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 Many of the images have art historical references—Mark Rothko, Howard Hodgkins, Richard Serra.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.

•••

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.

•••

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.

•••

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.

•••

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."

2010 City-Wide Open Studios, weekend 2, Sunday

I just had a couple of hours on Sunday to visit with artists so—as is usually the case—I had to miss more than I could see (but even more so). I stopped first at St. Paul & St. James Episcopal Church on Olive Street where four artists were showing their work. Three photographers had pictures on display: Diane Cushing-Mathews, Gwenith Heuss-Severance and Phoebe Barron. Barron's images were particularly striking. Deftly composed crystalline photos of architectural and natural subjects, they exuded a celebration of pattern, color and form.

Robin Hochstrasser, the only non-photographer in the group, was displaying monotype prints. Hochstrasser said she had gotten interested in monotypes after seeing the work of Sarah Gustafson at the Guilford Art Fair a few years ago. She decided to take a printmaking class taught by Gustafson at Creative Arts Workshop and another taught by Maura Galante.

Monotypes, as the name implies, are non-repeatable prints. (Monoprints, on the other hand, may feature repeated imagery but with slight or exaggerated differences from individual print to print.) Hochstrasser paints onto the plexiglas plate and runs the plate and paper through the press. She repeats the process, she told me, "layering until I get the desired effect."

Hochstrasser's monotypes include elements of collage and show a fine appreciation for the way the ink interacts with the paper. She uses netting, shells, paper cutouts and leaves and branches as printing surfaces in conjunction with her abstract mark making. Hochstrasser creates negative space by flicking mineral spirits at the painted plate.

"I use a lot of found objects, natural objects to print or I create my own shapes," Hochstrasser said, pointing out silhouettes of birds in her imagery. "I put it through the press if I can but sometimes they are too fragile so I press them by hand."

Hochstrasser is a teacher and currently tutors students at Bear Path School in Hamden. She said she has always incorporated art into her curriculum. Printmaking, in particular, offers creative possibilities for young people, she said.

"There so many things you can do with printmaking," Hochstrasser said. Students can use offbeat surfaces such as cut potatoes or rocks to hold the ink. "They always turn out unique and nice and they get some kind of image."

"Most artists, no matter what medium they are doing now, have done printmaking in their lives and love it and want to get back to it," said Hochstrasser.

•••

At a studio on Willow Street, photographer Linda Lindroth is reconsidering the range of work she has done since the 1970's. Examples of her work over the past four decades were on display on the studio walls: street photography in the style of her former teacher Garry Winogrand; photograms of urban detritus a la a digital-era Man Ray; landscapes; a series of images of a Doberman Pinscher dressed in a suit that reminded me of Diane Arbus' or Weegee's pictures; a large mixed media wall sculpture. Lindroth is contemplating her works in terms of the "remix" concept cribbed from the music world: recombining original elements of previous works to create new pieces.

The idea isn't new to Lindroth. For most of the 1990's, she told me, she had worked on mixed media pieces with a photographic base. One of this series, "Trail Trial of Wilma Mankiller," was hanging on one wall of Lindroth's space. The work was inspired by Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, the memoir of Wilma Mankiller, first female chief of the Cherokee Nation. In the book, Mankiller recalled being uprooted and sent by train from her native Oklahoma to San Francisco.

"Trail Trial of Wilma Mankiller" is composed of a background of multiple wood panels large enough to fit 16"x20" photos. Two other panels are attached to the front of the piece, mounted on wheels that ride along a series of rails on the top and bottom. Additional found objects are attached to the work: a rusted, crushed automoblie tailpipe; metal corner brackets from an old trunk on the corners of some of the panels; a metal handle one might hold onto for balance when standing on a train.

Pointing to the effaced imagery on the panels, Lindroth noted that it all came from her own photographic landscapes—a branch with seed pods, a marsh, irises. "Going back to my stock images and selecting them, they become art supplies," Lindroth told me.

"I liked the way that if I smudged the images they looked like smudged windows," Lindroth said. The effect is akin to how the landscape might have blurred by for Mankiller on her train journey from Oklahoma.

I asked Lindroth how she integrated the photographic imagery into the piece.

"I wet the [photo] paper and put gesso on the panel. I placed the photo on the gesso and then squeegeed and rolled it until it was flat. Some of the gesso comes up and dries. Then I sand it with a hand sander so it becomes smooth. If there are bubbles in the paper, they break. You get a surface that is very fresco-like," explained Lindroth. In order to make it appear "more photo-like," Lindroth touched up the images with silver and black oil stick and then went back and sanded them some more.

"I've found with working with found objects, that people volunteer things," Lindroth said, meaning their own memories and associations with objects they have encountered. "It's a talisman of a kind."

The various found objects in the work are evocative of travel—the wheels and rails, trunk brackets, road detritus such as the tail pipe. But the mounted handle also looks like a cross with two crossbars. This is a wonderful double-edged symbol, evoking both physical balance on the journey but also the need to grasp onto something for spiritual balance and grounding.

As she noted, if she hadn't told me it was "about" Wilma Mankiller, I might have made my own associations and interpretation. The viewer, Lindroth said, "has to bring something to a piece like this."

"So it's about the process of life and moving from one thing to another both as an artist and a viewer," said Lindroth.

•••

Constance LaPalombara has her studio on the same floor as Lindroth. LaPalombara had just gotten back the day before from three months in Maine, including a September artist residency on Cranberry Island.

LaPalombara always paints on site or directly from life, whether working on still life’s, seascapes or urban landscapes. This can present some real challenges. I asked about one work, an untitled painting of a moonrise over the water. LaPalombara noted that it was difficult to paint "because I was practically in the dark while painting it. I had done studies [of moonrises on paper] so that helped me." (LaPalombara had a pile of studies on paper for various paintings on a table in the studio.)

The quality of light is LaPalombara's true subject. The moonrise painting is characterized by a feathering of soft pastel colors. The sky graduates from the orange horizon up through a layer of clouds and further through transitions of translucent green, blue and violet. The heavens reflect on the water in purples and pinks.

Her Maine landscape paintings capture the placid feel of the shore. There are clusters of small homes, outcroppings of rock, soft waves, high skies with delicate clouds.

I was struck by the way her paintings capture a powerful sense of mood. LaPalombara is not a fussy painter, preferring to work with an economy of detail. Her urban landscapes—many of which were part of a 2007-2008 show The City at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale—are notable for their blocks of color and architectural shadow. They have a Hopper-esque quality to them, conveying both beauty and solitude albeit without alienation.