Erector Square Artists Open Up For ​“Open Source”

The process of moving from drawing and painting to working with fiber. The limitations — and the opportunities — presented by fabrication machines, and the connection of that to old Atari video games. The ways that the materials an artist uses can deepen the theme of the art, about climate change and impending extinctions. Such were a few of the conversations on offer for those who visited Erector Square this weekend, as dozens of artists in the warren of studios in the former factory building in Fair Haven threw open their doors to visitors for the first full weekend of Open Source, the citywide visual arts festival organized by Artspace.

Open Source — formerly Citywide Open Studios — this year features a full week of programming, from workshops and tours to a series of exhibitions across town. In changing from Citywide Open Studios to Open Source, some key features have changed. The large-scale event that was held in years past at sites ranging from the empty Hamden Middle School to the Goffe Street Armory to Yale’s off-campus office complex in Orange is no more, replaced by a panoply of smaller events. 

Other elements of Citywide Open Studios have persisted, and a weekend of open studios at Erector Square is one of them. 

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, this meant that the halls of the factory complex filled with people and voices. Covid-19 made the event impossible in 2020, and 2021 saw a cautious return. This year, to this reporter, felt like a slight uptick from 2021; but if the throngs of the pre-Covid years were absent, there were still plenty of opportunities to check out what New Haven’s artists were up to — and find threads of connection between them.

Dennis Carroll is formally trained as a fine artist, graduating from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2017. He moved into fabrics thanks to MakeHaven. ​“I went on the tour for screen printing,” he said, and a certain machine caught his eye. ​“What’s that?” he asked. It was a knitting machine. He felt an instant connection. ​“A lot of the artwork I’ve done in the past has had a lot of influence from 8‑bit video games, like Atari,” he said. In designing knitting patterns, ​“I already know the charting, and how images like that work, from the past.” So ​“it fit well together.”

He had been drawn to 8‑bit images because of ​“the simplicity of it,” he said. He was also inspired by the pioneering sense of early game designers, often just a couple people together figuring out what the then-new technology could do. The strictures were extremely limiting. ​“Yet depending on how many stitches you have, and how many pixels you have, you can make it look just like whatever you’re trying to make it look like,” he said. He started making drawings and then charting them out in pixels and stitches to create ​“an intarsia painting.” 

But ​“everything starts with drawing. It’s all drawing,” he continued. ​“All the knits are things that have been in my actual artwork — something I’ve done or something I want to do.” It was ​“a second way to experience the artwork. You get to wear it, and you’re a part of it more than just ​‘I get to look at it.’ Even just getting to own it is a different experience.” As his skill with the knitting machine has grown, he has learned how to create more intricate patterns, how to use more colors, and how to finish his textiles with more elegance. He aspires eventually to be able to use the machines in such a way as to produce full ​“paintings out of knitted fabric,” he said. ​“How many people do you know who are doing that?”

Carroll wears his own art to his job at the Yale University Art Gallery, where he works as a duster, cleaning the sculptures and cases. ​“I come in with this stuff,” he said with a laugh, and enjoys the sense he gets from his co-workers that he is perhaps overstylized. ​“But I’ve always been interested in unique things that pop out,” he said. ​“I don’t make anything that I don’t like. Why would I do that? Because I’m going to wear it.”

In another part of the Erector Square complex, Leila Daw entertained visitors there to admire her pieces, which combine painting with thread and beads, employing techniques from a Burmese tapestry tradition knows as shwe chi doe kalaga. Like Carroll, she was quick to see the connection between using fabric and using paint. 

“When you paint on canvas, you’re working with textiles,” Daw said, ​“because canvas is a texture.” But Daw as a painter dug into that deeper than many painters do. She painted on canvases without using gesso, a liquid akin to primer that most artists use to prepare their canvases for their chosen paint medium. Daw found that without gesso, using paint on canvas ​“was like watercolor. I would paint onto canvas with the canvas wet.” It allowed her to get a certain effect, a certain shine, she was looking for. ​“To me, shiny is magic,” she said.

On a trip to Myanmar in 2011, Daw came across specimens of tapestries. ​“And I thought, ​‘everything is so glittery, so shiny,’ and it was absolute magic to see it,” she said. ​“I said, ​‘I’ve got to learn how to do that. That’s what I want to do.’ ” Through a grant, she arranged a residency at a workshop where artisans were practicing the technique, and learned to do it herself. She has now been seven times (all funded by grants), and brings designs for pieces with her. ​“When I get there, we trace the drawing onto the canvas. Then I paint what’s going to be painted, and I draw little lines where I want the thread to go, and I make dots where I want the beads to go. Then the craftswomen come and start working, and they’re so fast!” she said. ​“It’s almost like a quilting bee.” Returning home, she can make the works herself, though it takes months. But nothing else will do. ​“There’s just something otherworldly about it,” she said. ​“I think I’ll continue doing it as long as I can.”

Daw has found that the techniques she uses dovetail with the themes she explores in her pieces, about environmental destruction and the threat of extinction of many, many species on Earth, including humans. She has one piece that is essentially a representation of the fossil record, ending with the fossils that we ourselves are in the process of making. Her artwork notes that the earth has passed through several periods of mass extinction, ​“and then evolution started all over again,” she said. Other pieces are of sinking ships, whirlpools. One piece involves a leaking oil tanker.

“No civilization has ever lasted forever,” she said. ​“Guess what?”

To Daw, the connection between theme and technique lies in the fact that ​“the technique is very physical,” she said, ​“and it’s very much about the substances out of which it’s made.” She also uses material she collects through just living: the foil from cocoa packages, blueprint, candy wrappers. ​“We all rise up from the trash and then return to the trash,” she said with a laugh. ​“Ashes to ashes? No, it’s trash to trash.” She even recycles her work in other pieces if ​“it’s appropriately shiny.”

Daw continues to be drawn to textiles because they’re tactile; they make people want to touch the pieces, not just look at them. ​“I want it to be beautiful, so it draws you in, but then it has kind of a kick to it.” Viewers may be drawn to a piece because ​“it’s a pretty blue,” she said, but then upon closer inspection, they see it’s ​“a whirlpool that’s destroying the whole of civilization, by the way.”

“I want it to be more of the world,” she said of her artwork, ​“because it’s about the world.”

The Open Source Festival continues through Oct. 30. For a listing of events, visit Artspace’s website.