Art Gets ​“Heavy”

Even flowers can be heavy, if they’re made of steel. Trucks can be ​“heavy” too, even if they’re made from paper.

At Heavy Metal, a new show at the offices of the New Haven Arts Council, a wide range of visual art represents all kinds of ​“heavy.”

The exhibition is the first to be curated by local Hill artist and Stetson Library muralist Katro Storm (at right in photo). He brought together eight artists, each of whom explored what it is to be ​“heavy.”

At the Thursday opening of the show, it was clear that in Heavy Metal, Storm has defined ​“heavy metal” in the loosest way. The show includes metal sculptures that are literally heavy, as well as works that are emotionally heavy, because of the circumstances of their creation. Take, for example, Gilberto Lopez’s sculpture.

Lopez’s green mustang, Storm explained, is made of magazines, paper, and toothpaste. It’s got a motor and an audio system that actually plays, the curator demonstrated, if you plug it into an iPod.

What makes this ​“heavy” is not the image of the car, but the fact that its creator, Lopez, is currently a prisoner in jail. Needless to say, he did not make the opening. He fashioned the car out of materials allowed him in jail.

To Storm’s mind, that was a kind of heavy redefinition of creativity. ​“It excites me to be around exciting things,” he said.

Of Lopez’s work, he added, ​“He created a Mustang with a working stereo. It takes a lot of creativity to create something out of nothing.”

This other vehicle in the show, also a truck fashioned out of paper, took another turn on ​“heaviness.” The artist Joe Copeland, who fashioned it, Storm said, died while Storm was bringing him and the truck to an opening in Massachusetts.

“Had I not been picking him up for the opening he would have died at home,” and not been found for a while, Storm said, since the artist lived alone and had serious medical problems.

Now the truck is in this show, and drives on.

Yet the exhibition is anything but heavy as in bleak. Although a few of the artists contributed two dimensional items, such as the black and white photos of Aniko Horvath, most of the work is three-dimensional sculpture. It hangs from the walls of the Art Council’s offices and beckons visual and tactile examination, which was not discouraged.

Steve Defillippis, who is well known for creating the life-size spray painted Michelangelo David in Pitkin Square for the recent Ideat Village, brought along his Italian greyhound, appropriately named Tonka. Defillippis’ painted car hoods and fenders are pictured.

Silas Finch (at left in top photo), whose Iron Man stood stalwartly near Defillippi’s festively painted car parts, said in his experience it was highly unusual to have shows of sculpture like this, and he thought it a great success. Imagine, he said, the Art Council folks having a meeting with all this stuff around them.

Storm had run what he called an informal gallery of underground or guerrilla artists out of his studio space on Dagget Street in the Hill in years gone by. His Dagget circle included Rocko Gallipoli (pictured), whose three steel stencils, titled Fair Lady, decorated the Art Council’s corridor and were, according to the artist, ​“nice dainty people in rough metal.” He created them with a plasma torch out of materials he found at Savin Park Amusements in West Haven, which his family runs.

A Boston ironworker, Christopher Santini, contributed these dozen roses made of copper and steel that gracefully greeted gallery visitors as they arrived at the show off the elevator.

“You think of flowers as being delicate,” said Storm, ​“but he [Santini] has the heaviest work in the whole exhibit.”

Heavy Metal will run at the Art Council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery through November 13.

Heavy Wood and Stone

A few blocks away, long-time sculptor Sy Gresser’s Graven Imaginings, offers another example of the large scale and meditative side of ​“heaviness.” The show also opened on Thursday.

It took seven laborers, two graduate students, and a serious hydraulic lift to bring 52 works, such as Jonah’s Return, on a 12-by-five-foot rectangle of ash wood, into the display space.

The works are salt-and-peppered at surprising locations on all three floors and the garden of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.

Gresser is a ​“direct carver,” explained Bruce Payne (pictured), a friend and promoter of the 82-year-old Gresser, who was too ill to make the opening from his home in Maryland.

Direct carving means, said Payne, ​“all chisel and hammer,” and no power tools or maquettes or drawings or assistants doing the work. There are very few people left doing this work, which Gresser has been at for 50 years.

Payne said he first saw Gresser’s work at the Athena Gallery on Orange Street in 1963. It was fascination at first sight. Payne said that Gresser’s work, using only hammer and chisel, was ​“a bit like action painting.”

That’s very counter-intuitive, but it means that the artist has an idea, as Gresser certainly did with ​“Last Seder,” a long rectangular work in Texas limestone, but, as Payne said, ​“it’s partly a process of finding your way in the stone.”

Although Gresser’s dad was a rabbi and his son’s practice of making graven images at an early age was a problem, Gresser’s subject is far more than Jewish or Biblical alone.

Working at times in the hardest materials, like granite, Gresser’s themes seem to be a rage at injustice and a call for universal reconciliation, such as in the black steatite ​“Hiroshima Angel.”

The show is on at the Slifka Center through December.