Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts | Westville | Public Health | EastWall Westville
Emiliano Cáceres Manzano Photos. The photo below, of Suzan Shutan in her studio, is contributed by the artist.
In a parking lot in Westville, above the cars and to the right of the gas station, you’ll catch an unmissable burst of color. A mural, about three cars wide and one car tall, reigns over the lot. Half of it is electric green, the other neon pink, and on top of this base, smaller squares display even more colors.
Each square contains two new shades—teals, purples, whites, yellows, reds, and more—separated along a diagonal line. Look from afar, let your eyes relax, and these diagonals will form and reform patterns, the piece coming alive under your gaze.
New Haven-raised artist and curator Suzan Shutan painted the mural as part of a project called EastWall WestVille, which has been running since 2010 under the supervision of local designer and architect, Eric Epstein. Shutan’s mural, called “Out of Line,” is the 25th such iteration, and was installed this month (read about the last mural, an homage to Edgewood Park, here).
Each piece, Epstein said in an interview over the phone, focuses on thinking unusually about materials, specifically the “temporary, quick, degradable kind.” His ambition was to give local artists a platform to experiment with large-scale work with high visibility.
“It’s a chance to step out of the preciousness and enjoy the exuberance of it for the short while it’s up,” he said.
Epstein and the project pay for all of the materials, and he encourages artists to engage creatively with the short-term nature of their works. These technical constraints have yielded a wide variety of projects for EastWall. One, for example, featured 100 portraits from passersby, creating a mosaic of the surrounding area.
Another used loose pieces of tape to cast shadows that shifted and blew with the wind. Each exhibit merges awareness of temporality with very concrete materials, often resulting in works that embrace the spontaneity of EastWall’s outdoor environment.
Epstein met Shutan two years ago at an open studio in Erector Square, where she works out of the complex’s labyrinthine second building. It took over a year, but their schedules eventually aligned for Shutan to be able to contribute “Out of Line” to EastWall.
Though Shutan’s work has been exhibited from New London to New York City, she has rarely had the opportunity to exhibit in her home city, she said over the phone. She also stressed that, though her pieces may be abstract, they are always about something specific.
The specifics, in this case, have to do with responding to the current political moment.
Shutan said she was interested in exploring “visibility and invisibility, the idea of having one’s life disrupted.”
“Out of Line” then came to be about difference and coexisting. Shutan cited the Trump Administration’s crackdowns on trans and immigrant rights as issues that made these ideas feel particularly urgent.
The finished mural merges these concerns with Shutan’s interest in materiality. She has previously worked with mediums from straws to pom poms. Here, she works with line and color to negotiate structure and deviation.
The viewer’s eyes create visual synergy across the diagonal lines, bringing an overall harmony to the piece. Originally, the individual squares were supposed to be able to be rotated, allowing viewers to create new patterns. Though this did not turn out to be feasible, Shutan’s commitment to the viewer’s participation remains in her resolution to allow patterns to emerge from extended looking.
Look closer, though, and the piece is not uniform. One can see the traces of human effort—those diagonals are not as perfect as they seem. The sheets of plywood, too, bulge and bend with the humidity and sun of New Haven summer, embracing the environment precisely like Epstein set out to inspire.
Shutan even has a personal connection to the shades that provide the background for the mural. Over the phone, she reminisced about the psychedelic carpeting in her parents’ house when she was growing up not far from EastWall.
“Out of Line,” Shutan hopes, will provide joy in dark times. With its bright colors and ever-shifting viewing experience, the work revels in non-conformity. It is a work unapologetically rooted in its context within Shutan’s life, within this time, within Westville and New Haven.