THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Seeing the universe in sweater lint

Hank Hoffman

Kevin Van Aelst. Photo by Kim Mikenis.

Artist Kevin Van Aelst is not one to cry over spilled milk. More likely, Van Aelst has “spilled” the milk himself and is diligently coaxing the white drops into a semblance of order. Van Aelst’s specialty is something he calls “conceptual photography.” His large color prints are treats for the eye; Van Aelst’s strong design sense is garnering him increasing commercial work. But what engages Van Aelst more than the act of photography is the play of ideas and their realization in visual form.

“Something very important to me is the idea of randomness, taking something that should be random and applying a very specific order to it,” says Van Aelst. A self-professed “math and science nerd” in high school who earned his undergraduate degree in psychology, Van Aelst is often inspired to illustrate scientific concepts in his work. His 2004 photograph “Logarithmic Spirals” depicts a blank white milk carton spilling droplets on a black cloth. But instead of being arrayed willy-nilly, the drops form a nautilus-like spiral in accordance with mathematical principles.

One of Van Aelst’s favorite works is “The Summer Sky Over New England.” It appears to be nothing more than a blue sweater with little tufts of washed-out yellow sweater lint clinging to it. In fact, it is an accurate star chart of the summer New England sky.

“It took weeks and weeks to do it because of my insistence that it be as accurate as possible,” Van Aelst recalls. Working with one blue sweater and one yellow sweater, he plucked spots of yarn off the yellow and positioned them on the blue. “It was very frustrating,” he says. “Someone would walk into the studio and say something and I would breathe too hard and destroy the universe.” (Because some viewers doubted the accuracy of the image, Van Aelst created a follow-up using little lines of thread to denote the constellations.)

Van Aelst picked up photography as a hobby while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University. He became a “darkroom rat” at the school’s community darkroom. After entertaining the idea of going on to graduate school to study social psychology, Van Aelst instead took a year off and returned home to Pennsylvania. He was swayed by advice from his thesis advisor who told him not to go to graduate school for anything “unless you can’t imagine your life without it.” Working in an airport parking booth at night, watching the planes take off and land, he realized he “wanted to take a stab at art for real.” Van Aelst attended Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, earning his M.F.A. in photography in 2005.

He attended art school “under no illusion that I had a great eye.” Van Aelst didn’t see himself as a photographer who goes out into the world and “captures moments of truth and beauty.” Thinking “aesthetics was too big a mountain to tackle,” he was drawn early on to what he calls “conceptual and process-based pieces.” For one project, he created a video feedback loop of himself “taking a picture of a TV on which a video was playing. It was a document of me documenting myself.”

“If conceptual art didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have any interest in making art. I respond much more to ideas than purely visual things,” Van Aelst says. His overarching idea is the use of everyday objects and materials to illustrate and represent more profound concepts. Milk spills in a logarithmic spiral. Gummy worms represent human chromosomes and gummy bears make up the periodic table. Hair in the bottom of a sink is arranged in the graph of a human heartbeat. An Oreo cookie’s cream filling is cut away to reveal the yin yang symbol.

Hearkening back to his undergraduate studies in psychology, Van Aelst recalls that he took classes in cognition and perception – how people view stimuli differently. Much of his work operates on two levels of perception, the conceptual and the material. Referring to his photograph “Periodic Table of the Elements,” now part of the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Van Aelst has found there is the viewer “who sees gummy bears and has to read the title to see the periodic table and (the viewer) who sees the periodic table and has to get real close to see that they’re gummy bears.”

Minimalism was another source of inspiration, giving him “permission to keep my own feelings out of my work.

“Initially, I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself. Even now I do so very subtly and not directly. To photograph a piece of bread cut into the Golden Mean – there’s no visual authorship, no imbued sense of its creator. A big part of Minimalism was separating the creation from the creator,” says Van Aelst. He enjoys working in sequence, another feature of Minimalism. One series depicts the phases of the moon using a nut and bolt. “You have a formula,” Van Aelst explains, “where every shot needs to be what it has to be.”

