Chelsea M. Rowe
Chelsea Rowe's Symposium-inspired art.
Artist Chelsea M. Rowe marries festive colors to a violent act in her art, a contrast that opens up the possibilities for interpretation. There’s no getting away from the pain, the blood spilling from both figures as they split from one another. But it’s not just a portrait of torture. It suggests a form of creation and change, too: the chance to survive, make something different.
The sense of energy, connection, and a little bit of revolution in Rowe’s piece was in the air at the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios’ Erector Square weekend.
The weekend at the Fair Haven building complex featured musical performances and food trucks, a community quilting project with Daniel “silencio” Ramírez in partnership with Fair-Side, a Japanese craft festival, and face painting. But at its heart were the dozens of artists who threw open their studios, and the steady stream of visitors that came to see them and their work.
It also featured works like Rowe’s piece, which is part of a collaboration she did with sound artist Alessandro Maione. It’s based off of the myth of the androgyne in Plato’s Symposium, according to which humans were originally two-headed, eight-limbed, and too powerful for the gods, so Zeus split them down the back. “The pull to find the other half” was the inspiration for the piece. It’s “about the split, but also this idea of revolting against Zeus, this oppressive power.” In a sister piece, the androgynes are using their spidery limbs to make a “body ladder” to get to Zeus and confront him.
Brian Slattery Photos
“One of the things that’s really special about this is how well, given who and what we are as artists, that we were able to do this,” said artist and co-organizer Martha Lewis, crediting the “energy level and enthusiasm” of everyone to pitch in and help out at this year’s Open Studios event. “Most of the time they went well over, above and beyond.”
The event benefited from support from the Amodio family, which owns and runs Erector Square itself under the aegis of Capp Associates LLC; they were eager to make sure that Open Studios happened to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Erector Square complex. They also got support from the Arts Council in helping administer grants, and from Adriane Jefferson, New Haven’s director of arts, culture and tourism.
But in running the event itself, Lewis reaffirmed her hunch in September: “I don’t think we need arts administrators for this. I think we can focus on what we want, what’s helpful to us as artists. There’s such a hunger for this.” She explained how the collective of artists met once a month to plan the event. Eric March assumed a role of director. Other artists contributed their organizational skills. In that way, they could replicate as a group what an organizing nonprofit had done in the past.
“Artists completely recognize the shift in attitude in not having a parent organization,” said co-organizer Maxim Schmidt, who coordinated volunteers for the event. “It has fostered a deeper community among the artists.” Artists are sharing their studio spaces with other artists, and “people who have never met each other in the same hallway sometimes are now working together collaboratively,” and “everyone is happily cross-promoting one another. It’s doing what Open Studios is supposed to do.”
Dexterity Press studio.
For Schmidt, part of that shift in attitude has been to get away from “the names that rule the New Haven art scene” and move toward emphasizing “spaces where artists connect with each other.” It’s the same attitude he sees in Volume Two, Witch Bitch Thrift, and at Fair-Side, in creating “bases for artists to meet.”
“I don’t think we’re going back to a parent organization,” Schmidt said. “Everything that everyone has been saying is that they want to continue to artist-run this.”
The continuity of Open Studios matters, too. “Open Studios was the first art event I ever went to in New Haven. It was really me getting my feet wet as an undergraduate student, and I met artists at the time that I now show” as a curator. He has been doing the same for his volunteers. “It feels more like family than it ever has.”
In troubleshooting how to improve City-Wide Open Studios next year, Lewis would like to see the effort be able to get more people to the studios that aren’t in Erector Square or in West River Arts, especially artists with home studios. But the promising success of the events so far has sparked larger thinking about asserting the role of the arts in how New Haven works.
“Artists in New Haven — artists everywhere — have to get their act together, and they have to be able to tell and show the places that they live in what their worth is.” She noted that public art tends to “fill in the gaps” of what a town needs, the “latest iteration” being that “we’re the people who paint brightly colored murals, and we do community projects to keep everybody well. But there’s more to it than that and not all of us do that.”
