini commix scene. (Examples of his work can be found in the anthology Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980's.)

I am struck by Greenier's photographs. Manipulated in Adobe Photoshop, the images have a pulsating, psychedelic intensity.

•••

Ann Oberkirch, who is 68, has only been painting for two years. It is her first CWOS and she isn't wholly comfortable with the experience of having some visitors walk into the room where she is showing her paintings (oil painting and watercolors, often augmented with pieces of glittery fabric or other objects), glance around, and walk out.

Oberkirch's work is characterized by the naïve approach to perspective common among folk artists. She tells me, "I would be an outsider artist except I'm a doctor, so I'm too much of an insider." (Oberkirch is a psychiatrist.)

Ann Oberkirch: Untitled"

Oberkirch says she works spontaneously. One work started with a painting of a lion—referring to a photograph—and orangutans. She then added naked humans and clothed humans. The composition was filled up with images of birds, flowers and leaves. But it's not really Edenic. Oberkirch draped a pair of small chains over the painted image of the lion, suggesting the powerful creature is in a zoo, a prison.

"The people were the villains but you can't really tell. They don't look like villains," she says.

"The whole thing is a giggle. I do such morose work all day," says Oberkirch. "To start painting at age 66 without ever having doodled—where does this come from?."

CWOS 2012, Weekend 1, Saturday

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2012
Through Oct. 21, 2012.
Weekend 1 Report: Saturday

My first stop on Saturday is at the home studio in Hamden of Kevin and Kim Van Aelst. Kim (née Mikenis) and Kevin met while participating in a CWOS bike tour several years ago; they are expecting their first child in November.

Kim Van Aelst paints, collages, makes puppets and creates her own short videos. One recent large collage, "Construction Will Be Completed in 9 Months," was inspired both by her pregnancy and the myriad hassles of having the studio built in their backyard.

"I made this while they were doing the foundation and the drilling," Kim tells me. She locked herself in the bedroom with the air conditioning on during one heat wave, trying to avoid the smell of epoxy. Kim found suitable images on the Internet—about 17 different images of an excavator, 10 different pictures of a hurricane—that she cut up into different pieces and rearranged to create her composition. "And a few images of 'the sky is clearing' and the end will be in sight—the baby will be here, the studio will be done" and their backyard will be on the mend.

Kim Van Aelst with "Construction Will Be Completed in 9 Months":

Kevin, a photographer, specializes in images that are elaborate visual puns. Some of his recent work is inspired by impending fatherhood. In one image, an egg is substituted for the bulb of a light bulb. The egg, which lies on its side, has a hairline crack. Kevin rigged up the egg so small lights inside it cause it appear that the egg itself is splitting open and emitting its own light. Another image deals with the disjunction he feels between his upcoming role as a father and the lingering self-image as not yet an "adult"—a suit jacket, white shirt and tie folded into the shape of a paper airplane.

Kevin Van Aelst showing a book with an image of his wife Kim with the part in her in the shape of a heartbeat:

•••

At the Eli Whitney Barn, I stop in to see sculptor Susan Clinard. A dozen or so of Clinard's small sculptures of refugees in boats are arranged for sale on a table in her studio:

In the main section of the barn, artist Alexis Brown is showing her exceptional drawings, paintings and prints of animals. Brown is burnishing her lithographic chops. But because lithograph stones are prohibitively expensive, Brown is using a pronto plate, an inexpensive plastic plate that can approximate the feel of lithography.

On the left, an Alexis Brown pronto plate lithograph of a tiger and, on the right, a sketchbook drawing of the same image in watercolor, pencil and gesso:

•••

This is Leslie Carmin's first time participating in Open Studios. Carmin opened the small studio built behind her home in the east Rock section of New Haven. an illustrator with a vivid and outré imagination, Carmin often spins her pencil-drawn images from visual metaphors.

Below, Carmin's drawing "Cancer." She drew the image of her mother when her mother was dying of cancer, referring both to the astrological sign and the way her mother's body was rebelling against itself, becoming something foreign and ultimately fatal:

•••

At 39 Church Street, Jerry Saladyga is showing his series of paintings and drawings contemplating the 1994 Rwandan genocide, "100 Days in Eden." (Concurrently, a show of Saladyga's From early April to mid-July of 1994, Hutu militias organized by the government and spurred on by inflammatory propaganda from the mass media, primarily radio, killed approximately 800,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic minority. As Saladyga tells me, "Outside of a few people, nobody did anything about it or tried to stop it."

Pointing to the first painting in the series, Saladyga tells me how he found his subject. He had painted the background—red, blue and yellow—and thought it looked like faces.

"I hated it. I don't like the backgrounds to look like anything," he says. He had recently seen the documentary Ghosts of Rwanda. With that in mind, he approached the painting again.

"One thing led to another. A couple of lines, let my try this, let me try that, and it came together. I ended up doing the series," Saladyga recalls.

The imagery is both beautiful and macabre—bright, alluring colors, palm trees, skies full of stars but also soldiers in fatigues with machetes (most of the killings were carried out at close range with machetes) and children with their hands and feet cut off or their torsos hacked in half. Saladyga tells me that for some of the paintings he tried "to think like a little kid thinks." As an example, he refers me to a painting of a young boy without hands unable to pick up the soccer ball—soccer being the preeminent sport of Africa—on the ground in front of him. In another painting, a girl without hands is unable to pick up her doll.