Another element essential to Van Aelst’s work is humor. To illustrate the six stages of cell division, Van Aelst used color sprinkles on top of chocolate frosted Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There is an intended audacity, Van Aelst says, to “intermingling the idea of eating a doughnut with life itself. And it’s meant to be funny just by the pure goofiness of the act.”

Notwithstanding his art school lack of faith in his aesthetic acumen, Van Aelst’s graphic facility has attracted increasing work in editorial photography. His client list includes The New York Times, GQ, Business Week and Men’s Health. Van Aelst also provides the photo illustration for Virginia Heffernan’s column “The Medium,” which appears most weeks in The New York Times Magazine. Although he has no formal graphic design training, Van Aelst believes the simplicity and legibility of his images appeals to magazine designers.

When his “Oreo Yin Yang” photograph was displayed in a show at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Van Aelst tells me, one family of viewers was inspired to recreate it at home. This response was fitting. Van Aelst himself is attracted to art that gives him the sense that he could have done it himself. A particular inspiration in this regard was the work of sculptor Tom Friedman. Van Aelst says Friedman “examines and almost fulfills the material destiny of everyday objects.” Still, Friedman “is one of those artists (whose work) you look at and think, ‘I could have done that.’”

“I respond more to sculpture than I do photography because photography as a genre is so broad. And most of it deals with things that don’t concern me — moments in time,” says Van Aelst. He is most intrigued by those artists who do what he calls “ ‘domestic sculpture’ – rethinking, reorganizing familiar materials,” including internationally known local artists Jessica Stockholder and Adam Niklewicz. In fact, the arrangement of everyday objects in ways and contexts that surprise and illuminate is at the heart of Van Aelst’s art.

“The main reason I exhibit as a photographer rather than exhibiting the objects is scale. I love seeing things big,” says Van Aelst. He shoots on 4x5 film, which is capable of being printed at large sizes without a loss of detail and texture. “And much of what I do is tied to a location that needs to be documented. I can’t exhibit a drain or a sink or the bottom of a chair.

“The photograph is just the period at the end of the novel, or paragraph, or sentence for me,” says Van Aelst.

Long Wharf premieres adaptation of Hemingway tale

David Brensilver

	Rey Lucas plays the boy, Manolin, in The Old Man and the Sea. Photo courtesy of Long Wharf Theatre.

Certain works of literature lend themselves well to stage adaptation, works, for instance, such as those by Dostoyevsky and Dickens.

“Both those writers wrote scenes,” Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein pointed out.

From April 1 through April 26, the Long Wharf Theatre presents a world premiere adaptation by Long Wharf Theatre Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting and Craig Siebels of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning novella is one that Edelstein said doesn’t necessarily lend itself to theatrical production.

And Ting agrees.

“It is not an inherently dramatic story,” he said. “It is a sublime parable.”

“This book is more internal,” Edelstein offered, “(Ting) worked arduously to work it out.”

In a sense, Ting has been wrestling with The Old Man and the Sea for years.

“It was the first novel that my father ever gave me,” he said. Ting was between his junior and senior years of high school when his father died.

The adaptation Ting is directing trains its attention on the relationship in Hemingway’s story between the old Cuban fisherman, Santiago, and the boy, Manolin, and not on the old man and the marlin he struggles to catch after 84 days of catching nothing.

The script was written by Ting and Siebels, the production’s set designer. Siebels, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Miami, where he works as the production designer on the television series Burn Notice, said training this adaptation’s focus on the relationship between the man and the boy was equally important to him.