She noted how many new developments include loft spaces as part of their designs. Artists “invented the idea of working in lofts, and living in lofts, which they are busy imitating in an ersatz version.” Just as one idea, she said, “I think all of the new building construction should have some element of our art in them,” as just one of many ways “to make our presence known and shown as what we are.” City-Wide Open Studios “does that in a natural way.” But it’s possible to “have a bigger plan” that goes beyond a few weekends in October.
“We’re artists,” she said. “We are the creative process.”
Rowe.
That process was easy to see in Chelsea Rowe’s work. She finds herself drawn to bright colors and, at the same time, to the grotesque — to “melting, splitting, sloshing, disintegrating” forms. She gets a lot of images from “using a scanner wrong,” intentionally dragging the images to smear them. She makes pieces and sometimes rips them apart and uses the remnants to make new things.
The combination of vivid hues and troubling forms, she said, “comes from where I grew up” in St. Petersburg, Fla. “The colors that I was inundated with all the time were plastic inner tubes, neon signs, surf shops, beaches. But there’s also this heaviness that comes with growing up there and being away” — especially as her family is still there, and the hurricanes that pass over it intensify. Every September and October she wonders if her family’s house will make it. “A lot of the things melting and sloughing away comes from erosion and tide, dragging this stuff away.” But at the same time “I just can’t get away from bright pink.”
She enjoys the “sinister” quality of combining the light, inviting colors that draw a viewer in with the darker subject matter. “Also, specific bright colors react to light in ways that I’m excited by.” By shining different lights on some of her pieces, she can make certain parts of them light up, or disappear.
She also draws from fabric patterns, wallpaper patterns, “the femininity of craft, but also trying to morph it” into a “different creature.”
Morabito.
Up on the walls of her studio, Maria Morabito had hung three paintings that were about “how humans change the landscape that surrounds them, in this case by building villages and cities,” she said. “I’m fascinated by cities because I think they represent the best in human innovation, creativity.” The paintings are inspired by ancient Mediterranean civilizations and the ruins they left behind, from which Morabito pulls her abstractions. “I use abstract language to express myself,” she said.
She started with the idea of a nuclear village as a round shape; when families joined in a village, they become compacted, square — “the best way to use a space” without leaving empty places. She plays with mixing angular and organic forms. Her color palette changes according to the seasons, to her emotions, and to her desire to give herself challenges of working with colors that don’t usually work together.
Morabito also works in sculpture, sometimes exploring things of migration — a theme close to home, as she herself is an immigrant. In one piece, called Resilience, she geometrically demonstrates the process of having a path disrupted by crisis and finding a new path. Another, called Safe Harbor, is inspired by a dock to tie up a boat. She made sculptures from empathy for victims of war and natural disasters, addressing the fragility of home.
Morabito grew up in Italy and her first paintings were figurative. But she grew uneasy with it. “I never liked to paint the portrait of a person,” she said. It felt like “an invasion of privacy” and “the expression on the face might not reflect the complexity of the person.” She decided she would rather “focus on what a person creates.” She’s also a neuroscientist and “I know how vision works,” she said. Abstract painting, she said, is perhaps “the most universal language you can find.… I’m interested in communicating with people in the simplest way,” by “taking the essence of things, and what really counts — getting to the bottom of things.”
Congratulations to all of the artists for putting on an awesome event!!! There was a lot of magic in the air... There were good maps, and artist directory... not some unreadable nonsense put together by Yale Interns padding their resumes.... Ran into so many old friends, saw some great art, (and rare turtles).... The enthusiasm was palpable, and embodied the kind of energy that will continue to help this event grow better and better...
I've been saying it for years as part of my 'public art instigations'....ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!!
Three independent arts events this October... Open Studios being the Visual Aspect.. NH DOCS being the film aspect, and the upcoming IDEAT VILLAGE ROCK LOTTERY, the music aspect.
This is the stuff that makes NEW HAVEN ROCK!!!!
A lot of administrators have been padding their pockets for a long time on the backs of independent artists... Let the New Age begin!!!!!