She’s going to become the fastest-hanging curator in the history of art exhibitons. In the 15 minutes Debbie Hesse spent explaining the Arts Council’s new show of cellphone-created images to a visitor, nearly that many new images arrived for her to mount.
Called Cellutations, the exhibition is composed entirely of cellphone images ranging from those captured candidly or impulsively or sloppily to the artfully composed.
The images in the ever-expanding show are being sent in via email by friends and strangers. They come in often anonymously or with minimum identification by the photographers from New Haven to Copenhagen.
The exhibition runs from June 1 to July 10 at the Art Council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery at 70 Audubon.
This fleeting, candid sidewalk shot, for example arrived from a person and place unknown. The Council sends it to its Flickr gallery in cyberspace, but that’s not all.
Hesse also prints each out on 8.5 × 11 cardstock and mounts each on the gallery’s walls, exactly as sent, complete with the To:, Sent:, and Subject: memo lines. So far more than 200 have come in, Hesse said — and, more, literally, even as she spoke.
An IT guy present at last Saturday’s exhibit opening, Mike Noskov, formerly of Moscow and now of New Haven, not only got Cellutations. He was excited about it. “I wish I had known about this,” he said, “when I was in Boston recently.”
What would he have photographed with his Iphone?
“There was this billboard,” he replied, “and it said: We sell guns. No I.D. required. Terrorists Welcome.”
Just such images of wide-ranging democratic quality are already in the show: memorable words from doors, stores, and kooks’ bumpers; a shot of red roses from someone’s wedding party. Very popular for some reason are views of dead fish on ice. Also, plenty of open-mouthed, protesting passengers are photographed in the back seats of cars.
Hesse said she does not want to encourage people to drive illegally and take pictures in their moving vehicles. She does want to encourage free-wheeling, democratic participation.
A companion exhibition to complement the recent Status Update, in which a select group of professional artists showed their stuff inspired by the new social media, Cellutations is an outlet for everyone.
“I don’t see the individual images as being key, but what it adds up to, the aggregate,” Hesse said. “This show is about the act of taking pictures. Each image is a kind of patch in a big crazy quilt.”
Patch? Quilt? Such quaint, old-fashioned words, yes, but Hesse also admitted to be suffering from Iphone envy. She mounted the exhibition in part to catch up herself on the new technology and to see what it would produce with this invitation.
Also, it’s in keeping with her previous International Mail Art exhibition at the council. In that show from 2007, more than 600 pieces of mail arrived. Those were post cards of unique art works, done on the cards, whereas Cellutations are all replicateable photographs that also exist in the parallel universe of cyberspace.
Theoretically, Cellutations can evolve forever (better duck, Debbie) on the Council website’s Flickr page. But because Hesse is also committed to that antedeluvian notion of showing each image sent to [email protected] at the gallery, she’ll be hanging and hanging. Even if wall space runs out
“I don’t care if I have to begin using the windows to hang them,” she said.
These two visitors, George Aseme and his daughter Danielle, gave the exhibition a thumbs up. Danielle, age 2, fairly rapidly made hers a thumb in her mouth as well.
Aseme is formerly the owner and curator of the Ikenga Gallery on Temple Street, where in the early 1990s he showed art from Nigeria and Russia.
“New Haven wasn’t ready for what we were doing then,” said Aseme, who’s now a mortgage banker with Wells Fargo.
Aseme was excited about the images that Hesse had festooned on the walls and partitions of the Art Council’s space.
“It’s .. it’s visual,” he said, “and if these people hadn’t captured the images on their phones, you wouldn’t be seeing it.”
Aseme pointed with particular interest to two images that caught other visitors’ eyes as well. Both views were from a dentist’s chair, one of the light that shines into your open mouth, another of instruments of pain waiting patiently to be applied to your naked gums.
Were the images taken by a patient in the chair? Were they taken by a root canal specialist who had always craved a career as an artist? Were they snapped by the dental assistant while waiting for the patient to numb up? Do such issues of motivation and provenance matter?
All we know, tantalizingly, is that they were sent by K. Brian Soderquist, of Copenhagen, who said he, or she, was a resident of New Haven from 1991 to 1994.
David Brensilver, the Arts Council’s director of communications, said the show is intended to raise more questions than it answers.
If you too want to exhibit, send your images here.