The idea to adapt The Old Man and the Sea for the stage was one Ting and Siebels talked about several years ago. They’ve known each other for about 10 years, having met at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Siebels was teaching in the university’s graduate program, in which Ting was a student. The two first worked together on Ting and Amy Russell’s Je t’embrasse, Elvis, at the Avignon Festival Off, in 2000. Siebels was the set designer on that production. The Old Man and the Sea marks his first turn as a scriptwriter.

“This book has held up for me for 20 years,” said Siebels, whose father, like Ting’s has passed on.

In focusing on the relationship in The Old Man and the Sea between the old man and the boy, Siebels said he and Ting wanted a design that allowed them, and thus the audience, to feel the void and connection between the two when the old man is out to sea. While the ocean represents a barrier between the characters, the horizon ties them together. Although Ting and Siebels wanted to tell the story in a certain way, the writing process involved tossing the script back and forth a great deal. The two writers agreed and disagreed on much. And they gave themselves one hard and fast rule: a change to the script could not simply be undone and reversed.

Ting said he and Siebels gave themselves the exercise of deconstructing Hemingway’s text then figuring out how to use it as a framework for their adaptation. Audiences will recognize Hemingway’s voice, Ting said. Almost all the dialogue in the adaptation comes directly from the novella, as does a lot of the narration. Siebels said some of the dialogue is even repeated from different perspectives.

To Siebels, The Old Man and the Sea captures the spirit of a man being, but not feeling, defeated. In crafting the script, he and Ting kept in mind lessons from Icarus and Don Quixote. As a designer, Siebels said, you get trained to research things, and, as a writer, you want to research things that might be related even tangentially to what you’re working on.

The story of Icarus, Ting said, is about “either the folly of man to reach too high, or the great glory of man to reach too high.” Talking about the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, he said, “It’s virtually a mythic feat that he accomplishes,” though the consequence of Santiago’s ambition, of course, is that sharks are equally interested in the marlin he almost incredibly manages to catch.

For Ting, it was “absolutely essential” to cast actors who could convey the context of the Cuban culture.

“I know that I’m going to be relying heavily on actors who can speak from that context,” Ting said. Mateo Gomez and Yale School of Drama graduate Rey Lucas, both of whom have appeared on the big and small screens, in regional theater productions and on Broadway, have been cast as the old man and the boy, respectively.

Ting said he would love people of different generations to experience this adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea together.

Still, Siebels doesn’t want audiences to feel as though there’s a homework assignment to finish before seeing the piece. A lot of people, he said, have a vague recollection of the book, and that’s fine. He’d rather the play inspire them to read or reread it after seeing the performance.

For more information about Long Wharf Theatre’s production of The Old Man and the Sea, visit www.longwharf.org or call (203) 787-4282.

Orchestra New England celebrates 35 years
April concert event looks to the future with a nod to the past

David Brensilver

Music Director James Sinclair and Concertmaster Raphael Ryger rehearse Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Photo by Judy Sirota Rosenthal.

Thirty-five years ago, an ad-hoc group of student and faculty musicians from Yale University assembled to perform a collection of works by Charles Ives. Fourteen pieces received their premieres during what James Sinclair recently called a “watershed concert.” What was at the time a celebration of the composer’s music during the centenary year of his birth became something more. That performance, in March 1974, and a second program of Ives’ music performed by the same ad-hoc ensemble in October of that year, marked the inception, for all intents and purposes, of Orchestra New England, known at the time as the Yale Theater Orchestra.

In August 1974 (between the aforementioned concerts), on property owned by the composer’s family in West Redding, an expanded Paul Winter Consort, along with members of the nascent orchestra, presented the Charles Ives Show, an event (Paul) Winter said was designed to be a sort of “musical town meeting.”

Three and a half decades on, Sinclair and Orchestra New England are celebrating the ensemble’s beginnings, and are doing so alongside the Grammy Award-winning Paul Winter Consort in a full-circle April 25 concert event that will also celebrate Earth Day, which will have been officially observed three days earlier. Sinclair said the program would include Ives’ Country Band March, which he and the ad-hoc group of musicians from Yale premiered in 1974, as well as the composer’s The Housatonic at Stockbridge from Three Places in New England, which was performed as part of the Charles Ives Show in August of that year. The program will also include an excerpt from Winter’s work-in-progress, Flyways.

