It’s a plush duck butt, hanging from the wall. Is it a piece of cartoon taxidermy? Is the bird crawling through a hole? Or is there something more oddly magical going on?
The only way this reporter knows for certain that the bird in question is, in fact, a duck, is because elsewhere in “Outdoors at Paul’s” — a show of art by Douglas Degges and Noe Jimenez running now through the week at iiiiotae in Cedar Hill — the duck’s head and torso are emerging from the wall, with the kind of blank stuffed-animal expression into which one can read just about any emotion.
The sense of fun and lightheartedness in the show itself extends to the location of the show, a house in Cedar Hill, and to the spirit involved in organizing it. For Paul Theriault, the house’s owner, throwing art shows at his house (for which he collects no money) is just another way of being involved in, and helping to nurture, New Haven’s visual art scene.
Brian Slattery Photos
Theriault.
“Outdoors at Paul’s” is the 14th exhibition Theriault has had in the house — which included an opening reception and party last weekend — but far and away not the only show he has presented. He is a practicing artist and works as the arts preparator at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts in Middletown. He previously worked at Artspace in the same role, installing shows and preparing tech.
The house shows “tie in” to the sense of New Haven visual arts scene “spiraling” in the past year, he said. But in another sense, they’re the result of a much longer timeline. The seed for house art shows, however, was planted before all that, when Theriault lived in Chicago from 1992 to 2004, where he studied bass and made art.
“I’d gone freelance, and one of the first jobs that I really got into was doing renovation and restoration.” That included a job at the house of a man named Kenneth Morrison, who had “weekly art gatherings,” Theriault said. “He had learned how to work on houses, and at some point bought a really cheap, really messed up house, and knew how to fix it.” That house, Morrison decided, was “like this,” Theriault said, gesturing around his own space. It was “never going to be fully finished, it was always going to be churning, always modulating, but had this really warm, comfortable space where people would gather.”
“That’s what I’m going to do,” Theriault recalled thinking. The idea was still in his head when, in 2012, he bought the house in Cedar Hill. He spoke with friends about how New Haven felt like a “really small” place with “a lot of artists” in it, but those artists didn’t talk with each other very much. In Erector Square, where Theriault has a studio, “I barely talk to my neighbor down the hall.” Westville, he said, “might as well be Arkansas.”
In 2019, he texted artists Jeff Ostergren and David Livingston about the possibility of doing an outdoor exhibition. In May 2020, with the pandemic making gallery events impossible, Theriault made good on it. He created a “temporary exhibition space” in East Rock Park, describing the “main gallery” on his Instagram page as “a sheer cliff wall at the intersection of the orange trail, red trail, and English Drive.” He included GPS coordinates. “The mission is to provide a free and open space to exhibit artworks in a public sphere. Objects added to the space are meant to accompany and compliment the natural surroundings.” The show ran through the summer, with “no formal group events or gatherings at any time during the happening.” Five artists participated; one artist’s work was “taken away because people thought it was garbage,” Theriault said with a laugh. A hurricane buried some of the pieces as well.
The first show in his house was in December 2022, after Theriault started his full-time job at Wesleyan. He has held opening receptions on the first Saturday of the month steadily since then, featuring light refreshments and musical acts, and has used most of the house at some point or another.
He noted with satisfaction how Erector Square artists self-organized in 2023 to bring back City-Wide Open Studios. “We were really happy” with the results, and noted that the artists there are now more organized and energetic than they were. With his own shows, he said, “I want to keep lighting the fire.”
With the keen sense of play and exploration on display in “Outdoors at Paul’s” — spread out across a few rooms upstairs in Theriault’s house — the fire seems lit. Jimenez’s miniature paintings, titled as greenhouses, are in some ways strict exercises in color and geometry. But the vivid color choices steer them far away from being austere. Instead, the variations on the form come across as Jimenez having fun, delighting himself and the viewer.
Meanwhile, Degges’s pieces are often made quite literally from toys — stuffed animals, dog toys, tennis balls — repurposed with a deep feeling of whimsy. By calling it art, Degges is making an important point: that while art can be used to express painful personal feelings or comment on social problems, it can also be play. It can be fun. And there is and should be a place for that on the walls of galleries as much there is and should be for the more overtly serious stuff.
With the comfortable track record he has so far, Theriault has ideas for doing shows in other unconventional spaces in addition to his house. He would try a show in, say, a Walmart. He has done art shows in hallways. As for having exhibitions that he then gets to live with, usually for 10 days or so after the opening reception, “it feels really good to have people putting stuff up,” and to “wake up to find art” on the walls of his house. “It’s totally fun,” he said.
But there’s a serious point behind that, too: “You don’t have to have gallery representation and institutions to have an arts scene,” Theriault said. “We’re the art scene, as a network and a community.”
To make an appointment to view “Outdoors at Paul’s,” or inquire about future shows, contact Theriault through his Instagram page.
