Touch-Up Planned For Alleyway Optical Illusion

Laura Clarke doesn’t know the exact number of people who have stopped in their sidewalk peregrinations to view the optical illusion art work down the Chapel Street alleyway leading to Temple Plaza. She believes it’s more than the number who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Clarke, the director of Site Projects, the group that brings world-class public art works to the Elm City, made that wry assertion during a brief presentation Monday night to 40 neighbors gathered for the monthly East Rock Community Management Team meeting at mActivity gym on Nicoll Street.

Swiss artist Felice Varini painted the work in question, ​“Square With Four Circles,” in 2010. Site Projects wants to bring back his team to brighten up the orange paint on what is described as the artist’s ​“anamorphic” mural.

In an ​“anamorphic” work, the artist creates a deliberate distortion of perspective, or the creation of optical illusion, as if looking through a lens oddly.

Site Projects is considering launching a GoFundMe effort to raise the required money, although Clarke didn’t mention a goal toward which the effort is working.

Back in 2010, Site Projects debuted the art work as part of that year’s Arts & Ideas Festival.

The execution of the work, along with bringing Varini to New Haven and having him participate in corollary art programs at the library and other venues, cost $175,000.

Clarke urged New Haveners themselves and their friends to visit the location and plunk their feet in the designated viewing spots, demarcated on the pavement looking west down the alleyway adjacent to Zinc restaurant, and to take selfies as a way of promoting the effort.

Clarke seemed slightly surprised that not everyone in the room had done that or even seen the mural in the decade since the work was created. Clarke even had to explain what the work is and its significance for the Elm City.

“It’s Varini’s only anamorphic wall mural in North America,” and as such contributes in a major way to New Haven being the cultural capital of the state, Clarke maintained.

Clarke estimated that a million people in one glancing way or another over the past ten years ​“have come to figure it out. We don’t know how many, but we say more people have seen it than were at Donald Trump’s inauguration.”

“Lighting Your Way” Coming Our Way Too

In another update on Site Project activities anticipated for 2020, Clarke said that Yale professor and longtime New Haven public artist Sheila de Bretteville’s new project, ​“Lighting Your Way,” will soon be installed by the city.

De Bretteville has been working since 2012 on the project, an array of choreographed lighting effects triggered by pedestrians, in order to transform the gloomy Route 34 underpass near Union Station and the police station that people endure on their way into town from the train. 

The city has embraced de Bretteville’s idea and is incorporating it into its ongoing ​“Downtown Crossing” effort to link the Route 34 mini-highway and reconnect downtown streets to the portion of the Hill near the train station, making New Haven more walkable.

And, if the light installation lives up to its promise, perhaps even an artistic destination in its own right.

The state Department of Transportation (DOT) over the years has approved projects in which artists paint murals on, say, underpasses.

“Lighting Your Way” marks ​“the first time DOT has approved a public art work that is integral to the structure of the bridge,” Clarke said.