Opening and Gallery Talk Wednesday for "Deliquescence" at New Haven Museum

New Haven Museum
114 Whitney Ave., New Haven, (203) 562-4183
Colin Burke: Deliquescence
Dec. 7, 2011—Jan. 28, 2012.
Opening and Gallery Talk: Wed., Dec. 7, 5:30 p.m.

Press release

What do you do with half a million feet of microfilm destined for the dump? "Make art, of course," says New Haven artist Colin Burke, one of seven local artists commissioned by Artspace New Haven to create site-specific art for Library Science, an art exhibition running until January 28, 2012.

Deliquescence, Burke’s site-specific installation at the New Haven Museum, includes microfilm from the New York Times collection. Burke repurposes media from Connecticut libraries to create a connection between the past, the present, and the future of how we experience the library. On Wed., Dec. 7 at 5:30 p.m., Burke will present a gallery talk about his newest installation.

Thousands of feet of microfilm envelope two of the museum’s columns in the entrance rotunda. This sculpture illustrates the celebrated landmark pair of elm trees planted in New Haven more than 300 years ago. Between the columns is a transparent pedestal supporting a vintage six-drawer wooden card catalog. Visitors are invited to explore the contents of the catalog drawers, where they will find printed cards allowing digital access to more information about the project, the library and museum collections via QR codes designed for smartphones.

Part of the project included a research residency. Burke spent several weeks mining the collections of both the Whitney Library and the New Haven Museum online and onsite. Through primary source materials, including thousands of illustrations and photographs of New Haven, he found the basis of what would become the theme of his artwork—The Elm City.

"I’m still relatively new to the area and still exploring New Haven. I’ve been wondering about the 'Elm City' and the lack of elm trees for a while now—how this ties in to the identity of a place and the way we perceive and preserve the history of our surroundings," explains Burke.

Deliquescence has several definitions, Burke says. “In botany, it describes the branch patterns of trees, including the elm. As metaphor, deliquescence means to vanish into thin air, which also works in describing the demise of the elms and the usefulness of materials like microfilm. I found the word through my research which brings it all together. I also just love the sound of the word."

Library Science is an exhibition curated by Rachel Gugelberger, Senior Curator at Exit Art, New York. Bringing together a selection of work by 17 international artists, and seven artists from the New Haven area, Library Science contemplates our personal, intellectual and physical relationship to the library as this venerable institution—and the information it contains—is being radically transformed by the digital era.

Colin Burke is a visual artist creating work featuring analog, antique photographic processes and methods. Through this work, he explores the themes of liminal space, time and proximity. He is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Artspace New Haven, where he has a dedicated studio space to further explore his analog photography practice.

Deliquescence is on view at the New Haven Museum, located at 114 Whitney Ave. The New Haven Museum, founded in 1862 as the New Haven Colony Historical Society, continues its tradition of preservation with a collection that includes folk, decorative and fine arts, an extensive photographic archive, and a unique manuscript collection and research capabilities in the Whitney Library. Open Tues.—Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat 12—5 p.m. Free on the First Sunday of the month, 1—4 p.m.

Library Science is generously supported with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the David T. Langrock Foundation and a Strategic Initiative Grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

Artspace is New Haven’s largest independent visual arts venue, showcasing a mix of local and national artists in a downtown corner storefront in the historic Ninth Square district. Our mission is to catalyze artistic efforts; to connect artists, audiences and resources; and to redefine art spaces.

(Photo by Mia Orsatti, Courtesy of Artspace New Haven.)

Artists' reception in Rockville Saturday evening at Gallery 46

Gallery 46
46 Union St., Vernon-Rockville, (860) 454-8822
Colin Burke & Krys Swiatek: Articulated Bodies
Through Feb. 5, 2011.
Artists’ reception: Sat., Jan. 15, 6—9 p.m.

Press release

CWOS 2010 weekend 3

I only had one day for the third weekend of the 2010 City-Wide Open Studios but it was a beautiful day. I spent most of it at the alternative space on the corner of Crown and College streets, taking in the storefront installations and the ad hoc galleries. I made the decision early on to just enjoy the experience and not get as invested in taking notes and interviewing artists as I usually do.

