CWOS AIRS Hamden

I approached City-Wide Open Studios differently this year. I wanted to make as many visits to disparate locations as possible so I didn't spend as much time as I like talking with artists. For example, where in the past two years I spent part of both Saturday and Sunday at visiting studios on the Erector Square weekend, this year I had to squeeze Erector Square into two or so hours on Sunday before I went to work.

I started on Friday with the Hamden AIRS, following that with a visit to Westville. There I took in the AIRS as well as other attractions at ArLOW, and the Kehler Liddell Gallery. Saturday started with Westville-a return to the AIRS and over to West Rock Gallery to savor Gar Waterman's sculpture. From there I headed to Gilbert Street in West Haven, checking out the AIRS exhibitions and the sculpture in Susan Clinard's studio. I ended up downtown, visiting the AIRS and Roberto's restaurant, dropping in on Jerry Saladyga, Steve Grossman, Silas Finch and Jo Kremer at 39 Church and detouring down near Cafe Nine to observe the works in progress of "aerosol art," organized (at least, in part) by artist Robert Greenberg. Sunday started with the Fair Haven AIRS and concluded at Erector Square. Whew!

(Before continuing, I want to note a caveat. I couldn't take notes on and write about everybody. The fact that some artists aren't discussed in this post is not because they weren't worthy of attention.)

The Hamden AIRS focused on photography. I spoke about their art and process with Michelle Reynard, Regan Avery, Cara Vickers-Kane and installation artist Greg Garvey. (I spent more time talking with artists at the Hamden AIRS than anywhere else. I quickly realized that would be a recipe for not getting very far in my explorations.)

Reynard was showing medium format color prints, night photography. The series evolved over the last couple of years, she told me. Her images, several of which were shot at the Shoreline Trolley Museum, featured long exposures, rich colors and sharp focus. Reynard is working with film, not digital, and she appreciates the various ways that different emulsions respond to different light situations. Particularly with night photography, she said, there is a large element of the unknown. The end result is a combination of choosing certain materials, estimating exposure time and "alchemy."

"The film does its own magic. You can sort of but never quite predict it," said Reynard. "The wonderful thing about film is that delayed gratification—not looking at the back of the camera to see what you got."

A lot of the scenes, said Reynard, were shot several different times with different kinds of emulsions, some of which have been discontinued in the last several years. Different emulsions work better in different situations. She noted that Kodak Portra is "more buttery." She used it for three of the images from the Trolley Museum. Working with tungsten light, it yielded images bathed in a nostalgic gold glow. I particularly liked an image of one of the libraries at Yale. Shot through big glass windows at night when the first floor was empty, it has a hint if melancholy. But that note is leavened by the appearance on the floor of a paper airplane.

Regan Avery also still uses film and, like Reynard, her images were primarily shot at dusk or in the night. For this "Mirrors" series, Avery planted a 12x12-inch mirror in the sand on the shoreline, facing away from the water. She shoots with a 6x7 medium format but crops the images square to evoke the mirror itself.

"I like perspective changes. It's one of the fun things about this project," said Avery. "It is actually disorienting to see two things at once."

Avery takes time to set up her tableaux, positioning the mirror both so as to catch an interesting reflection behind her and to have that reflection appear out of synch with the rest of the image. Especially compelling is a picture taken on the shore in Rye, New York. The water and sky are a dark night blue and in the upper quarter of the photo there is a double black horizon line (a jetty with a land mass behind it?). The mirror is planted in the sand in the foreground, angled slightly up toward the left of the image. In strong, almost surreal, contrast to the night darkness, it's an image of the nearby amusement park with lights and a ferris wheel.

One print, shot at a beach in Greenwich—Avery said the placidity of Long Island Sound is more conducive to this concept than the more turbulent ocean—features dark sand and the mirror reflecting an overcast light sky and what appears to be a castle in the distance. It is a well-made illusion, a sand castle small and close. Avery told me she had to spend time building it and getting the perspective right.

Cara Vickers-Kane was raised Mormon and taught that human bodies in general—and the female body, in particular—were one's temple and should always be covered up. She left the faith but the fascination with the body has remained. It has been accentuated by a personal history of gaining and losing weight. For her series "Self-Portraits of Your Mother," Vickers-Kane shot nude self-portraits of herself over a 14-month period during which she was losing weight. In all the images, she is posed on a plush couch, often accompanied by her German Shepherd. The dog is a "symbol of domesticity," she told me.

