Gallery co-owner Inger DaSilva, art framers Jonathan Peterson and Libby Boyd, and gallery co-owner Gabe DaSilva.
Miami is Coming to New Haven
DaSilva Gallery
Through March 25
At Miami is Coming to New Haven, the current group show at DaSilva Gallery & Frame Shop in Westville, you can tell the pieces are full of stories, seeming to whisper among each other about who will get your ear, your eye, first.
You can also tell the show is in a working frame shop and busy gallery, with the active energy of a system that never stops.
When I stopped by the exhibit Saturday afternoon, gallery co-owner Gabe DaSilva was in the middle of ironing out logistics to ship artwork, including some by Connecticut artists from Lyme and Bethany, to Scotsdale, Arizona, for a fair.
The show on display, Miami is Coming to New Haven, is a collection of pieces by a dozen artists the gallery works with, many of whom the gallery recently featured in a show in Miami.
With bold hues, pop elements, and experimentations in form, the artworks give a sense of newness, making the viewer curious about each artist’s journey through their craft and what would come next. The show doesn’t have a theme, DaSilva said; he selected pieces for the original Miami show with certain collectors’ tastes in mind and a curator’s instinct for what new flavors to take a chance on.
As he pointed to different works in the show, he mentioned the future he envisioned for them (fairs and exhibits to come), explaining the value of seeing now how the pieces looked on the wall.
The show is the fifth iteration of an annual DaSilva tradition to enliven New Haven’s winter months. Every year, DaSilva Gallery puts together a booth of artwork at the Pinta fair at Miami Art Basel, a contemporary art extravaganza with works from high-end galleries around the world. For the past five years, DaSilva Gallery has been bringing the art from Miami, along with other works by the same artists and a few new introductions, back to New Haven to give the work one more shine in the spotlight after the big fair — forming the exhibit currently on view.
Some pieces from the show open out toward the street, inviting in passersby. In one of the gallery’s windows facing Whalley Avenue, a piece by UK artist Ruth Mulvie plays with thick shadows and a hot pink underpainting, with large swipes of teal and deep blue. The bright, saturated colors vibrate at their boundaries, depicting a small aircraft’s arrival or departure.
Ruth Mulvie, Childhood Memories Luton Airport, 30x30" acrylic on canvas.
In another window, an oil landscape by Peruvian artist Ingrid Alvarez balances a rich, warm red underpainting against a family of greens and dazzling shades of orange. The color-blocked sections of the piece come together like a quilt of vegetation, mountains, and sky.
Ingrid Alvarez, Landscape, 24x36" oil on canvas.
Meanwhile, in the indoor-facing portion of the exhibit, cheerfully colored polymer parts curl up among sections of found wood in three sculptures by Norberto Estrin from Argentina. The pieces have a playful feel, the found and created elements interacting with each other’s form to create a tight hug, a support, a secret.
Norberto Estrin, wood and resin; (background) Dalia Kats, handmade cut paper.
Norberto Estrin, wood and resin.
Norberto Estrin, wood and resin.
DaSilva was not afraid of getting up close to and even touching the works as he explained different aspects about their materials.
“If you’re scared of the art,” he said, “something will happen.”
This is what he tells the fellows at NXTHVN art gallery and fellowship program in Dixwell, where he lectures four times per year on materials and methods and helps with logistics like shipping to Poland and South Korea. He elaborated on his advice with the koan-like statement: “Not every piece is fragile, and all pieces are fragile.”
As an art handler and framer with 25 years of experience, DaSilva brings what he’s learned everywhere he goes. He recently did two installations in London for Woodbridge’s Palestine Museum. His shop also did all the in-house framing and art handling (either through transportation in their own trucks or by managing the shipping process) of the works in his gallery’s current show. Any gallery curator might be familiar with an art piece or even a body of work, but DaSilva was familiar with each work’s exact makeup and physics.
“Looking at a piece,” he said, “you know what is the dangerous point, and how to handle it.”
Taking a peek behind the gallery into DaSilva Gallery’s back workspace, I was able to understand a bit more how, as DaSilva Gallery employee Jonathan Peterson put it, “the sausage gets made.” Peterson, along with fellow gallery worker Libby Boyd, explained the tips and tricks behind the framing projects they were currently working on, and DaSilva showed me the shop’s huge computerized mat cutter.
DaSilva Gallery's high-tech mat cutter and a little taste of what it's capable of.
“A lot of places don’t do large projects. And we do enormous projects,” DaSilva said. “Even though the place looks small.”
“It is small,” Boyd said, making the others laugh. Even with the entire back area of the frame shop and gallery, along with the two basements, DaSilva said, they also use as workshops, the team has to pack a lot into a compact Westville footprint. In order to have enough space to match their big ambitions, the team also uses a space in Wallingford for art installations, shipping art, and building big stretcher bars. They house these other services under a separate-but-connected business called Fika, and combined, the team handles “everything to do with art.”
When asked about their job titles, Peterson and Boyd said “art framer” before adding installation technician, driver, photographer, designer, web support, and more. Both of them are artists as well, and the attention to detail showed. Peterson demonstrated his process framing a pastel work, taking the extra step to add a gutter in between the art and the mat itself, so little particles of pastel dust would fall into the gap rather than settle on the beveled edge of the mat.
Peterson demonstrating on a scrap piece of foam how he creates his own wood molding.
“I like this molding. It’s one of my favorites,” Peterson said about that framing project, before saying this was, of course, just his own taste. He had the chance to make his own molding (which one can only guess is exactly his taste) for a piece of his in the gallery’s current show. It is a photograph of a small church surrounded by trees, the solemn monochrome and symmetry of the structure offset by slightly uneven red accents and the sprawling, warm beauty of the tree branches.
Jonathan Peterson, Church, black sconce, white sconce, archival pigment print
Jonathan Peterson, Abandoned Oil Platform, archival pigment print, also part of the current exhibit.
As both a skilled craftsman looking to showcase art and a creator of art itself, Peterson uses lessons from one role to strengthen the other — just like the gallery itself. “Darkroom photographers make good framers because they’re so meticulous,” Peterson said. They see how every little change in the process affects the result.
Boyd showing an example of wood molding.
Boyd, meanwhile, was in the process of “fitting,” in which a framer has the art, the mat, the glass, and the frame, and must now assemble everything together. The piece she was fitting had glass on both sides, as it was something with a signature on the back she needed to showcase.
Usually, she said, a double-sided framed work like this would use what’s called an “overmat” on the front (where the mat overlaps slightly on top of the work) and a floating mat technique (where the work goes on top of the mat) in the back, or two mats. In this case, though, the client wanted a floating mat in the front, which would normally necessitate a hinge in a specific spot. To accomplish the double-sided framing, Boyd performed a precise cut-out of the mat right where the signature was and moved the location of the hinge to accomodate.
“Definitely one of those things you can’t get done at Michael’s,” Boyd said.
DaSilva Gallery’s current show Miami is Coming to New Haven will be on view through March 31. Next up, the gallery will hold their annual exhibit with Westville’s ArtWalk festival in early May.