Ghost Ship Earth?
Artspace show takes our environmental pulse
New Haven Advocate
By Geoffrey Detrani
9:53 a.m. EDT, July 12, 2011
Despite the protests of some ideological refusnicks who see empirical data as political propaganda, there is little doubt that the alteration of our planets life support system in a process clumsily termed "global warming" is proceeding alarmingly apace. By now we know that cheap energy and life styles of facile convenience accrue an enormous long term cost and place our future in peril.
Among the ready metaphors for this uber-theme is the story of the 19th century freighter the Mary Celeste. This ill-fated ship, discovered adrift in the ocean with cargo, provisions and personal effects in their unmolested place but with no trace of the crew has become the model of the ghost ship — a world unto itself, un-peopled, freed from the imperatives of human purpose, plying its random course Marie Celeste is also a term researchers have pinned to the phenomena known as Colony Collapse Disorder, wherein bees, for some attributed reason, flee their scene, ceasing to do the important ecological things that they do and leaving their colony a ghost town.
The exhibition Marie Celeste plays off the multiple connotations of this term in assembling the work of 11 artists whose work considers our troubled socio-ecological present. Curated by Liza Statton, this thoughtfully presented show encompasses a range of approaches — from allegory to non-objectivity, from the documentary to the ethereal. Several artists choose the allegorical approach. In Joseph Smolinski's delicate and beautiful pencil drawings and watercolors, animals share the picture with the cell phone towers and electric wires that have encroached upon their living space.
Smolinski collaborates with Jessica Schwind on a piece consisting of photographic images immersed in a buckets of clear resin evoking references to the world of man-made toxicity we have conjured. In Stephen Bush's lush, gloss and liquidy enamel paintings, pools of saturated colors abut and swirl to depict animals and beekeepers, alpine landscapes and sky.
Eva Struble's paintings show us things we can find in any landscape of post-industrial dereliction. Picturing oil tanks and jumbles of industrial scrap, she adds some levity by the use of color and the juxtaposition of some incongruent florid details. Erika Blumfield's color photographs flicker between the realms of document and poetry. Blumfield frames closely rendered views of Antarctic ice allowing us to examine its assortment of visual properties in images that take on an almost elegiac cast.
Shari Mendelson contributes inventive re-workings of traditional glass forms rendered in discarded and repurposed plastic. By sorting and combining fused and molded plastic, Mendelson assembles a quixotic array of faux glass bric-a-brac and a menagerie of animal forms.
Consisting of blocky, brick and debris-like forms coated with a dermis of mosaic tile and gathered in a pile, Jason Middlebrook's sculpture suggests a prettified covering up of ruin.
Nick Lamia's paintings come off the wall by incorporating geometric imagery that spreads from canvas to adjoining walls conjoined with blocks of colored wood spread across the floor. Viewers are invited to arrange the blocks as they see fit. Taken together the whole project seems like an open source planning tool to envision the grid lines of a future city.
Allison Williams and Tattfoo Tan embrace the garden and its cognates. Williams presents an ad hoc garden shed built from found material that functions as an ersatz studio and place of botanical experiment, while Fan's gallery project consists of a wall-sized color chart for hues derived from the natural colors of fruits and vegetables.
Operating on a more techno-poetic level Mayumi Nishida offers an interactive work wherein the viewer's action of pouring water into a container triggers a canopy of LED lights to fire in a sympathetic sparkle of color.
Little in this show feels like admonishment, which is a relief. There is no instructive or overtly didactic work that seeks to educate or scold the viewer. Instead, we see a variety of views on a vexing and complex theme — one that needs to remain a centerpiece of our societal awareness.
For Immediate Release: May 12 - September 9, 2011 : Artspace Presents Marie Celeste
Artspace announces Marie Celeste, an environmentally-informed group exhibition New Haven, Connecticut – From May 12 – September 9, 2011, Artspace presents Marie Celeste, a thematic group exhibition that uses the recent environmental phenomenon of “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD) or “Mary Celeste Disorder,” in which bees mysteriously disappear from their hives, as a metaphor for environmental consciousness and an exploration of the ethical sublime in our post-industrial era.