Repeated motifs tie the series together—imagery of volcanoes (there are several volcanoes in Rwanda; additionally, the volcano imagery may symbolize the potentially explosive ethnic antagonisms), embryos that symbolize a sense of rebirth.

Saladyga says he was reaching for "a mystical sense of redemption." He tells me, "It's a complicated history that I'm trying to make sense of. I'm using the whole thing as a metaphor for trying to understand genocide."

Painting from Gerald Saladyga's series "100 Days in Eden":

•••

Stephen Grossman is showing a number of drawings and paintings in his 39 Church Street studio from his current "Luftmensch" series. "Luftmench" is a Yiddish/German word meaning literally "air man." But its more colloquial Yiddish meaning, Grossman tells me, is "a young man who is a dreamer, not a very practical guy." As it has evolved, he says, it has come to mean a man "who makes his living selling something intangible." Grossman conceptualized the "luftmensch" in terms of a man selling ideas—for example, the derivatives that were at the center of the financial crisis—and whose identity gets bound up with that act of salesmanship.

Grossman found his central image by Googling the phrase "1950's businessman in suit." He says he tweaked his search until he found exactly the iconic image he was looking for.

"It resonated with the era I grew up. It was the father figure in society at that time," Grossman says of the image of the man in the gray flannel suit clutching his attaché case.

In some of the paintings, the figure of the "luftmensch" almost disappears into a fog of abstract geometric shapes inspired partly by the pixilation of digital images. But the break-up into abstraction, Grossman notes, also has symbolic weight.

"It's possible he's lost, consumed or buried in his own thoughts. The integrity of the self is dissipating. It may be a Zen thing of being at one with the world. Or it may be the opposite," Grossman says, that the "luftmensch" doesn't know his place in the world in the metaphysical sense.

One of Stephen Grossman's "Luftmensch" paintings:

CWOS 2012, Friday night—lighting the way

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2012
Through Oct. 21, 2012.
Weekend 1 Report

Quite a crowd turned out Friday night at Artspace for the Grand Opening Reception for this year's City-Wide Open Studios, the event's "crystal" (15th) anniversary. The weather cooperated as much of the Ninth Square took on a festival atmosphere, in part due to the numerous light installations of the second annual LAMP (Light Artists Making Places).

Crowd socializes and browses the main exhibition at Artspace:

Your blogger in a photo from the early 1990's projected by Ernst Weber on the wall of the Acme Building:

Drum circle and dancers outside 45 Church Street (on the Crown Street side), an old bank used as location of "The Crystal Ball" and LAMP headquarters:

The Play House in The Lot:

Holly Danger's "Soul Seasons" light projections:

2012 City-Wide Open Studios begins this weekend: Grand Opening Reception on Friday

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios
Fri., Oct. 5, 5—8 p.m. Grand Opening Reception
Weekend 1: Oct. 6/7—"Passport Weekend" (individual studios in New Haven, Hamden and West Haven)
Weekend 2: Oct. 13/14—Erector Square
Weekend 3: Oct. 20/21—Alternative Space at the old New Haven Register building
Plus special events—see below

Press release from Artspace

Connecticut’s leading forum for visual artists returns to New Haven every October. City-Wide Open Studios invites the public to meet hundreds of visual artists, in studio and alternative spaces across New Haven, and to learn about the creative process. Nearly 300 artists will take part in the festival over the course of three consecutive weekends. Each weekend features different workspaces in New Haven; in all, more than 60 sites will be open. A grand opening reception, free and open to the public, takes place at Artspace on Fri., Oct. 5, from 5—8 p.m., followed by late night festivities throughout Ninth Square.

To mark the 15th year, Artspace has invited artists to draw inspiration from the crystal, whether in chemical, mathematical, geological, or polished form. Special themed tours and exhibitions will take place; prepare to be dazzled. In collaboration with Project Storefronts, the public is invited to the opening night Crystal Ball. Other special events are listed on the calendar and more will be announced in the coming weeks.

During the first weekend (October 6/7), visitors are invited to explore New Haven, Hamden, and West Haven to discover the area’s hidden artistic gems—the individual studios and small group spaces scattered throughout downtown and residential neighborhoods. A special gathering of artists making functional objects—furniture and crafts—will be featured at 14 Gilbert Street. A free, guided bike tour departs both Saturday and Sunday at 12:30 p.m. from the Devil’s Gear bike shop at 360 State Street (enter on Orange). Walking tours TBA.

The second weekend (October 13/14) features artists and demonstrations at Erector Square, 315 Peck Street, New Haven. Erector Square is New Haven’s largest concentration of studios, in a series of buildings that once housed the factory making Erector Sets; today over 100 artists maintain studios there. Studio Maps will be available at the entrance, along with a schedule of demonstrations. The visit is free; $5 donation is suggested. The studios will be open from noon-5 p.m.

The third weekend (October 20/21) will feature the Alternative Space, at the vacant, mid-century, New Haven Register Building, off of I-95. Admission is free; a $5 donation is suggested. The Alternative Space will be open from noon—5 p.m.