The self-portraits were shot with a medium format film camera. Vickers-Kane also received permission from the University of Connecticut to use a medium format digital camera to shoot 18 daguerreotype frames from the university's special collection. Using a computer, she replaced the antique daguerreotype images with her own portraits. The reference to the past is bolstered by several of the poses, which echo nudes in paintings by Manet, Courbet, Rubens and others. Vickers-Kane told me she "like[s] the point in history where painting split off" from an emphasis on faithful representation, displaced by photography's superior capabilities in that regard.

Greg Garvey's installation was titled "Don't Push Me 'coz I'm close to the edge/I'm trying not to lose my head..." (derived from lyrics of Grandmaster Flash's 1980's rap hit "The Message"). Garvey's forte is creating installations using modern technology that are both thought-provoking and accessible (see here for a post on his 2006 CWOS installation and here for a post on his 2007 installation). For "Don't Push Me," Garvey erected a mini-theater where viewers can look through security peepholes at video loops playing on iMac computers. The loops could be changed by pressing a button mounted on the wall near the peephole. There were 20 loops. Some were nature scenes shot by Garvey with a digital camera on a walk at Hammonassett State Park. The other videos, found on the Internet, consisted of scenes of military mayhem, both real and made in Hollywood. These included the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, footage from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Trinity nuclear test.

Although Garvey's video compilation was non-narrative in nature, he was influenced by Soviet avant garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage. It shares with Eisenstein "the principle of juxtaposing two different perspectives or threads of action." Juxtaposition can create new meanings. Here, contemplation of nature is juxtaposed with the existence—in the same temporal plane if different location—of war. At the heart of "Don't Push Me" is a critique of 21st century fragmentation and alienation.

"The shots of nature and contemplation suggests a way of looking that is literally about being in a Zen-like state, about experiencing where there is simply a sense of a continuum," explained Garvey. "And then suddenly you see something that is all about the action and arrow of time and irreversibility of time and implication of death."

The use of the peephole reinforces the metaphor. It is a security mechanism employed, Garvey said, "in the cocoon of the household through which we peer out from behind the safety of the door." The peephole creates a kind of distancing from the parade of alternately peaceful and disturbing scenes. The video, while created with contemporary technology, is playing on slower computers (by about 5-8 years!). This causes the imagery to stream in kind of a slow, herky-jerky way, adding another element of edginess.

Speaking of edginess, Bradley Wollman's The Little War photographs, which previously were shown in Real Art Ways' Real Room, were even stronger in this setting. The eight photographs—recreations by Wollman with toys of scenes from the Iraq War—were hung in two horizontal rows of four each. The gritty nature of the images resonated in the semi-industrial garage space.

Photographer Keith Johnson's (web) images explored elements of texture, shape and color. There were also some visual puns. One triptych, entitled "CMY," depicted a succession of rundown bungalows. One was painted in a soft blue, a second was colored a washed-out yellow and the bungalow on the right was a stark pink.

Alternative Space: Short takes

City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St., New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Alternative Space: Short takes
Oct. 28, 2007.

I was unable to go through the Alternative Space on Saturday, Oct. 27, because I was in Boston visiting my son at college and protesting the war in Iraq and the coming war with Iran. But I spent the better part of five hours at the Alternative Space in the old Hamden Middle School on Sunday, Oct. 28. Overall, I would say that it all felt much more low-key and reserved than last year. Of course, that is a subjective impression. It seemed less expansive—there were parts of the school that were utilized last year that weren't this fall. I occasionally noticed the color banners identifying the media being displayed in particular rooms but didn't use them for way-finding.

•••

Derek Leka was showing his acrylic paintings in a room on the first floor. Three of them were indicative of a new direction he is taking in his work.

"I started from liking Mondrian and his ideas with how to deal with space. And I liked Albers as far as color and light. It's blasphemy to call them boring but I wished Mondrian would use other colors and Albers would break out of his format," Leka told me. "So I combine them. And since it is the 21st century, it is the voice of those languages in a 21st century voice."

Where Leka had in the past generally confined himself within the constraints of straight-line geometric forms, his newer works chart an evolution into more organic forms.

"I've allowed myself to let it look like circuitry or organic," he said. A work like "Invariant Discordant Catastrophe" (see image) starts at the top with rectangular forms. But as the imagery moves down the painting it opens up first into a splaying of wires and cables and finally into free-form space. The progression of imagery within the painting reflects Leka's cautious approach to changing his style.

