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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 10, 2023 8:37 am
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Eleanor Polak Photos
Bajzelle plays at Gather.
A crowd assembled in the basement of Gather, at 952 State St., lit only by a few strings of red bulbs and the lurid screens of old-fashioned television sets. The scene felt intimate and grungy, stripped to the bare essentials of a show: lights, sound, and people. David Taylor Coffey, soft spot, and Bajzelle prepared to fill Gather with a buffet of genres and sounds. The audience swelled inside the confined space, with enough enthusiasm and energy to fill a stadium. What was an empty basement transformed into a party as soon as someone plugged in the mic.
by
Eleanor Polak |
Jun 23, 2023 7:57 am
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Eleanor Polak Photos
Elm City Robots performs at Gather.
The interior of Gather, a coffee shop and community spot located at 952 State St., looked like a magical grotto. Low lighting shone over chalkboard-graffitied walls hung with vines. Amidst the vibrant scene, local bands Elm City Robots and Model Decoy prepared to play the third week of their Thursday night June residency.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 15, 2023 8:09 am
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Water Under the Bridge.
It’s hard to look at Joyce Greenfield’s Water Under the Bridge and not think of the recent smoke from forest fires in Canada that choked the air last week. All the signals are there — a wall of angry flames, a sky full of soot, the land seeming to melt away in the heat. But that’s not what the painting has to be. It could be autumn, the fiery colors the result of the changing of foliage. The dark sky could be rain clouds. Either way, the painting is about transformation. Fast or slow, destructive, creative, cyclical, the brush strokes mark the change.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2023 8:45 am
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A small sculpture hangs from the ceiling of City Gallery on Upper State Street and floats, as if it’s alive and capable of hovering in midair, or perhaps is a bit of plant life floating in the ocean. All around it, the walls are decorated with pieces that read like fungal growth, or the traces of growth, or perhaps the tracks left by some land or sea creature. They and the rest of the pieces in the gallery are so thoroughly integrated that it would be possible to believe that they were made by a single artist. But it’s really the work of two artists — Meg Bloom and Cyra Levenson — working in conversation with one another. And as the title of the show — “Regenerations,” running through April 30 — suggests, that conversation has been nothing but fruitful.
Cops handcuff Wezenter in her hallway, as seen through police body cam footage.
“Police with a search warrant!” a cop shouted after pounding five times with his fist on an East Street apartment’s door.
Seconds later, he and four fellow officers rammed the door in and wound up pointing a gun at a 20-year-old who’d been asleep in bed — only to realize minutes later they’d raided the wrong apartment.
Cop cars outside on East Street Tuesday following suspect's death.
Nora Grace-Flood photo
Stacey Wezenter outside her third-floor apartment and beside her still-broken door.
A 35-year-old East Street resident suspected of involvement in child pornography was found dead in his apartment Tuesday five days after police surprise-searched his apartment — as part of a raid that began with cops busting down the wrong door and handcuffing an innocent neighbor.
by
Thomas Breen |
Mar 23, 2023 2:51 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
Dev Deputy Carlos Eyzaguirre, Mayor Elicker, builder Alex Opuszynski and son Atlas, and Alder Eli Sabin at Thursday's groundbreaking ...
... for 15 new apartments planned for vacant State St. lot.
Shovels in hand and a mound of dark brown dirt underfoot, city officials joined a former nurse-turned-commercial real estate broker-turned-housing developer — along with his hard-hatted toddler son — for a ceremonial groundbreaking for 15 new apartments to be built atop a vacant Upper State Street lot.
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 9, 2023 8:39 am
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The paths of light streak across the darkness, like the afterglow of the sun across your retina after you close your eyes on a summer day. Or perhaps like the smoky path in the air left behind by a kid waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, or a flashlight. It’s actually the sun dancing across water, but for artist Phyllis Crowley, it’s not the source of the light that matters. It’s the shapes the light leaves behind, a record of the way it moved — and the way it suggests a meaning, just out of reach.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 28, 2023 2:31 pm
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Nora Grace-Flood photo
Caroline Smith and crew at work on Upper State.
Caroline Smith slid a shovel beneath some slush obscuring a State Street sidewalk — and cleared a pathway to keep some of the city’s small businesses open for snow day shoppers.
She was joined by a handful of other volunteers looking to lend some muscle to a slew of stores thrown off by the previous night’s snowstorm.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2023 8:39 am
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Rita Hannafin
Sanctuary in the City.
The scene depicted in Rita Hannafin’s Sanctuary in the City could be of several places in the New Haven area, places that seem wilder than they should be given their proximity to people, whether it’s a stretch of the West River, or the Quinnipiac River before it reaches Fair Haven, or a part of the shoreline in West Haven.
by
Karen Ponzio |
Feb 7, 2023 9:04 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Alexander Silver Angeloff and a sampling of his creations.
When you walk into The Cultured Café on State Street, you are greeted by the feeling that you’ve walked into as natural a habitat as you can find that is not actually outside. Philodendrons wind around glass jars full of fermenting vegetables on a wooden counter. Above, cotton ball-like clouds dot a blue sky ceiling. What the café serves is also as close to nature as it can be, courtesy of the café’s owner Alexander Silver Angeloff, who is trying to make the path into the world of natural health safe, welcoming, and delicious.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 12, 2023 8:43 am
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(1)
William Frucht
Ellis Island Island #6 and Ellis Island Hospital #1.