Sinclair, it should be said, is executive editor of The Charles Ives Society, and originally came to New Haven to work with the late John Kirkpatrick, who was the curator of the Charles Ives Archive at Yale.

Orchestra New England’s history is the story of a group of musicians who simply wanted to play together and for Sinclair, the group’s founder, music director and conductor. The goal, looking forward in 1975, Sinclair said, was to perform repertoire that would feature the ensemble’s individual instrumentalists – “to do innovative programming and really show off the players.” And while the group’s size and budget have precluded the programming of works by such composes as Mahler, Bruckner and Rachmaninoff, the orchestra’s repertoire has not been limited to works written before and during the classical period. By this season’s end, Orchestra New England will have performed music from the baroque to the contemporary — from Vivaldi, Haydn and Beethoven to new works by the ensemble’s principal bass player, Joseph Russo, and Southern Connecticut State University Associate Professor Mark Kuss.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

In 1975, under the name Chamber Orchestra of New England, the fledgling group performed a series of concerts at Sprague Hall, one of which featured American soprano Phyllis Curtin, who was then chair of the Yale School of Music’s voice department.

Anne Mauro and her husband, Jean, attended that performance because they knew Curtin. They got involved with the orchestra a few years later. For nearly 30 years, Anne Mauro sat on the group’s Board of Directors, a group her husband was president of and chaired.

“I had no idea what a board member did,” (Anne) Mauro said, laughing. What a board member did, it turned out, was everything from selling subscriptions and raising money to baking cookies and decorating the United Church on the Green for the orchestra’s annual Colonial Concert. Mauro also helped organize special events and started an auxiliary group that she said once numbered about 150 volunteers.

“It’s been really one of the best learning experiences I’ve had in my life,” Mauro said, though it wasn’t always smooth sailing for Orchestra New England. Mauro remembers crying at a board meeting during which she had to make a motion that led to the ensemble filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1989.

Sinclair said Orchestra New England, which was formed during a recession, has fared well during other economically trying times including the early 1980s, which Sinclair described as “our growth years.” And in the late 1980s and early 1990s — Chapter 11 reorganization years — the orchestra made three recordings: one of Ives’ music, one of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ musical Magdalena and one of the revived Cole Porter show Fifty Million Americans. The musical diversity of these three recordings strongly reflects the group’s original mission.

“You should be part of your neighborhood,” Sinclair said about the importance of having the flexibility to perform all sorts of music, including “a lot of literature that’s much less heard.”

The orchestra has been hired for numerous productions of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, a work that certainly will never be in danger of being classified as “much less heard.”

Still, “It doesn’t feel like a commercial venture,” said violinist Raphael Ryger, who said he began playing with Orchestra New England as a substitute in 1982, became a regular member the following year, and has served as its concertmaster since 1988.

Ryger said the ensemble has maintained a feeling of freshness, one that, “with a different music director … could be gone.”

For Ryger, a software developer pursuing his Ph.D., playing with Orchestra New England is a labor of love.

“I only take what’s really special,” Ryger said with regard to freelance work, “and Orchestra New England is very special.” That includes those who work behind the scenes.

Even during trying financial times, “we’ve had board members, decade after decade, contributing,” Ryger said. “This is real dedication.” Ryger also pointed to volunteers’ dedication, “without which this just wouldn’t work at all.” Throughout the organization, he said, “the dedication is infectious.”

On April 25, all those who are and have been involved during the orchestra’s 35-year history will celebrate that spirit, a spirit that, in large part, begins with Sinclair.

“They play for Jim,” Orchestra New England Director Heidi McAnnally-Linz said of the musicians. “It’s a lot about the community with him and the friendship with him.

