Allan Appel Photo
Davis with “The Inspirational Experience,” aka “The Wall of Wood.”
Erich Davis showed eight cords of wood piled high into a maze set in a sun-lit drill hall. David Thompson evoked absence in a darkened Room 319 where long-gone officers once filled the lockers with their gear. Roxane Crane hung her drawings in a stall shower, above the medicine cabinet and across the lid of a long-broken toilet.
They were among 130 artists who showed their work at the normally empty Goffe Street Armory during the third and final weekend of the 16th edition of Artspace’s City-Wide Open Studios
Photo provided by artist.
The first two weekends took place in Erector Square and in individual artists’ studios. The third weekend was “alternative space” time — when Artspace temporarily reclaims and redefines an emptied industrial space with new possibilities. Artspace this year chose the armory, which city officials are wondering what to do with next.
Approximately one third of this year’s CWOS participating artists took the challenge to show photographs, painting, prints, collage, jewelry —along with a small number of site-specific installations —in a 155,000 square foot space, much of it still in serious disrepair. The space was originally designed for housing tanks, heavy-duty trucks, and the equipment of the soldier, not the sculptor.
By the measure of the oohing and aahing of visitors and artists alike at the imposing drill hall and warrens of side rooms with quirky detail and memorabilia intact, the experiment worked.
Micahel, Brian, and Susan (pictured) Huff showed in the sergeant-major’s former office.
“We used only one half of the building,” Artspace’s Helen Kauder said. That was because so many sections, like the fallen parapet and the basement, still remain in need of serious repair and remediation.
The building, most recently used as a rehearsal site for band of the historic 2nd Company Governor’s Foot Guard, was turned over by the federal government to the city. Some of its promoters see it as a potential community center; opponents to such plans are worried it might supplant the revival of the Dixwell Q House
This weekend’s use by artists was designed to show, however the politics and funding play out, that the building can be “of service to the neighborhood” and the city, Kauder said.
It certainly was a hit with Erich Davis. Where else could he have ample room to borrow and then assemble eight cords of wood into a maze for his A Creative Evolution installation?
Davis said he’d never had an installation in an armory. He was luxuriating in the space. During the set-up of his piece in the drill hall, one of the walls of his maze fell. There was so much space around it that the topple was harmless; friends helped him reconstruct without a problem before opening.
Sales price for his work: $250 a cord.
Up on the second floor Rebecca Lowry and Mark St. Mary (pictured) were among a dozen or so artists in Room 221. With its big fireplace, still visible behind a plywood-boarded hearth, the room seemed like a lounge where the generals may have sat to discuss the recent campaign over sherry and cigars.
“I lucked out with the temporary walls,” said Lowry, whose work was most recently seen in town at City Gallery. Artspace had erected a number of the walls in several spaces.
Photo Provided by Artist
“Texture Study #2504,” digital print by St. Mary.
St. Mary said he thinks his photographic prints of found surfaces just right for the big falling-apart fireplace near where his display was planted.
“The work is at home — the decay, the age,” he said.
There was another real fireplace in Room 405 that artist — and new Artspace staffer — Katie Jurkiewicz had lit with a glowing pink (fake) fire. “I had a lot of kids toasting marshmallows,” she said.
Across from the fireplace, as if speaking to it, were the clay sculptures of Kathleen Zimmerman.
Showing in the armory, also a first for the Terryville-based artist, had special significance: Her son Sgt. Dillon Zimmerman had trained here prior to serving a year in combat in Afghanistan. “He kind of liked it” that his mother was going to show her animal sculptures, drawings, and prints where he had trained, she reported.
Roxanne Crane ended up with room 322A (pictured), a defunct bathroom. Her display of ink on paper drawings, called “Shades and Shadow,s” actually made a good fit with the medicine cabinet, the white tiles, and the other fixtures in the narrow bathroom, completely non-functioning as a w.c.
After Karen Adams of Stratford dipped in for a look, she said, “People will definitely remember.”
Haunting Lockers
One of the most moving uses made of the space was David Thompson’s installation in Room 319, the officers’ locker room on the third floor.
Here Thompson (pictured) brought a collection of broken trumpets. He deployed the instruments atop the lockers of long-gone soldiers, whose names still appeared on many of the grey-green lockers now ajar.
In front of them, like an echoing field, Thompson arrayed the cases of the instruments, also open. While he played military music in the deliberated darkened room, he projected in large white letters the names of each of the officers in tall white letters across the far wall of closed lockers.
The effect was haunting.
“The history of modern art has taken place in armories,” Thompson observed, referring to the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which introduced European modernism to staid American eyes. That red-letter-moment is being commemorated and re-evaluated in a new exhibition at the New York Historical Society.
“I met a gentleman yesterday. He was looking for a friend” who had served at the armory in decades gone by,” Thompson said. When the man located the locker of Captain Richard Erff, “We turned on the lights so he could photograph the locker.”
“The armory stimulated and informed what I’m doing,” Thompson added.
Past locations for CWOS’s “alternative space” weekend have included the Smoothie Building in 2001; the Pirelli Tire Building in 2002; the Olin Building in 2005, and, last year, the New Haven Register building on Sargent Drive.
Unlike some of the previous buildings, the armory is at 290 Goffe, in the heart of a residential area. “It’s here for the neighbors,” Kauder said. She said Artspace will return.
Looks like some really great installation work.
Unfortunately, I am still out of town, so I missed it.
I will leave my analysis at that, except for this one important point....
THE COMMUNITY is the one who decides if the event was for them, or not. Not vice versa....