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“Ball and Socket,” by Marjorie Wolfe, archival pigment print.
Look through the same window six times or so and see six different vistas, or possibilities.
Step back, and you get a sense that those windows, grouped in sets of two, might also be staring back, like a still-to-be-discovered species of green, square-eyed owl, right at you.
That’s the sense you get from looking at Marjorie Wolfe’s photograph “Ball and Socket,” whose eponymous subject — the 19th century Ball and Socket factory in Cheshire — is the centerpiece of the new exhibition at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery.
“Lustre and Rust” has been organized and curated by artist Kevin Daly, who also wears the additional hat of co-founder and artistic director of Ball & Socket Arts in Cheshire.
Since at least 2013 he and his group have been working mightily to turn the old factory at 493 West Main in Cheshire into an arts and entertainment complex, complete with sculpture parks, theater, cafe. and other retail establishments, and other amenities.
Artist Photo
“Woven Study #3,” by Crystal Gregory, cyanotype print on paper.
The New Haven show, which consists of photographs of the old factory floors, doors, and interior vistas, mixed media pieces, and photo-based animations, both featuring the factory but also on larger artistic themes inspired by the project, runs through Feb. 24.
Daly was invited by the Arts Council to do the show about Ball & Socket “as an opportunity to showcase the project and generate more regional interest in it,” he wrote in an email.
After purchasing the property with help from the state, the group is now engaged in environmental testing and devising a plan to address the contaminated areas while breaking ground in the fall with activities in non-contaminated sections of the property, Daly added.
Artist Photo
“The Card Players,” 2015, by Karen Ostrom, animated tintype framed with text by Joy Tomasko.
With photos of the old factory, by turns documentary and transformed by added colors, by artists Melanie Stengel, Gabrielle Tougas, Staci Miller, and Tom Hearn, among others, the show is an advertisement or crie de coeur for advancing the project in the town of Cheshire due north, but also an exploration of issues around re-purposing.
Photo-animations of some classic images from art history, such as Karen Ostrom’s humorous riffing on Paul Cezanne’s “The Cardplayers” are suggested by the issue of rescue and reuse of an old building.
Allan Appel Photo
Detail of “The Seamstress,” by Ostrom, inkjet print, 2002.
By taking something old and making it new or new/old, the show is also a kind of meditation on artistic repurposing, or appropriation, or both.
“Each of the pieces, to me, include some kind of image, material, or process that references an earlier age of manufacturing,” Daly wrote.
I particularly liked Ostrom’s “The Seamstress,” an inkjet photo print that will forever make me think twice about taking a shirt or pair of pants in to the tailor ever again.
Other artists in addition to those mentioned in the show are Crystal Gregory, Thessia Machado. and Kathryn Frund.
Daly’s partners in Ball and Socket Arts who, he says “have seen beauty in this factory and have set out to restore it,” are Ilona Somogyi and Jeffrey Guimond.
There is an artists’ reception on Thursday, Jan. 19, from 5 to 70 p.m.