•••

My first stop was in the storefront SERA (Social Experiments Relational Acts) NAIL SALON (Web). The space was still laid out as it had been when the tenants left, including rows of nail polish of various colors on shelves on the front left wall. The overarching curatorial frame was "service." Within that theme, a half dozen or so artists plied their conceptual trades, "serving" visitors in ways interactive, offbeat and thought-provoking.

I regret now that I didn't get a "manifesto massage" by "Ted" (aka Ted Efremoff [Web]). Stationed in a massage cubicle, Ted read from arts manifestos (Stuckist, Futurist, Situationist and more) while giving massages. One young woman seemed to be quite enjoying her Stuckist massage.

I spent the most time with Melanie Carr Eveleth. Mel, as she was calling herself within this context, whose primary medium is sculpture, was facilitating "swaps." Participants could fill out forms indicating what they were looking for in terms of goods and services and what they could offer to swap in return. In fact, Carr Eveleth actually operated a SWAP SHOP in a New Britain storefront briefly as a kind of conceptual art/community involvement mashup. While I couldn't think of anything I wanted or had to offer, I had a lively exchange of ideas with Carr about commodities, art and social theory, capitalist ideology and more.

•••

In a corner room upstairs, Colin Burke was beguiling visitors with an installation that melded art and science. Burke constructed a camera obscura in one corner of the space. Visitors entered a darkened box surrounding two corner windows. Burke had covered each window with thick sheets of black plastic. In front of the black plastic hung big sheets of flimsy light-colored fabric. Light from outside was channeled through small holes cut in the black plastic, projecting real-time imagery from the streets on the hanging scrims. Interestingly, when the imagery from outside is projected by the camera obscura it appears upside down and reversed. It was like entering a magic box where the magic is actually based on measurable principles of science.


Burke had science books on display that detailed how light is bent as it passes through a small aperture (although he confessed he didn't really know why it does a somersault to end ass-up and backwards). But the ancient scientific discoveries of the workings of the camera obscura led directly—if over a thousand years or more—to photographic technology. Knowledge builds upon knowledge and eventually you have crowds of paparazzi chasing after Paris Hilton.

"I'm kind of a science nerd so I like the idea that it all goes together," Burke told me. The installation prompted lots of questions as to how it worked and how visitors might be able to rig camera obscuras in their own homes. Burke was also showing some of his cyanotypes—the name derives from the fact that the emulsion darkens to a Prussian Blue color on exposure to ultraviolet light—and explaining the process by which he made them. Because cyanotypes crave UV light, they are often developed using sunlight. Although cyanotypes can be made through a contact printing process involving photographic negatives, Burke primarily makes his cyanotypes as photograms—placing objects on the treated paper or cloth surface. The result is a negative image. Several of Burke's cyanotypes were of leaves and twigs but he also had an example of a large cyanotype he created by setting a shopping cart on its side on the emulsion-treated cloth.

•••

Harvey Koizim has been doing photography for a long time, starting with the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) when he was 13. Koizim told me he had "gotten very into taking macro pictures of flowers." He lives in the Wooster Square area of New Haven and is one of the founders of the City Seed farmers market there. He began taking photos of the veggies to use as promotional material for the market and then discovered that he loved them as a subject in their own right.

"I really like it," Koizim said. "They're almost three-dimensional."

Koizim shoots with a digital camera because, he said, "Digital is much more adaptable to all kinds of situations. You can push the sensitivity way up," allowing the use of available light rather than flash even in many low light circumstances.

The photos offered a tasty combination of form, texture and color. Looking at the images, I thought of crowds of people. The fruits or vegetables clustered as recognizable groups but each individual had its own identity.

•••

Tim Nikiforuk was showing two disparate bodies of work: portraits, executed either with paint and ink or graphite, and abstract images of viruses warped and filtered in Adobe Photoshop and then colored by hand.

Nikiforuk pointed out that the virus pictures were composed within the frame in almost a mushroom cloud shape, an allusion, he said, to biowarfare. He prints them out as linework on coated paper and then selectively colors them with ink and watercolors to get a pulsating, psychedelic design.



The graphite portraits were impressive in the way Nikiforuk combines photorealist rendering of some features within the context of a contour sketch.

•••

Eric Iannucci used humor and smarts to set up his Artist for Sale room. Iannucci stocked the space with a lively collection of foam masks, clay artwork and assemblages made out of lightweight inexpensive materials.

•••

Lauren Laudano's untitled installation—or perhaps it's called "Elastic Web;" she didn't seem too sure—filled a room. It was a complex netted sculpture made from rubber bands. Painstakingly, I assume.