Throughout the festival, viewers are invited to visit the central Festival Exhibition at Artspace, which will feature a representative work by each participant, along with maps and information. A host committee of local individuals invites everyone to meet the artists at theopening reception on October 5. The Official Map & Guide of the event and a website with studio information will be available at the opening. Details for all of the events can be found at the City-Wide Open Studios Web site.

City-Wide Open Studios has been made possible thanks to First Niagara Bank Foundation, Yale University, the New Haven Register, the City of New Haven Economic Development Office, Yale-New Haven Hospital, and other local corporations. Eileen & Andrew Eder, Seth Brown & Ywe Ludwig, and the Honorable Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro chair the Host Committee, a group of art lovers and supporters.

Special Events:

• Fri., Oct. 5, 5—8 p.m. CWOS Grand Opening Reception

As part of the October’s first Friday, On 9, Artspace will hold the CWOS Grand Opening Reception. Also at Artspace, the opening of a special printmaking project created by Darwin Nix in collaboration with clients of Liberty Community Services. Free! At 8 p.m., explore LAMP, "Light Artists Making Places," throughout the Ninth Square.

• Saturdays and Sundays, Oct. 6/7, 13/14, 20/21 at The Lot. Curated by Marianne Bernstein

A modular cube, crystal clear, serves as temporary studio by day and a 4-sided, illuminated projection space by night at 812 Chapel Street. The schedule will be as follows: October 6/7 (Darwin Nix, abstract etchings), October 13/14 (Keily Anderson-Staley, tin types), and October 20/21 (Kirk Bacon, drawing and sculptural installation).

• Oct. 5—22. The Crystal Palace Experimental Film/Video Festival. Organized by Liena Vayzman.

Crystal Palace is an experimental film/video festival curated by Liena Vayzman for ArtSpace's 15th Anniversary—its crystal anniversary—which will feature crystal-themed, crystallizing, and multi-faceted video and films. Crystals, including snowflakes, diamonds, ice crystals, and gems will be featured; works will explore these references in both abstract and narrative forms, taking the cultural, scientific, and mathematical associations with crystal as a point of departure. Like the Crystal Palace plate-glass building, a marvel of engineering constructed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, ArtSpace's Crystal Palace aims to illuminate and amaze—the festival, held in Artspace’s gallery at 50 Orange Street, will feature non-narrative and experimental video installations, as well as more traditional films. Works in the festival will be screening continually during gallery hours (Tuesday–Thursday, noon—6 p.m.; Friday, noon—8 p.m.; Saturday–Sunday, noon—5 p.m.). After CWOS, the Crystal Palace Experimental Film/Video Festival will travel to the Kroswork Gallery in Oakland, California.

Three shows open at Artspace in New Haven this Friday

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
William DeLottie: in three states of mind
Interventions: Works from Artspace's Flatfile
Felandus Thames with Summer Apprentices: Occupy Main Street
July 27—Sept. 15, 2012.
Opening: Fri., July 28, 5—8 p.m.

Artspace Press release

Three new shows open this Friday at Artspace in New Haven. The opening reception will be held from 5—8 p.m. All three exhibits will be on display through Sept. 15.

• William DeLottie: in three states of mind

This show, organized by VAC member Eric Litke, will present previously unseen video installations and a mural-sized work on paper by Connecticut artist William DeLottie, who has been exhibiting regionally and nationally for over 30 years. DeLottie’s work, which is typically raw and nonhierarchical, was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. DeLottie's art continues to explore notions of collage imbued with media imagery, as well as a very personal lexicon of forms both abstract and pictographic in nature. DeLottie’s range of materials, including pure pigment, metallic sheets, and vinyl bags, give an unpredictable and enigmatic quality to his works on paper, while his video installations frequently delve into a range of both narrative and abstract subjects.

William DeLottie currently lives in rural, eastern Connecticut. Though he has exhibited frequently for over three decades, moving from monochromatic paintings in the 1970s to more experimental installations in recent years, he has often been fully employed at non-art-related jobs. His installation works, often referred to as "systema," constantly mutate in response to new sites or inspirations in DeLottie’s own studios in Putnam and Willimantic.

Eric Litke was born in Hartford, CT and holds a B.F.A. from the School of the Visual Arts. A member of Artspace’s Visual Arts Committee, Litke currently resides in New Haven, CT and works at the Yale University Art Gallery.

• Interventions

Interventions features works from Artspace’s Flatfile that are centered on the theme of human intrusions into nature. The Flatfile, Artspace’s rotating collection of works on paper, celebrates a diverse collection of local and regional artists. Many of the works featured in this exhibition deliberately play on a sense of what is real; some through mechanical alterations, such as that of a camera lens; others through staged recreations and dioramas; and still others through shifts in scale. Collectively, these works seem to offer a reminder, subtle or otherwise, of the artist at work behind an image and, more broadly, of the constant tension between constructed and natural environments. Artists to be shown include Hannah Cole, Keith Johnson, Carolyn Monastra, Robert Morris, Lori Nix, Jessica Schwind, Jeff Slomba, Joseph Smolinski, and Bradley Wollman.

