Urban Scrawl Spreads

Queen Larita of The Sausage Crew fashioned a uvula in the mouth of a gorilla slated to climb the Waterbury clocktower. Ken Lovell powered up his computerized Sharpie or Drawbot that makes lines on its own. Andreas Madariaga finished the first flower representing the four corners of the soul.

On Wednesday night the Queen (pictured above) and other artists launched an Artspace project called SCRAWL. It poses a question: If you give 23 artists each nine feet of wall and floor, as many Sharpies and pencils as they want (but only black), and don’t allow them to peek at each other’s work … when all the sections are linked and the whole ultimately revealed, will the result be a masterpiece or a misfire?

The answer will come on March 25, at what’s billed as the ​“Big Reveal.” The work, which will cover all of Artspace’s walls, floors, and even windows, will be shown in its entirety.

And then painted over.

After, of course, a big party.

“Normally when you do an exhibition, you know what you’ll get,” said the show’s chief organizer, Artspace education curator Martha Lewis.

The point of SCRAWL: You don’t know until the end.

The idea derives from what had been a loosening-up game for the Surrealist artists of the 1920s and 1930s called ​“exquisite corpse.” That’s when a writer or artist does a line or figure and then the next artist does the next gesture without knowing what preceded. It has since become a school exercise and a parlor game.

And sometimes there are rules.

In the case of SCRAWLers, the rules appear to be simple: Have fun, stick to black and don’t look around too much at colleagues’ work except at the edges where two artists’ sections meet.

The artists have until the March event to finish their work.

Queen Larita and accomplices Dr. Box and M.C. Sausage got in the spirit Wednesday night at Artspace’s gallery at Orange and Crown streets in the Ninth Square. Professionally not artists but rappers, they all hail from Waterbury. Thus municipal patriotism dictated that that town and its clocktower needed to appear front and center in the work.

Apart from that they had no plan whatsoever They let the white space of the wall inspire them.

“Maybe the gorilla can climb the clocktower?” suggested Dr. Box.

“There has to be some sci-fi imagery” insisted M.C. Sausage.

Then they debated whether a headless corpse might work better.

Meanwhile in the adjoining section, Ken Lovell had a clearer idea of how to begin. Lovell is the technical director of the Digital Media Center for the Arts at Yale. His motorized Sharpie was making a first pass at the wall.

“I’m a printmaker. I react to the matrix,” he said. That meant that he planned next to print out a pattern on gauze and affix the gauze to the wall. ​“With the Sharpie I’ll draw through.” His aim: layers of patterns that might achieve for the viewer as well as himself something of a meditative state.

Lewis said part of the aim was to promote a kind of collegial competition.

It was already getting to Sausage, who said he was managing his anxiety with forbidden substances. Queen Larita then said she wanted to take a break to tango.

Unlike Lovell and The Sausage Crew, the youngest artist in the show, Andres Madariaga, had a pre-conceived plan. He said he knew exactly what he was up to: symbols of spiritual enlightenment, with as a centerpiece a pregnant goddess dominating the usual male figures at the top of a pedestal reached by stairs. Madariaga was planning to start on the floor of Artspace.

“One of my secret goals is to surprise the artists, so maybe they can’t plan what they do,” Lewis said in the Surrealist spirit.

Artspace Executive Director Helen Kauder characterized the show as a ​“Big Draw,” a visual equivalent of the Big Read.

Between the show’s opening and the Big Reveal, related events include drawing classes for veterans, inviting in yoga-ists from a studio the across the street, and a ​“PubSCRAWL.”

Calling drawing a fundamental human activity, Kauder said she hopes the viewing public and the visiting groups ​“will find joy in this primal act.”

Click here for a full listing of programs.

Among the 23 participants and their crews selected for the show are emerging artists like Madariaga as well as internationally known artists like Rebecca Salter. Salter is currently having a show of her work at the Yale Center of British Art, Madariaga opens a an exhibition Friday at Bru Cafe..

Salter’s crew consists of eight students from Co-Op High. Another well-known local artist Karen Dow will be leading her crew of 12 students from the Educational Center for the Arts as well.