Brian Slattery photos
Old projectors and such, up for grabs ...
... at Artspace's sale on Wednesday.
The pumping music and impromptu skatepark set up at Orange and Crown gave the first signal that something was changing on that Ninth Square corner — as a recently closed visual arts gallery sold off frames, chairs, televisions, and other goods from its now ex-home.
At Artspace on Wednesday — which announced last week that it was closing its long-held gallery space at 50 Orange St. this month — people entered and left with an array of objects. A woman walking by turned and leaned into the entryway.
“Anything going on here I should know about?” she asked.
“We’re having a sale,” responded Gabriel Sacco, the gallery’s visual culture producer.
The sale at Artspace had two functions: to help the organization clear out its Orange Street space before the end of the month, and to raise a little money.
The first wave of the sale, which started Wednesday and finishes Thursday at 6 p.m., involved the “first bring-out from the basement,” said Sacco. This involved electronics and office supplies, and “some shop materials.” Next week “we’ll have another pull from the basement, and it’s going to be mostly raw materials — wood, acrylic, fabricated material” for people to “break down things and build things.”
Artspace Visual Culture Producer Gabe Sacco.
“Everything’s going quick, I’m definitely going to say that,” he added, as a woman hauled out a set of metal chairs. It’s “first come, first served.” Artspace’s space heaters, he said, were the first items to sell.
As the sale continues, Sacco will price the items as he goes, and “after that it’s pay what you wish.”
Artspace is hoping not only to empty out the space, but to raise funds. “Most of it’s going to go toward SAP this year” — Artspace’s four-week summer arts program for New Haven public school students, which will happen this summer at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street, culminating in a month-long student exhibition in August — as well as general operating costs.
Speaking for himself, Sacco feels “okay — I feel like it’s a good step for Artspace, necessary” but also “refreshing in a way.” With the move out of the gallery, Artspace will have downsized to its smallest footprint as an organization in years. “Because we’re so small right now, it’s almost like everything is a possibility,” Sacco said. “There is talk of ‘what can we do?’ We’re not trying to limit ourselves” as Artspace looks ahead to “recalibrating, thinking about partnerships,” and finding ways to “be with other orgs.”
By 1 p.m. much of the office supplies had already found new homes. A lot of intriguing items remained, from frames to mounting materials to televisions to various generations of lighting and sound equipment as well as audiovisual gear — projectors, DVD players, wires and cables.
Several people who identified themselves to one another as artists helped one another find some of the supplies they wanted. They mused about what the Artspace gallery could become after Artspace moved out — a restaurant? A co-work space? Perhaps even another gallery?
As Sacco described what still lay in the basement, a few ears perked up, and Sacco led a small group of them downstairs, where they perused stacks of raw materials of metal and wood — as Sacco had said, full of possibilities for people with the ideas and equipment to reshape them.
Artist Julia Rooney found a heavy triangular metal frame with casters at each corner. “My guess is that it might have held equipment, or maybe it was fabricated for an artwork,” she said. She had another idea for it. For one of her projects, “I’ve been making this folding screen that I envision being moved around urban spaces,” she said, “and this seems like it could be repurposed for that.”
Rooney made an original version of the piece for Artspace last year as a part of the gallery’s collaboration with artists in residence at Yale. That piece “was a greenscreen,” she said, “and the vision for it was that it would be activated by the public.” People could “walk in front of it” and perform with it as a backdrop and infuse with “images they produce themselves” (she will bring it to Yale University Art Gallery’s Sidewalk Studio this afternoon; it runs on Chapel Street in front of the gallery from 2 to 4 p.m.).
She has built a second larger version that has wheels to aid in movement from place to place in the city, where she could use it to “engage in certain histories of the places in which it’s being moved.” The three panels that comprise this larger version, she said, “could get mounted on this, and then it would be like this moving triangle.” So “this is kind of incredible.”
“I like the idea that it would actually be on a found item,” she considered. That would hearken back to the original version, mounted on “found, cast-iron legs. So it always had this base that was found material combined with the painting. So this might be an option.” The odd triangular frame connected Rooney to the history of her piece, but might also help her roll into the future.
The Artspace sale happens at 50 Orange St. Thursday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. and June 28 from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.