This exhibition is organized by Kristen Erickson, curator and art history teacher at Greenwich Academy, and Erin Riley, art teacher and director of the Luchsinger Gallery at Greenwich Academy.

• Felandus Thames with Summer Apprentices: Occupy Main Street

Each summer Artspace seeks out an artist and a group of New Haven high school students to work together in the spirit of collaboration. Over the course of three weeks this group coalesces into a creative unit, learning new art skills and completing an intricate installation in the Artspace galleries.

This year’s project features a silk-screening collaboration between artist Felandus Thames and 16 New Haven high school students. The project centers around ideas of branding and self-image; their work features hand-screened logos for their class, which they dubbed the Sharpie Squad, that have been applied to the long wall in Artspace’s gallery.

The summer apprentices are: Badria Ahmed (Hillhouse High School), Arianno Alamo (Wilbur Cross and Educational Center for the Arts), Danny Amir (Metro Business Academy), Tyler Carrillo-Waggoner (Guilford High School), Jasmine Chevalier (Hillhouse High School), Ian Davidson (Sound School), Shawn Duplessie (Metro Business Academy), Jazmin Iturbide (Metro Business Academy), Rain Jasiorkowski (Sound School), Shanti Madison (Hamden High School and Educational Center for the Arts), Olivia Marciano (Shelton High School and Educational Center for the Arts), Stefany Mitchell (Joseph A. Foran High School and Educational Center for the Arts), Kira Podgwait (Cooperative Arts High School), Isaiah Rodgers (Metro Business Academy), Juan Velazquez (Metro Business Academy), Aysha Younas (Hamden High School and Educational Center for the Arts).

Felandus Thames is a cross-disciplinary artist engaged with questions of race, power, and identity. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, he received a B.A. in Painting and Graphic Design from Jackson State University before completing his M.F.A. in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art in 2010. Thames has participated in a residency at the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center in Jackson and has shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. He currently works in Harlem, New York, and is represented by the Tilton Gallery.

Call for artists for upcoming show, "Instructions Not Included," at Artspace in New Haven

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Call for artists: Instructions Not Included, exhibition in planning for November, 2012

Press release from Artspace

Artspace is seeking artists/makers to participate in the exhibition Instructions Not Included: Tinker, Hack, Tweak, organized by Artspace's Education Curator Martha Lewis. This exhibition, slated to run from Nov. 9, 2012 to late January 2013, will construct a visual discussion around the creative possibilities of readymade culture. The exhibition will serve as a forum for reexamining industrial design, our daily environment, and the objects with which we surround ourselves. Artspace is putting out two calls for artists, one for artists to participate in a project within Artspace's gallery and one for temporary works for our building's exterior.

The interior call (PDF available here) seeks Connecticut-based artists who, in addition to exhibiting work, will commit to be in the gallery at least once per week as artists-in-residence, working on both individual and collaborative projects, for the duration of the show. Each artist will occupy a portion of the gallery with a desk area and visuals board to share their concepts, working process, and inspirations.

The exterior call (PDF available here), for temporary pieces on and around Artspace, is open to all regional artists. Proposed pieces should interact with the works taking place inside and invite a reexamination of the gallery's historic location within a former furniture factory. We welcome works with a political edge, a sense of humor and wonder, and which possess a strong sense of design—suggested projects include yarn-bombing, light installations, sound works, and projections. Projects must not damage the façade of the Chamberlain Building or interfere with normal operations of doors and sidewalks. Dimensions for Artspace's windows can be found here (PDF). Photographs of the exterior of the building can be found here (PDF).

All selected artists will receive an honorarium, the amount of which is determined based on the scope of the project. A printed catalog will be produced and a strong web-based component, offering opportunities for dialogue and exposure, will be provided. All submissions must be received by August 30th; notifications will be sent out in mid-September.

To view more specifics about the calls and to send in submissions, please set up an account here.

Questions? Email ini [AT] artspacenh.org.

Friday evening opening event at The Lot in New Haven

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Leeza Meksin: Flossing the Lot at The Lot, located in the outdoor park space at 812 Chapel St.
June 15—Sept. 15, 2012.
Opening: Fri., June 15, 5—8 p.m., with a musical performance by Mira Stroika.

Artspace press release

Interdisciplinary artist Leeza Meksin installs Flossing the Lot, a new site-specific outdoor installation, and the last in a series of public works all employing custom-designed, printed spandex of huge metallic gold chains on a gleaming white background. The chain link pattern symbolizes many—at times contradictory—ideas such as community building, wealth, adornment, incarceration and continuity. When placed in a new geographic context, the print transforms itself and the location, creating a playful urban space for new connections, associations and encounters.

The New Haven installation will be comprised of large abstract forms, stretching across the surrounding walls of The Lot, referencing New Haven's Historic Corset Factory as well as jewelry displays, ceremonial garb, and bondage. The billowing spandex banners will be “chained” to the exterior walls of The Lot, and weighed down with sand bags in flashy cozies. The gold and brightly colored "balls" will evoke the ways bags are displayed in stores, as well as the more literal "ball & chain" of imprisonment. The gold link motif re-used at the busy corner of Orange and Chapel St. will fit almost seamlessly into the lively intersection flanked by businesses and stores ranging from Sassy to thrift and dollar stores.