"I'm trying to make it my language and a new language. I'm still stretching into new areas but trying to stay within my language," explained Leka. "I always want them to look like they are by the same artist. I don't want to make something so simple that it looks like it's by a different artist or that I'm trying to change my style."

This was Leka's third CWOS. He wanted to show all work from this year "both for myself and the people who already know me. So people can know I'm working. And I want to see them all in one place to see how they communicate with each other and get feedback."

Some of the feedback he got surprised him. One of the "slow, simple" paintings, as he described it, was built of different shades of blue squares and rectangles. Leka felt it might be "boring." But many of his visitors, he said, told him they liked it the best.

"It's nice to get feedback. That's why this is great, of course," he said.

•••

Marc Pypaert is an electron microscopist by trade. In an artist statement he had available, he wrote, "I have spent most of my career looking at cells through the lenses of a microscope and marveling at the beauty of life and creation." The photos he was showing were not taken through the electron microscope. Rather, Pypaert uses a 35-mm camera and a 55 mm macro lens to shoot objects very close up. This included the ripples left behind in beach sand at the water line, bubbles in mottled ice, the bottom of a cracked enamel basin and rusted metal—a mélange of congealing browns and pastel turquoise.

"The idea is that they are abstract. I try and make the images look like a painting," Pypaert told me. In the case of the basin, he saw something of a landscape. The grains of sand, shot very close up with a high resolution camera, look almost like pixels.

Like many of the photographers I have spoken with recently, Pypaert is moving, albeit reluctantly, from film to digital imaging. He had been using the darkroom at Yale but it is being closed. Taking film to be processed and scanned can be prohibitively expensive for a serious but non-professional photographer. His conclusion: "Why not just be controlling the digital process myself?"

He entered Open Studios for the first time in 2004. He had always had an interest in being an artist, he said, but couldn't afford to.

"[City-Wide Open Studios] is great for that reason because it allows everyone to get a shot," said Pypaert.

•••

Suzan Shutan was showing "Fragmented Narratives," an installation that is still a work in progress. In a little dark room, she had hung wire and twine sculptures from the ceiling. Through the sculptures—held more or less in place by nearly invisible fishing wire—she projected a loop of short videos. The sequence included goldfish beneath the sun-reflected surface of a pool, a couple of ducks gliding over a pond surface, a young girl twirling in a dance, a ceiling fan spinning with a slow motion hum. A fan blew softly through the sculptures, which cast gently moving shadows on the projected video. The video included occasional narration, lines that Shutan took more or less at random, Dada-style, from novels she really likes.

As the ducks were swimming on the pond, the narrator (a female voice) says, "It's a secret between us and a secret that's being kept from us." Sounds like the varying takes on contemporary art (although in that case the word "and" should be replaced by "or.")

One visitor told Shutan, "I know the secret!" When Shutan inquired, "What's the secret?" the visitor replied, "I can't tell you!"

"It was the best comment I got," Shutan told me (now the secret is out). "My own audience keeping my secret from me."

•••

Last year, Greg Garvey created an installation in the old Hamden Middle School music room using iMac computers left behind when the school was closed. This year Garvey was using iMacs again for a different installation, one that touched on the growing and intertwined fears of identity theft and virtual surveillance.

The four iMacs were labeled with bold declarations: two stated "Trust Me" while the others were emblazoned with "Go Ahead" or the more provocative "Make My Day." The set-up was in a first floor hallway. Like a carnival barker, Garvey accosted passersby: "Let me steal your identity;" "Step up and enter all your personal information." On the screens was a familiar display, a form with fields for the computer user to enter personal information: name, address, phone number. But there were also fields for Social Security number, credit card number, bank account number and PIN. At the bottom of the form there was a button ripe with double meaning. "Submit," it said.

There was a disclaimer at the bottom of each form that none of the information would actually be retained. In fact, Garvey told me that the "submit" button was actually a "clear form" button. Notwithstanding the disclaimers, he wasn't getting a lot of takers.

"There are those who are reluctant and if I press them hard enough, I find their reluctance was related to a real experience of identity theft," Garvey told me.

"I like the piece because in a way it's a one-liner but it's much more than that. It allows me to explore issues," said Garvey. "You can imagine how banal it would be if I made a painting with a screen like this. It shows the limitations of traditional media. There are ideas, even emotions, that can't be captured by other media.