Everything in William Frucht’s photographs is having its layers peeled away — of paint, varnish, wood, metal — by time and neglect. At first glance they could be of century-old buildings anywhere in the Northeast, until a certain famous statue appears in the window of one of the buildings. Then the pictures snap into focus; they’re of the buildings on Ellis Island, the famous point of arrival for the great wave of immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century, when U.S. immigration was perhaps the most open it has been in its history as a global power.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2022 8:33 am
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The layers of overlapping textures, patterns, and colors are, in truth, abstract. But they evoke much of what we see in our lives. Maybe it’s a picture in a magazine of the surface of an insect leg, magnified a thousand times. Maybe it’s a close up of fabric, or water running down a window. For the painter, Judy Atlas, the connection between the painting and the world is the viewer’s to make. For Atlas herself, the connections between the paintings tell their own story, too.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2022 8:59 am
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Rita Hannafin’s quilt, front and center on the back wall of City Gallery, is at first glance a piece immersed in a folk tradition. But look closer and Hannafin’s more playful nature comes out. The first of the nine boxes in the center is full of patterns and colors — among the more abstract shapes are prints of cars, glasses, leaves, and helicopters. In the next box over, one of the sections of the box is replaced by a white box with a square peephole in it, from which a small pattern peeks out. In the next large box over, another white box appears. This plan repeats all the way through the piece; there’s a sense of those peepholes taking over, each iteration making it more geometric and more abstract. And in veering away from old patterns of quilting but establishing a new one, Hannafin is stretching the form without breaking it. She’s showing what else can be done.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2022 11:10 am
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Joy Bush
Loose Screw.
The title photographer Joy Bush gives to the image — Loose Screw — suggest something about the sense of humor she wants the viewer to have in looking at the piece. But it also offers some direction for how to look at the image. The first thing that jumps out, after all, is the chair. But the story, whatever it is, starts with the screwdriver balanced on the power outlet. What’s it doing there? And where is the screw it was brought out to tighten? Is it between jobs? Has it been forgotten? Where is the owner of that chair? There’s a sense of incompletion; something hasn’t happened yet, but it’s about to.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2022 8:31 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
The images up on the screen at Gather on State Street on Thursday night were from the Canadian mockumentary comedy series Trailer Park Boys, but they were altered, made psychedelic. The ambient music behind it felt sad and urgent. It was a quick reminder to the people filing into the space just how much a few images and the right music can alter the vibe of a room — fitting, as Gather was performing yet another transformation, from coffee shop to after-hours lounge.
by
Thomas Breen |
Sep 16, 2022 1:34 pm
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(6)
Thomas Breen photo
15 Brown St., now OK'd for a new 2-family house.
Three different vacant lots in Wooster Square, West River, and Upper State Street should soon sprout new two-family houses, thanks to approvals granted by the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA).
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 11, 2022 8:55 am
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(5)
Karen Klugman
Jerry at Jerry's Antiques, 928 State.
Jerry stands with his hand on his hip, a cigar angled improbably out of his mouth. He’s wearing a hat from another time. The shop behind him is from another time, too, an older New Haven that’s increasingly hard to catch a glimpse of. The photograph is accompanied by a quote from Jerry, addressed to the photographer: “Say, you ain’t Polish, are ya? John here said you might be Polish. You’re Italian, ain’t ya? You look Italian.… Lithuanian? Romanian? Well, at least you ain’t a Jew. Say, you ain’t Jewish, are ya? Old John, he and I just like to kid around. What are you anyway?”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 14, 2022 8:37 am
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Sheila Kaczmarek
Caterpillar Homes.
The sculpture in the window of City Gallery is fashioned almost like it could be a bouquet of summery flowers, or a piece of interesting coral — the kind of art made from natural objects that you see a lot. But the pleasing shapes are actually representations of caterpillars that look like they could crawl out of their ceramic homes at any second. Some may find it a little creepy, but it’s also about the abundance of nature, the way it moves and grows, especially in the summer.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2022 9:04 am
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(1)
Cassides' Diner.
Cassides’ Diner sits everywhere and nowhere; it could be on any number of city blocks around the Northeast, and at the same time, it’s hard to say from the picture where on that block it is situated. The building itself is also a little improbable. It carries the signs of both tough economic straits and real ingenuity, the result of someone taking what’s at hand and making something better out of it.
Bradley Street Co-op's John Martin picks mulberry to share with neighbors.
A mulberry tree that was purportedly planted by George Washington at the intersection of Bradley and State Streets will soon going to find itself in the midst of a summer home-improvement project.
by
Courtney Luciana |
Jun 7, 2022 3:26 pm
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Courtney Luciana Photo
As cars raced by the I‑95 Exit 5 entrance ramp on State Street during the morning rush hour, “Keith Nauer” was “flying a sign.” It read, “Homeless. Help. Thank You. God bless you all.”
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2022 9:00 am
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Dunn.
“It was kind of like I was squished so hard it leaked out,” Sarah Dunn said of her first EP, Thank You — coming out this Saturday, June 4, with a release party at Gather on Upper State Street — and the torrent of songwriting that followed, in between shifts in nursing homes during the depths of the pandemic. “I happened upon a very strange way of having silence, and it allowed the space inside my head to put things down that maybe had been festering there for a while. I didn’t have the opportunity before, but suddenly I was provided the time, so I did it.”
by
Brian Slattery |
May 11, 2022 8:37 am
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Brian Slattery photos
Davies.
The surface of Jennifer Davies’s Blue Accord, part of “In Mind and Hand” — a show of Davies’s work up now at City Gallery on State Street through May 29 — is a panoply of textures, and not just visual ones. There are the endless variations on indigo, wrought by applying the dye in unpredictable ways. But look closer, and you can tell the material itself has a tactile life of its own, sometimes punctuated by string. Davies may be a visual artist by training, but her art appeals to more than one of the senses.
