City-Wide Open Studios | Culture & Community | Downtown | Institute Library | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts
Top: Lewis installing Jennifer Davies' Three Fungi. Bottom: Clymenza Hawkins' Orange and Stephen Henderson's On the Path. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The woman stands in a doorway, an orb of orange light glowing in her raised left hand. All around her, the house looks as if it has been lifted from a fairytale, engulfed in the deep green of enchanted woods, a carpet of fall leaves. Just beyond the stoop, a river beckons, the water gem-like and pristine. A boat bobs atop it, waiting for an occupant.
Clymenza Hawkins' Orange is one of over 50 works in Glorious Index, running in The Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library through Dec. 14. As it opens this month, it is a celebration of October's City Wide Open Studios, now an artist-led effort in its second year. Throughout the month, studios will be open in West Haven and the Eli Whitney Museum Barn (Oct. 12 and 13), Erector Square and MarlinWorks (Oct. 19 and 20), and Westville (Oct. 26 and 27).
The Institute Library is located at 847 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven. Hours and more information are available here. Creative Arts Workshop and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art held their open studios last weekend. On State Street, City Gallery is open every weekend.
David Katz, Facing the Past and Oi Fortin, Traditions.
"I was thinking about the way that Artspace had it as a kind of survey show, and I was thinking about surveys, collections, and then I glommed onto 'index,'" said artist and curator Martha Willette Lewis as she installed the show alongside collaborator Maxim Schmidt. "I wanted something that would bridge Open Studios and beyond."
"And a celebration of people in New Haven," Schmidt added. "It's really really important, especially with the arts community being sort of fractured in the way that it is, that we continue to support the feeling that we love New Haven artists."
Across the space, that vision comes to life in vibrant color, with multimedia works from 51 different artists who build something of an index of their own. Close to the show's entrance, a human brain from Robert De Matteo appears on a split-screen of a canvas, floating against a sea of black.
One side is intricate, that ghostly blue-white of x-ray film with intricate definition. On the other, the brain is spongy, sepia-colored with a softness one can almost feel through the canvas. An identical stem hangs from each brain, filling the frame. A viewer has to do a double take, studying the canvas and deep color, to realize that it is oil on canvas, and not a photograph.
Top: Maria Markham, E/immigrate (Greystones, Ireland—New York, USA). Bottom: Lesley Finn, Ex Libris.
It's just a beginning. On an opposite wall, deep-veined shelf mushrooms erupt from the plaster, as if a fungus has taken root in the damp, old bones of the Chapel Street building. Nearby, two women look into a computer, their faces flooded with blue light and a looming, quiet sense of disaster that feels instantly familiar. Back across the room, a luminary from Atelier Cue dangles from a tree in Edgerton Park, sending honeyed light out into the velvet dark. One of Susan Clinard's sculpted boats, small enough to fit in a person's outstretched hand, waits expectantly on a table nearby.
Deliciously—and very much by Lewis and Schmidt's design—many of the works talk to each other, chattering animatedly on the walls and tables and ledges where they are installed (or as Lewis said with a smile, "we tried to find friends among the pieces."). Beside Hawkins' painting Orange, for instance, Jody Clouse's multimedia collage Finding Depth channels a similar kind of enchantment and whimsy, gears spinning through space as a green and blue background blooms behind them. Strips of ornate ribbon, bits of film and a collaged bird all appear atop the canvas, lending it a forest nymph meets magical tinkerer vibe.
On the other side, Stephen Henderson's On the Path brings that kind of enchantment squarely back into the natural world, with a scene of boulders and bare trees that feels both immediate, as if it could be a sparer East or West Rock in the fall, and like a throwback to Van Gogh's nineteenth-century work in Montmajour and Alyscamps.
Eliška Greenspoon, “Future?”
That kind of vibrant conversation happens several times over. In a trio of works that feels particularly chatty, artists Megan Shaughnessy, Eliška Greenspoon, and Joe Fekieta find their way to each other, with a pairing that makes a viewer want to linger and take a second look. In the center, Shaughnessy's Untitled pulls a viewer closer, her subject's cartoon head looking out as the universe slants and shifts behind her. The sun, a low smear of orange in the sky, forms an unexpected halo around her head, making the viewer wonder who she is and where she has found herself at that moment.
Meanwhile, Greenspoon’s “Future?” feels like a dispatch from another time (or maybe another planet), shapes whirling around and past each other as light beams up through the painting and tiny, blue and orange figures make their way through the scene. Everything is drenched in green, giving it a disorienting, slightly vertiginous vibe that is a little Gino Severini, a little Brave New World.
To this, Fekieta’s chaotic canvas, on which monkeys swing through a tall, giant tree with fluorescent yellow fur and furious faces, feels like a strange and also fitting complement. The title—Demolishing a patriarchal system of absolute authority, because of endless imperialistic conflicts victimizing the silent majority left demoralized by broken promises of prosperity made too often and the depressing images of soldiers returning home in a flag-draped coffin—feels just as jumbled, rounding the whole thing out.
Top: Schmidt works on installation. Bottom: Books on books on books! Peep those indexes.
At the far end of the gallery, a dry-erase board with an outline of New Haven ties it all together. Atop the outline, Schmidt has carefully drawn a color-coded map of each weekend’s location, to signal where and when each studio will be open. Both he and Lewis jokingly called it their own ornate murder board—another kind of New Haven index.
"If we have the space to platform artists, we're gonna give it to them, Schmidt said. "One of the things that Martha and I really champion is offering as many opportunities where people can be involved [as possible]. There's never a fee. Just generally trying to demystify the arts community."
But the spirit of the show outlives Open Studios. Lewis has loved indexes for years, since a project in the U.K. saddled her with a deaccessioned guide to using a PC, and the tome's index became her creative launchpad. She has a mental list (indeed, an index) of index-y works that speak to her, like Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and Thomas Rockwell's The Portmanteau Book. The latter includes a whole second story folded into the index.
Hannah Petrikovsky, Blue-eyed Babysitter.
The show—like all of Lewis' shows—also integrates several indexes from the Institute Library. There are, for instance, phone directories from a New Haven of yore, with bright orange covers and blue blocks of color that jump out at a viewer wandering through the space. There are exhaustive, antiquated guides like Gardner Teall's 1920 The Pleasures of Collecting and new ones that undermine its entire premise, like Noah Charney’s 2015 The Art of Forgery. For Lewis, it’s part of what makes the show come alive.
"Indexes feel very here, I think," she said. "One of the things that I like doing is highlighting the beauty that we have—connecting contemporary art with the books in the collection."
In that sense, it's also a sort of index of New Haven, past and present (if not also future). In the canvases—none larger than 10 inches by 10 inches—are a partial record of artists who are involved in Open Studios, but also a reflection of where the city and its art scene are.
For instance, a viewer can look at the pieces, many by artists who work in their homes, and think about how hard it is to get studio space. Or they may wonder who is missing and why. Or, in the midst of an open studios that is all about grassroots planning, where the city's art scene goes next.
"I want to see something concrete for professional artists, that puts us ..." Lewis paused for just a moment. "That makes this city more beautiful, too."
Glorious Index is open at the Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, through Dec. 14. On Oct. 27, Madame Thalia and the Gallery will hold a fundraiser, burlesque show and Halloween party called "Banned." Tickets and more information are available here.