"It started with the material. I got a bag of rubber bands and decided to create a system to make the piece and this is how it came out," Laudano told me. She said that it was made site-specific to conform to the space.



"For this and another piece, I wanted to use material that's usually discarded. I'm interested in looking at the pieces that people throw away and disregard, to see of they can be looked at in anther way," said Laudano.

The malleability of the material enabled an engaging interplay of line, perspective and form.

•••

Over at 39 Church Street, I met painter Nick Mead. Mead, an expatriate Brit, told me he trained as a figurative painter as an undergraduate. A year spent in the United States as an undergraduate exposed him to a lot of abstract painting. His works combine line and the use of thick blobs of paint that bring an element of relief to the surface of his canvases.


Mead noted that it was "problematical" coming up with one's own voice as an abstract painter because so many ideas have already been explored. He arrived at his present style as a "juncture" of his figurative and abstract work. The compositions "refer to a landscape of sorts, a psychological landscape as much as physical." He emphasized, however, that his "landscapes" were not literal representations.



A third element in the paintings is the staining of the canvas caused by the linseed oil in the linework leeching into the rabbit skin chalk ground. Mead said, "It makes it kind of an active process in itself." The blobs, Mead noted, have the effect of "making the surface not exactly three-dimensional but they physically activate the surface. It creates a kind of ripple.

CWOS Weekend 3 this Saturday, Sunday: Alternative Space and more downtown

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios
Oct. 9—10, 2010: Alternative Space (196-212 College St.), 39 Church St., 300 George St.

Press release

This past weekend, over 200 art-seekers explored New Haven's neighborhoods with City-Wide Open Studios. Artists reported heavy traffic, and roughly 50 people participated in guided bike tours led by the Devil's Gear. Saturday night also saw the return of the Artspace Underground, bringing cutting-edge performances, experimental time-based art, and 100 people to the gallery. On Sunday, several workshops and demonstrations were hosted, and visitors left with a better understanding of the creative process - and sometimes even their own creative product.

The final weekend of Oct. 9—10 marks the return of the Alternative Space, located at the Coop Center for Creativity at 196-212 College Street. This year, the Alternative Space promises more interactive, site-specific installations than ever before.

Visitors are encouraged to begin with Colin Burke's (Web) installation, a camera obscura on the second floor of the Coop Center for Creativity. A camera obscura is a darkened room in which images of the external surroundings are projected onto its walls through an extremely limited light source.

From there, visitors can stop by SERA (Social Experiments Relational Acts) Nail Salon at 206 College Street. Set in a vacant, fully-outfitted nail salon, the event examines the notion of art as service and is organized by artist Ted Efremoff. Visitors will have the opportunity to engage with artists directly amid massage chairs, nail files, and more. Next door, Gene Beery (Web) and Eric Litke (Web) have created Pictures and Words, a mixed-media exhibit set in the former location of College Wines and Spirits.

At 198 College Street, visitors will find the Art of the Warrior, featuring works by several veterans. The group's collective artist statement acknowledges the profound effect of war on our veterans, and "reflects the personal rather than the political. Many of the pieces in this collection were created not with the intention of selling, but as a way to make sense of, integrate, and even transcend their experiences." At 1 p.m. on Sat., Oct. 9, veterans Lanse Dowell and Esdras Lubin will perform as a musical duo on reeds and bass, respectively.

Visitors can expect another musical performance as well. On Saturday and Sunday between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., Cris Shirley and Marion Hunt will improvise using found instruments in their installation at 202 College Street.

In addition to the 45 artists exhibiting at the Alternative Space this year, two other sites will be open to the public. 300 George Street is home to the Haskins Laboratory and several participating artists. 39 Church Street will also have its doors open.

Discounted parking is available through LA-Z parking, located at George and College. Visitors should inform the attendant that they are visiting City-Wide Open Studios; parking will be $5 on both days.

Artspace has been documenting City-Wide Open Studios with a full slate of bloggers. Check out the CWOS blog for ongoing documentation of the events as they unfold, and see City-Wide Open Studios from a few angles.

City-Wide Open Studios is presented by TD Bank, and is made possible by the support of many other sponsors, including the New Haven Advocate, Yale University, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Alliance Bank, City of New Haven Department of Economic Development, and MacWorks LLC.