Meksin’s personal history of migration and cultural dysphoria made her keenly aware of the magical potential of carnival and role-reversal in creating a forum for meaningful interactions between members of any community. As a gay woman and an immigrant, Meksin dresses up buildings and public spaces in entertaining and voluptuous outfits, implementing drag as a symbol of marginalized cultures, marked with struggle, transformation and ostentatiousness. The masquerade aesthetic of Drag embodies the playful and irreverent spirit of Meksin’s public art works.

Meksin’s previous public art installations with the chain motif included House Coat in 2011 where she transformed a quaint, two-story row house on an inner-city street of St. Louis, MO by giving it a new spandex outfit; and Sad Side of the Street, an installation in the former NY Public Library, the Donnell, across the street from the MOMA that took place before the building’s demolition. With the final installment in New Haven, Meksin explores how "Flossing," "Fabulousness," "Drag," and "Bling" in marginalized communities relate to the history of bondage, slavery and spiritual freedom.

Meksin’s installations invite people to explore urban spaces in new and playful ways. A videographer will be present during the installation and opening party to record the neighborhood’s impressions and opinions. People are invited to stop by during the installation process (June 12-15) to ask questions, discuss the project, and provide feedback which will become part of the project itself. The opening night will feature a performance by the stunning cabaret singer Mira Stroika, and visitors are invited to don a costume in exchange for a free drink. The event will be free and open to the public.

BIOS

Elizaveta (Leeza) Meksin is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Leeza immigrated to the United States in 1989. She received a BA’99 in Comparative Literature and MA'00 in the Humanities, both from the University of Chicago; a BFA'05 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA'07 in Painting from the Yale School of Art. Meksin, recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship and the Soros Foundation Grant, has exhibited her work in numerous venues throughout the United States, and has been teaching at Tyler School of Art since 2007. Currently, Meksin is an artist-in-residence at Chashama’s Brooklyn Army Terminal, and holds a Visiting Faculty position at Ohio State University where she will be mounting a solo show of recent work in August, 2012.

Chanteuse-songwriter Mira Stroika is a fixture in New York's neo-cabaret and indie music scene. Armed with a flirtatious wit, a riveting voice, and a soulfulness one normally associates with performers of yesteryears, Stroika offers up jaw-dropping interpretations of the classics and original and infectious pop songwriting on subjects as far ranging as Reality TV, UFO's and mortality. A classically trained vocalist, pianist, composer and accordionist, Stroika's highly theatrical performances fuse Western pop sensibilities with Eastern European folk, and French and German cabaret influences. The daughter of immigrants, Stroika graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University and holds a masters from Tisch in interactive media and performance.

Drawing in the moment: a "happening" at Artspace

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Saturday "happening": Colleen Coleman: Ode to Walter Benjamin
May 5, 2012.

This past Saturday, as part of the opening reception for several shows, Artspace presented the first in a series of Saturday evening "happenings" slated for this month. Saturday's "happening" featured artist Colleen Coleman in a drawing performance "Ode to Walter Benjamin." Benjamin was a renowned 20th century German-Jewish cultural theorist. Among his well-known essays is "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," written in 1936.

Coleman's "endurance piece," as Artspace director Helen Kauder describes it, is part drawing, part dance. Holding a thick, dark slab of raw graphite in her hand—in both hands, depending on the gesture—she cranks swirls of kinetic circles on the long free-standing wall in the main gallery. Stopping for a moment, she offers her outstretched palms to the audience, black graphite glistening on coffee-colored skin.


Related to the dance aspect, the performance is almost musical, as well. In its rhythms, it resembles a free improvisation concert: flurries of noisy energy dissipating into pregnant quiet, only to build up again to another crescendo. This association is reinforced by the sound aspect of Coleman's effort, the whirring white noise of the graphite gliding against the wall, the occasional percussive SNAP! Of the graphite chunk striking the surface.

Circles. Circles within circles within circles and the long flowing lines from one end of the wall to the other, some drawn languidly as Coleman seeks to catch her breath, others applied in a graceful sprint the length of the wall, punctuated with a leap that registers as a black linear arc.


It's a high wire act. Do you end up with something that has an aesthetic integrity outside the performance of its creation? In a way, that's a bonus if it happens because this is gestural drawing as performance art, dance, creation in the moment, Pollock's "action paintings" taken out onto a stage.

For a short moment, Coleman settles into repeated figure-eight swirls, the infinity symbol, the infinite possibilities inherent in mark making, art-making, the musical rhythm flow. Conscious art—yes, thinking the whole time, in the moment—but also pushing beyond the conscious to the visceral physical, the ecstatic joy of graffitizing a white wall with scribbly black marks, that outside-of-consciousness pleasure. The highest curves chart the peak of Coleman's leap, jumping with hand extended, reaching for the stars.

I expect to take in 15 minutes or so of Coleman's performance, which was supposed to last up to two hours. But it is surprisingly compelling and I'm absorbed through to its conclusion, when Coleman reaches the limit of her athletic endurance 10 or 15 minutes beyond an hour.