Ranging from site-specific installations to painting and photography, the diverse works in this exhibition enter a broad, polyphonic discourse on contemporary art practice and the environment that has been ongoing since the 1970s. The eleven artists participating in the exhibition ask viewers to see and think about humankind’s relationship to science and nature—both as a physical environment and an idea. Their works probe the boundaries that encompass our moral and ethical obligations to care for our surroundings, now, and in the future, and make manifest the interconnectedness of ecology and technology in the 21st century. And, while the artists in Marie Celeste explore the conflicts between individual and collective actions, preservation and
transformation, production and reclamation, and notions of disenchantment and optimism, their works are created from a deeply personal artistic practice that is grounded in the production of emotional affect rather than in the production of meaning.
Artists include: Erika Blumenfeld, Stephen Bush, Nick Lamia, Jason Middlebrook, Shari Mendelson, Mayumi Nishida, Jessica Schwind, Joseph Smolinksi, Eva Struble, Tattfoo Tan, Alison Williams. Organized by Liza Statton
Marie Celeste debuts new works by Stephen Bush, Nick Lamia, Shari Mendelson, Jessica Schwind and Joseph Smolinski, and Alison Williams. With the support of Artspace, the City of New Haven, and the Buildings Materials Reuse Association, Williams will realize Homage to Guerilla Gardening: a new public art installation in the nearby Chapel Street greenspace, The Lot. Working with a team of students and local volunteers, Williams will design and install a community garden using donated household materials from throughout New England. The public will be invited to participate in the growth and care of the garden as it gradually transforms the space during the 4 months long exhibition.
Marie Celeste opens Thursday, May 12, with a reception for the artists from 6 to 8PM. On May 15, Marie Celeste will be the setting for the welcome kick-off for Decon' 11, the
annual conference of the Building Materials Reuse Association. The BMRA is national non-profit educational and research organization whose mission is to facilitate building deconstruction and the reuse or recycling of recovered building materials.
In collaboration with The Marsh Botanical Garden and Whitney Humanities Center, Artspace copresents The Gardener's Shadow, a film and discussion series centered on sustainability and gardening, July 14, 19, 21, 26, and 28 at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center. Screenings take place at 7:30 pm at the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, and will be followed by a wide-ranging discussion session with audience-generated topics about each film. Free and open to the public.
Marie Celeste is made possible thanks to the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Blue State Coffee, The UI Company/Southern Connecticut Gas, Zinc Restaurant, and The Study at Yale. Urban Miners, The Devil’s Gear, and Habitat for Humanity/ReStore have provided materials support to Homage to Guerilla Gardening.
Artspace is a visionary and dynamic non-profit organization supporting emerging artists and building new audiences contemporary art. Artspace's programs are made possible with the support of the City of New Haven Office of Economic Development, the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, Yale University and other area colleges, local businesses, and individual Friends of Artspace.
Artspace is free and open to the public Wednesday and Thursday 12 pm – 6 pm, and Friday and Saturday 12 pm – 8 pm, with holiday closings during the Independence Day and Labor Day
weekends. www.artspacenh.org
For Immediate Release: February 9, 2010: Artspace Presents SCRAWL!: Drawing Writ Large.
Artspace is pleased to announce SCRAWL, a seven week festival of site-specific drawing and related events. Beginning February 9, 2011, 23 artists will work individually and in teams to transform the landscape of Artspace with simple materials and their own ingenuity.
SCRAWL kicks off on February 9th with Sprint-to-SCRAWL. Beginning at 6:30 pm, SCRAWLers will race down Crown Street to cross the starting line – a large ribbon in Artspace's front door on Orange Street – and commence drawing! Area musicians will provide a festive soundtrack and refreshments will be available. SCRAWL's major reception, with the work revealed in its entirety, will be at its end, March 25, 2011, from 6 pm – 8 pm.
Each participating artist or team of artists – all of them SCRAWLers – is assigned his or her own portion of wall or floor to work with, which will segue into other participants' space within the main gallery at 50 Orange Street. The SCRAWLers will create their pieces without being able to see what the artists next to them are doing, ultimately collaborating on one giant collective work.