“You can see how excited he gets, and you know that’s going to translate into great music,” she said.

“A lot of it clearly derives from Jim,” Ryger said, “because he set the tone.”

Winter, who first met Sinclair in 1974 through meetings with Kirkpatrick and Ken Singleton — who, while studying tuba at Yale, was instrumental in the organization of the Ives programs that year — said he and Sinclair “had a great time working together” 35 years ago. “It was really a simpatico collaboration, so we’re long overdue to get together again.

“(Sinclair) is completely imbued by the spirit and the essence of music,” Winter said. “And that’s what he lives for. It’s very contagious and it’s selfless.”

For details about the April 25 Orchestra New England concert event with the Paul Winter Consort, including a pre-concert reception at Kroon Hall at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the 8 pm performance at Woolsey Hall, visit www.orchestranewengland.org, call the Shubert Box Office at 888-736-2663 or visit www.shubert.com.

In the Write...
Poetry is in the air with a spring crop of New Haven verse

Signaling winter’s slow withdrawal and our impatience for spring’s arrival, poetry seems to be filling the air. Or certainly that’s how it seems when you look around at what the writing community of greater New Haven is up to.

The display of poetic talent by Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander at Barack Obama’s inauguration was only the most visible symptom of the poetic energy humming through the Elm City. For those seeking to revel in words finely wrought, there is no dearth of recently published books and public readings to enjoy. Represented here is only a few of the many fine bards who live in and around our fair town and the venues that play host.

First up is Brian Johnson, composition and creative-writing instructor at Southern Connecticut State University, whose recently published Torch Lake & Other Poems (Del Sol Press, November 2008) is a flashing mix of vers libre and prose poems.

Brian’s colleague, Jeff Mock, former editor of the esteemed Gettysburg Review and SCSU Professor of English, will see his first book of poetry, Ruthless, winner of the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, published toward the end of this year.

Also active is Margot Schilpp, author of The World’s Last Night and Laws of My Nature, who is in the midst of completing her third book of poetry and will also have poems appearing in American Poetry Review, Locuspoint, Bateau and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

In a feast for the eyes, Guilford resident and poet Charlotte Garrett Currier will publish Shadow and Light: A Retrospective (Trefoil Arts, 2009), a memoir in poetry stunningly arranged by New Haven book designer Daphne Geismar.

If you missed the February reading by New Haven resident Susan Holahan in the Anchor Bar, not to worry. Author of Sister Betty Reads the Whole You, Holahan, whose work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, will have her prose poems featured in the May issue of New Haven Review, where she helps as a contributing editor.

New Haven may well also feature one of the nation’s youngest published poets, with the appearance of Circa (Hanging Loose Press, 2009) by Yale freshman Hannah Zeavin, currently available from Book Trader Café and Labyrinth Books.

And finally, there is the ever prolific J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review, whose sixth book of poetry, Mercury Dressing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), revisits themes from entirely new angles, touching on questions of love and the slow ravages of age.

Of course, poetry is more than words that grace a page. It is the measured rhythms of our oral culture, and fortunately for us, there is no lack of opportunity to hear that culture at work. Listeners will find poetry readings at a variety of venues: the English department at Southern Connecticut State University hosts monthly readings at Engleman Hall on the last Wednesday of every month; at Yale, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry (55 Wall St., Room 116) offers a full schedule of readings; for the last few years, the “Ordinary Evening Reading Series” has played host in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room (272 College St.) to poets and writers and their work; and there is also the Word of Mouth Poetry series, which takes place at the Institute Library (847 Chapel St.).

Bennett Lovett-Graff is publisher of the New Haven Review, a literary journal and Web site that hosts parties, sponsors speakers and supports and celebrates the literary activities of the Elm City. For more information, visit www.newhavenreview.com or contact Bennett Lovett-Graff at publisher@newhavenreview.com.

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