Artspace openings this Saturday in New Haven

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Agit Crop
May 5—31, 2012
Opening Reception: Sat., May 5, 5—8 p.m.
Pre-reception Gallery Talk with Hudson Valley Seed Library Founder Ken Greene, 4:30 pm
Summer Apprenticeship Program alumni show: (Art)iculate
May 5—31, 2012
Opening Reception: Sat., May 5, 5—8 p.m.
Saturday "happening": Colleen Coleman: Ode to Walter Benjamin
May 5, 2012, 6—8 p.m.

Press release

• Join us where art meets ag for Artspace’s new exhibition, Agit Crop, on view from May 5 to 31, 2012. Agit Crop will showcase 23 original works of art commissioned by the Hudson Valley Seed Library for their annual Art Pack collection. The seed packet artwork—from the powerful Cosmonaut Volkov Tomato to the stately and serene Early Summer Crookneck Squash—displays a wide range of media and artistic styles (in the case of the aforementioned tomato and squash, think comic book art and landscape painting!) Each artist imaginatively and uniquely captures the essence of the Seed Library's heirloom varieties. Warning: you may feel moved to purchase some potting soil and a watering can.

Also on display will be edible terrariums by Britton Rogers, “Garden Voices” a video and multimedia documentary project by Amy Coplen, “cropoganda”: works created by students at Common Ground High School. Common Ground, an environmental charter school and urban farm in New Haven, will partner with Artspace this spring to produce original artwork that plays with the notion of food branding. Agit Crop will showcase the original fruit-and-vegetable-themed artwork, along with posters, packaging, and clothing based on students’ design.

• (Art)iculate is a show of work by Artspace alumni whose artistic ventures and processes were supported by their involvement in the Summer Apprenticeship Program. The show invites past participants to return and share new artwork in a space to which they have a close relationship.

Artspace's Summer Apprenticeship Program was founded in 2001 to provide a unique opportunity for New Haven high school students to work intimately with a master artist for a few weeks every summer. Each year, the Apprentices complete a major group project, which is displayed prominently in Artspace's gallery (or in The Lot, our outdoor exhibition space) and is celebrated by the public.

• We will be kicking off a series of Saturday “happenings” throughout the month, beginning with Colleen Coleman’s (Web) drawing performance, “Ode to Walter Benjamin" this Saturday, followed by the Illuminated Universe Artist Workshop on May 12 (cost TBA), Night Picnic (May 26), and a live music performance. Come spend your weekends in May at Artspace!

Two days left to check out "Library Science"

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Library Science
Through Jan. 28, 2012.

Libraries are not an obvious choice as an art-making subject. But, as the show Library Science at Artspace in New Haven through Saturday demonstrates, the topic is rich with resonance. This sprawling group show featuring national and international artists takes the subjects of libraries and books as springboards for wide-ranging works of imagination and philosophical and intellectual engagement. It comes at a time when the Internet and the digitization of information are usurping the role of the book.

At least some of these works focus on libraries as signifier, not so much as a repository of knowledge but as a sign of the repository of knowledge. Mickey Smith's "Corroborating Information" features found portrait studio images, re-photographed by Smith, which situate individuals and families in front of bookshelves laden with what appear to be weighty tomes. The books are props, a sort of intellectual fill lighting for the posing subjects.

Candida Höfer's (Web) "Biblioteca Geral a Universidade de Coimbra IV," a photograph of packed bookshelves in an ornate reading room at a prestigious Portuguese university, conveys multiple messages. This is a temple to knowledge—the books are associated with wealth and power and are not out of place amid the finely detailed, plush surroundings. And yet, they are worn, inert, likely largely untouched for quite some time, orphaned repositories of knowledge that may no longer be useful or even credible.

Nina Katchadourian's photographs also employ books as signifiers, albeit in a lighter, more idiosyncratic mode. Katchadourian is granted access to private libraries and specialized collections and allowed to rearrange the books, gleaning personal statements from the juxtaposition of titles. Read left to right, the titles on the book spines in Relax from Composition" posit an amusing conversation: "Relax," "When I Relax, I Feel Guilty," "When I Say No, I Feel Guilty," "God Always Says Yes!" It concludes with the title "Don't Say Yes When You Want to Say No." It leaves me wondering whether God has taken the advice.

Where Katchadourian creates her winking juxtapositions from the spines of books, Erica Baum finds hers on the subject headings of library card catalogues. My favorite was "Untitled (Suburban Homes)." The subject heading in the foreground reads "Suburban homes;" behind it just out of focus in the tight depth of field is "Subversive activities." Where suburban homes in this culture are considered the antithesis of "subversive activities," Baum's images suggests that, of course, subversive activities lurk behind the respectable facades of these houses. It's is worth noting that Baum's photographs succeed not just as visual puns but as images, finding strong balances of line and shadow.

In order to closely view Baum's images and those by Mickey Smith on the facing wall, it is necessary to do something that feels wrong—walk on the spines of over 1,000 books. Mickey Smith's floor installation "Memorial Service," is composed of 1,201 copies of Federal Reporter," compilations of federal court decisions and opinions that were once de rigeur for law offices, since replaced by digital editions. It feels sacrilegious to tread on the spines of these compendiums of legal knowledge—they squeak as they give way underfoot, almost a cry of despair.