Inspired by the Surrealist's exquisite corpse games, SCRAWL intends to create an exhibition in an experimental way with minimal means. We start with nothing but bare walls and some markers, which we give over to selected artists, without being able to control the exact outcome. Viewing the working process as it unfolds in real-time and exploring the experimental possibilities of large-scale drawing in a complex interior space are integral to SCRAWL's methodology.
View the full release here.
For Immediate Release: October 26, 2010: Artspace Presents Betwixt & Between
Betwixt & Between is a group exhibition of contemporary short videos that inject the ordinary domestic landscape with existential content and psychological slippages. Informed by the visual and conceptual strategies of the Surrealists, and echoing their simple, direct methods for constructing dream-like experiences, the artists in Betwixt & Between create works that reveal the authority, alienation, and desire embedded in everyday objects and occurrences.
Although the artists assembled in the exhibition vary in style and practice, their works share an unexpected beauty, and reveal a common aspiration to bring new awareness to the body and consciousness by questioning the moral ambiguity of the ordinary in surprising and often humorous ways. Participating artists include Terry Fox, Nadia Hironaka, Alex Hubbard, Takeshi Muratra, Jeff Ostergren, Delphine Reist, Hiraki Sawa, Carrie Schneider, and Tom Thayer.
Download the full release here.
For Immediate Release
July 9, 2010
July 30th Exhibitions and Event Openings:
Tag and Repeat x2; Cat Balco and the 10th Summer Apprenticeship Program, 5-7 PM
Particular Heights; Paul Theriault and Siebren Versteeg, 5-7 PM
Flock; City-Wide Open Studios Guest Juried Exhibition, 6-8 PM
SAP 2010: Tag and Repeat x2
The 10th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program with Master Artist, Cat Balco
July 30 – October 2, 2010
Public Reception: Friday, July 30, 5-7 PM, The Lot and Artspace
Each summer, Artspace invites a Master Artist and a group of New Haven public high school students to work together to create a new work of art for the Summer Apprenticeship Program (SAP). This year, Artspace is pleased to invite New Haven-based artist, Cat Balco as our 10th Master Artist. Beginning in July, Balco and her 12 student apprentices will create two site-specific installations that use painting's vernacular of color and form to explore the relationships between public and private space, and notions of individual and collective vision. As part of Cat's project, the Summer Apprentices will design and install a series of colorful banners on the exterior wall of one of the buildings enclosing The Lot. Spanning the height of the 40-foot building, these vibrant stripes will transform The Lot into a creative outpost for residents and visitors alike.
In just three short weeks, this group will get to know each other, learn new art-making skills, and complete an ambitious installation connecting the Artspace gallery and The Lot. This is Cat Balco's first public art installation--and the second SAP project installed in The Lot. Balco's project will also be accompanied by a collaborative wall drawing at the Artspace gallery.
We would like to thank our twelve dedicated apprentices and three interns from the following institutions:
Apprentices: Summer Eckart, Leandre Henry, Bethanie Highsmith, and Maxx Spinelli (Cooperative Arts and Humanities), Ariel Maiorano (Educational Center for the Arts), Milcaly Rodriguez (High School in the Community), Margaret Dobroth, Alexandra Larson, and Sean O'Brien (The Sound School), Riana Rodgers (Wilbur Cross High School), Melissa Schmidt (Seymour High School), and Kadija Tyrrell (New Haven Academy).
Interns: Rachel Kobasa (Haverford College), Sarah Wendell-Raynold (Southern Connecticut State University), and Maggie Vaughn (University of Hartford).
Tag and Repeat x2 is organized by Liza Statton, Laura Marsh, and Courtney McCarroll, and is part of SAP, Artspace’s flagship educational program for New Haven public high school students with diverse interests in creative expression and collaboration. Artspace has received support for SAP from Ameriprise Financial, John Barrett and Barrett Outdoor Communications, The George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Merrill Lynch, Alex Marathas, Mr. and Mrs. Sam Peterson, Russell Rainbolt, and other private donors.
size: small;">About the artist:
Cat Balco received her B.A. from Yale University in 1997 and her M.F.A. in painting from the Yale School of Art in 2007, where she was the recipient of the Helen Winternitz Award for Excellence in Painting and the Gloucester Landscape Painting Prize. She has been awarded residency fellowships through the Weir Farm Trust, the Albers Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Yale School of Art at Norfolk. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout U.S. galleries and exhibition spaces. Balco is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Hartford Art School at Hartford University.