"There are emerging dimensions of our human experience that require new ways to comment and subvert," Garvey said.

•••

Jonathan Waters said that assembling his sculptural installation, which practically filled a room at Hamden Middle School, was "like wrestling an anaconda." Waters titled his work "Corrievrekin" after a whirlpool off the west coast of Scotland. ("My father," Waters said, "used to like the sound of that word.")

Waters used 2-inch orangeburg pipe, plywood and black gaffer's tape to create the spiraling sculpture. He built it in the room. It took about four or five hours, he said. He then spent a few days using the black tape to create lines on the walls that complemented the sculptural form.

"I had a really low budget on the piece. I had the pipe and had been thinking about what to do with it for a while," Waters said. He had been working with harder-edged forms, Waters said, but he was "starting to work with curvilinear elements." "Corrievrekin" was a way "to marry the two together." But the pipe was the snake Waters had to struggle with and tame to his vision. Tape and tie wraps were holding it together.

There was music accompanying the sculpture, composed by his friend Nelson Bogart specifically for the installation. Waters noted that in the beginning of the composition, which is orchestral in style although created digitally, there is the sound of (synthesized) bagpipes. The music, Waters said, "has eight repeating elements. It starts off kind of slow and as it goes up it builds in intensity." While I was there, one visitor told Waters the sculpture was the best thing he'd seen so far that day.

"It was great to have the opportunity to put this thing together," Waters told me.

•••

This was the first Open Studios for Joseph Fucigna, the Weston, CT-based sculptor. One of the artists-in-residence for this year's Alternative Space, he chose the room he was in because it was a big, "relatively clean" space with good lighting. He set an old teacher's desk and chair off kilter in the middle of the room.

"I was walking around trying to find elements to put on it. It was hard," Fucigna said. Ultimately, he scavenged up an old test and a student I.D.

Fucigna is attracted to the use and transformation of industrial materials in his work. Not materials with a strong identity, like car bumpers, but rather the type of anonymous yet functional products that are part of the background noise of everyday existence. Viewers can respond to these works in diverse ways—explore the material, try and figure out what it is, appreciate the formal aesthetic aspects of the sculpture. His material of choice for his installation was black plastic deer netting.

His current work comes from the idea of water stains or mold, the notion that "something ominous is underneath or behind the wall or ceiling," Fucigna told me. And what better place to imagine such a likelihood than a shuttered old school built on a toxic waste site? Fucigna spent about 25 hours arranging the black deer netting in the room. It appears to spill out of the ceiling down onto the desk. It bubbles out of the desk drawers and trails way on the floor. As the afternoon sunlight played off the netting, Fucigna contemplated the possible interpretations.

"Is it billowing smoke or lava? Is it coming up or going down?" he mused.

"Each installation gives you different things to respond to. It helps my work grow. It helps you to think on your feet," Fucigna said. "And there's something quite wonderful about throwing it all out at the end of the day."

•••

Kelly Bigelow Becerra and Roland Becerra were in high spirits when I stopped by their room. I had met Bigelow Becerra last year when I checked out her installation "Harvest: Hidin' from the Hair Cut, Amongst the Sweet Corn." The reason for the married couple's excitement was showing in the darkened room: clips from and a trailer for their short animated art/horror film Dear Beautiful.

Dear Beautiful won Moving Pictures Magazine's Spring 2007 Short Film Award Contest in the Animation category. The award scored the couple a paid trip to the Cannes Film Festival where the short was shown.

Becerra, who received his M.F.A. from Yale in 2001 and teaches at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, used still photography, hand drawings and animated painting to create the visually unique film. What he didn't use was video. The paintings are of areas around New Haven. The photographs are of friends playing the roles of the characters in the film.

"It's a combination of scanning in the actual paintings and drawings, using stop-motion photography and compiling all those in Photoshop and using Flash and Final Cut Pro to make it move," Roland Becerra explained. "It's painting outside the computer and painting inside the computer."

Bigelow Becerra described the short as "the calling card to get into competitions: 'We can do this and this is what it will look like.'" The ultimate aim is to parlay the short into a contract to make Dear Beautiful a feature film.

The short will be featured with the other Spring 2007 Short Film Contest winners on a DVD to be included in an upcoming issue of Moving Pictures Magazine.