Theoretically, these physical objects are obsolete. This, however, prompts me to segue to a concern that I have flogged before on this blog: the danger of storing increasing amounts of our information and knowledge in the digital realm. As a vehicle for storing knowledge, books are simple and direct. Crack open a book and—provided you can read the language in which it is written—you can dive right in. But information in the virtual format is a completely different story. Digital information, supposedly so free, is actually stored under lock and key, the lock being the hardware and the key being the software. Without the right combination of both, the information is inaccessible.

The peril of this reliance on technology is, ironically, demonstrated by a work in the show inspired in part by a failure of technology. David Bunn's "No Voyager Record" is a slide projection of catalogue card images for lost or missing books at the Brooklyn Museum of Art Library, where Bunn had been invited to do a project with catalogue card discards. Why were there discards of catalogue cards? Because the library was digitizing its card catalogue under the rubric of the Voyager Project. But when Voyager was launched, it crashed and the backup was also erased. The old card catalogue had to be salvaged; it had been boxed for disposal but was not yet gone. The irony? I couldn't see the slide projections because of a malfunction with the projector.

Still, if digitization and the concomitant obsolescence of the book presents (what I believe are under-appreciated) risks, it's incontestable that it has placed a wealth of knowledge and information—not always overlapping concepts—at the click of our fingertips.

Loren Madsen's three Iris prints hearken back to the pre-Google search engine era of 1998. Madsen used Amazon's search engines to ferret out book titles with popular and loaded search terms like "self," "fashion" and "sex." Her results, alphabetized, are printed in long lines of small, upper-case block type, making up big squares dense with text broken up by occasional rivers of white. It is all weighted the same—Is Salami and Eggs Better Than Sex? as consequential in the design as The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

Xiaoze Xie's (Web) two photorealist paintings are based on photos he took in libraries. "Chinese Library No. 46" depicts the edges of a stack of decaying manuscripts, torn, curling and marked with Chinese characters. "Untitled #3" references the active destruction of books, showing orange-yellow flames twisting amidst a background of black and red. The painting is based on a still from the documentary Degenerate Art about the Nazi assault on culture and the attendant book burnings. The subtext to both works is the notion that knowledge is fragile and contingent, dependent both on the survival of physical objects and the moral will to defend free inquiry.

Melissa Dubbin's and Aaron S. Davidson's (Web) "Reading Room for Kids" is a subtle and powerful statement on the fact that knowledge is not necessarily neutral. Did you know that the Central Intelligence Agency has recommended reading lists for grades K-5 and 6-12? Well, they do and as one would suspect, they are geared toward glorifying spycraft, subterfuge and the shepherding of secrets. The installation imagines a reading room for My Little CIA Library.

A small shelf holds all 39 books from the CIA's reading lists. The walls are papered with an ivy pattern based on illustrations from Lord Robert Baden-Powell's 1915 book My Adventures as a Spy. (Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts.) Disguising himself as a distracted butterfly collector, Baden-Powell spied on Boer forts in South Africa, sketching important information into drawings of ivy leaves and hiding other information on the patterning of butterfly wings. A kaleidoscope of butterflies—printed from one drawing in various sizes and different shades of brown—is pinned to the wall in a random, lively arrangement. A cloak of nature and innocence conceal the CIA's propagandistic intent, trying to inculcate children with the notion that knowledge is a weapon and deception a virtue.

Library Science is on view through Saturday.

City-Wide Open Studios, weekend two

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios
Through Oct. 30, 2011.

I couldn't get to Erector Square the first weekend because I was out of town at a family wedding. This Saturday and Sunday are the final weekend with various artists showing in the Alternative Space at the Coop Center for Creativity, 196—212 College Street in New Haven.

(Note: As of Thursday night when I am trying to post this, Blogger is giving me trouble with including images. So I'm posting it now without images and hope to add them soon.)

(UPDATE 11/2/11: Added images.)

I started off the second weekend by dropping by the studio of photographer Linda Lindroth. Lindroth had a wide array of her work spanning decades available to be viewed. But we spent our time discussing new work—large color digital images of objects like worn antique boxes, bunched-up vinyl shorts and fluorescent temporary yellow road stripes.

Lindroth shot the objects at extremely high resolution and then silhouetted them in Photoshop and blew them up to very large size. Many of the images have art historical references—Mark Rothko, Howard Hodgkins, Richard Serra.

A conical bowl made out of spun aluminum with a crackle texture surface reminded Lindroth of Richard Serra drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Serra used an oil stick, Lindroth tells me, so the surface of his drawings feature prominently.

On the facing wall, Lindroth displayed two images, one from the inside and one from the outside of an old gift box for a strand of pearls. The outside is aquamarine-colored with worn edges. The inside is the real treasure. The aquamarine coating of the splayed edges of the box is peeling off like old paint on a house, curling and flaking. The inner square is yellowed cream framed by a thick swirl of aged, dried mucilage glue—swirled and congealed, the color ranging from mustard to amber to deep caramel. Although they are flat images, they are richly tactile.