Paul Theriault and Siebren Versteeg: Particular Heights
July 30 – October 23, 2010
Public Reception: Friday, July 30, 5-7 PM at Artspace
Conceived and constructed by artists Paul Theriault and Siebren Versteeg, Particular Heights is an interactive public art installation that locates an electronically-enhanced swing set in the Lot--a municipal pocket park and transit stop a few blocks from the Artspace gallery in downtown New Haven. Taking their cues from notions of play based on childhood experiences, the artists invite park patrons to translate their physical experiences on the swing set into virtual ones via the Internet. Visitors are encouraged to swing on this hand-made, one-person swing set outfitted with an LED that quantifies movement. The swinger’s motion triggers an electronic switch that performs two operations: 1) a digit is added to the counter after every swing, noting the participant’s progress 2) a web-camera captures an image of the swinger mid-flight. The images are continuously uploaded to an Artspace-linked website and will appear in real time on a monitor at Artspace’s Gallery. Particular Heights is an experimental installation that measures time through play and physical participation, allowing visitors to revisit the past through the technology of today.
About the artists:
Paul Theriault lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York. His work is based in new media, sound, and sculpture. From 1992-2002, Theriault lived in Chicago, Illinois, where he studied orchestral technique of the contra bass and worked primarily in digital video and sound-based art. Theriault is represented by Dutch Kills Gallery in New York and has exhibited work in the United States and abroad. Examples of his work appear on several online journals and in the Artspace Flatfile.
Siebren Versteeg is a multi-media artist whose work examines our daily interactions with the Internet and technology that serve as subjects for his installations. Versteeg graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Versteeg has shown both nationally and internationally, and currently lives and works in New York City.
Particular Heights is an Artspace commission that has been organized by curator, Liza Statton. This project is part of the ongoing Lot Public Art program, which has received support from: The George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation; The City of New Haven-Office of Economic and Business Development; and many individual friends of Artspace.
Flock; City-Wide Open Studios Guest Juried Exhibition
July 30-September 4, 2010
Public Reception: Friday, July 30, 6-8 PM
Curated by Patricia Hickson, the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Antheneum, and Kristina Newman-Scott, Director of Visual Arts at Real Art Ways, Flock features work from 27 regional artists participating in
Artspace’s 13th Annual City-Wide Open Studios. FLOCK is the first collaborative exhibition by the two Hartford-based curators, and it combines the singular visions of these distinctive individuals.
The 27 artists selected for FLOCK present works created in a variety of media, ranging from photography and painting, sculpture and site-specific installations, to clothing and craft. The diversity in these objects is echoed by the concerns that the works address, including themes such as consumption, gender politics, environmental decay, alienation, and notions of high and low art. While the works in FLOCK speak to the issues and conflicts embedded in contemporary culture, the objects also acknowledge art historical movements such as Minimalism, Process Art, Pop and Conceptual Art, among others. FLOCK reveals the myriad of approaches that artists use to respond to the world around them and how individual voices coalesce to form a vibrant community.
Participating Artists: Elizabeth Antle, James Ayers, John Bent, Vito Bonanno, Jr., Anna Broell Bresnick, Daniel Buttrey, Jaclyn Conley, Phyllis Crowley, Matthew Garrett, Debbie Hesse, Barbara Hocker, Keith Johnson, Kristina Kuester-Witt, Laura Marsh, Meredith Miller, Maria Morabito, Jordan Nodelman, Jacob Pongratz, Ronnie Rysz, Joesph Saccio, Gerald Saladyga, Jean Scott, Suzan Shutan, Rita Valley, Jonathan Waters, Jemma Williams, Mark Williams
Artspace also acknowledges operating support from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, New England Foundation for the Arts, the City of New Haven, Yale University, Yale-New Haven Hospital, and Friends of Artspace.