The ostensible subject of another image was the cover of a 19th-century photo album that used to hold the postcard-sized portraits one would get at a studio. The cover had been covered with red velvet and stuffed with cotton batting. But it had fell apart after 100 years. The velvet was degraded to the extent that there was only a smattering of tufts around the middle. Stray fibers were spun out from the frayed edges along with protruding cotton batting turned orange with age. With its subtle, shifting shades of red, the image suggested a painting by Rothko.

"I'm really excited about this," Lindroth told me. "When you're working on a series and it keeps reinforcing you and making you happy, you forget about all the difficulties and go with the flow."

•••

Constance LaPalombara was showing cityscapes, still lifes and evocative landscapes. She has an upcoming show so most of her newest works were not on display, being held in reserve for that exhibition.

One of the most recent works that she did have on display—"Evening at the Pool"—was one of the results of a resident fellowship last fall at the Heliker-Lahotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island in Maine. LaPalombara did studies in Maine and finished the large, square painting in her New Haven studio.


She told me, "It felt good to paint something big again. I hadn't done that for a while." LaPalombara said she had been "creeping up on it" and pointed to a medium-sized painting of a cityscape on a parallel wall.

"Evening at the Pool" is a serenely meditative work, low contrast and suffused with soft, pink light. The lagoon in the foreground is studded with jetties of squat rocks. A couple of small cottages nestle amid the forested horizon line. The sky is filled with the kind of light that promises night is just around the corner. The painting is deceptive. It looks simple but is rich in painterly detail: moss on the rocks, multi-color light reflections on the water's surface.

•••

In his 39 Church Street studio, Gerald Saladyga was showing a range of work from minimalist geometric paintings made in the 1990's to current works in progress. Among the newest works was a suite of drawings on brown wrapping paper that Saladyga jokingly referred to as the "Wheelchair Series." Working with India ink markers, Saladyga made the drawings when he was incapacitated by injuries to his right leg and foot, now thankfully on the mend.

"I was like a kid with a crayon box—nothing more, nothing less—and your imagination kind of runs with it," Saladyga told me.

Increasingly, figurative elements have been returning to his work. His primitivist figures feature prominently both in the "Wheelchair Series" and in his new "100 Days in Eden," a series about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Saladyga is an artist in constant, restless creative motion. His work is always evolving, going through permutations.

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I dropped by Silas Finch's studio. Finch is constantly acquiring objects that resonate with a sense of the past and offer him a platform to let his wild imagination take flight. His representative work in the main exhibition at Artspace incorporated horseshoe crab shells and, sure enough, he had more crab pieces in his studio.

His experimentation with using horseshoe crab pieces is an extension of his fascination with antiques and the past into organic parts derived from one of the oldest still existing species on the planet.

It's a challenge for Finch because the claws and molted shells are quite fragile. One idea he has is to layer the helmet-like shells, which appear either metallic or ceramic, so they look like Japanese shoulder armor.


On the same table where Finch has stacked piles of horseshoe crab shells, he has a half-dozen or so yellowed "Wanted by the FBI" flyers he picked up at a large flea market in Stratford. All the "wanted" flyers are for fugitives sought for "interstate flight"—among other crimes—and Finch envisions a work or series with that title.

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Other work I enjoyed at 39 Church; Ken Lovell's digital paintings and prints, Jo Kremer's paintings and the paintings and drawings of James Jasiorkowski.

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On Sunday I stopped by John Keefer's apartment/studio in Westville. It was a beautiful day and Keefer had paintings outside on the porch as well as lining his walls and propped against the wall on the floor. There were quite a few paintings from a new series Keefer has been working on that he termed, with a bit of a mischievous grin, his "ten-prong cock attack" paintings. Each painting was defined by the use of two colors and the design—a double set of interpenetrating fingers or, um, cocks.


Keefer told me he "wanted to make paintings really fast. I wanted them to be really simple." They are finger paintings—one color for each hand.

"Both sides are painted at the same time. I put stretches of color on each side and work towards the edges," Keefer said. He said they are "very satisfying objects to make." He doesn't have to think about the composition—he can just be in tune with the energy of it. One of the series was mounted on the wall near the entrance. Painted in opposing and complementary red and black, it had a vibrant energy with swirling trails of color.

Keefer continues to work on large paintings based on photographs and laid out on the basis of the classic grid system and has also been doing a lot of drawings. One complete work—or almost complete, Keefer isn't sure—depicts his late German Shepherd Casey standing in shallow water. Like most of Keefer's paintings, the application of paint is raw, unfussy. He uses brushes, yes, but also his fingers, the former business end of a spatula and his forehead. (He acknowledged that the latter painting instrument wasn't particularly effective.)


"It's best for me to do a couple of different things in close temporal proximity to each other," Keefer said.

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Over at West Cove Gallery, I spoke with sculptor Jonathan Waters. We talked about one of his sculptures, a large, free-standing work in the middle of his big studio gallery that is part of his "Portal" series. As waters originally built it, wide boards painted black framed a large, open space. The addition of two thin verticals added a powerful dynamic. There was now a visual flow occurring within the frame and the open (positive) space became a type of S-shape.


"What happens is that you get pieces that are generative for a lot of other work," Waters said. "You open up and go, 'Oh, here we go again,' and this one is in that category."