Standing at the heart of his studio, Danny Sheffer held a flashlight in one hand, weathered fingers clasping its slick, narrow tip as his thumb clicked it on and off. The lights were down, the studio totally dark and quiet. Days before, he’d pressed brown and red reams of paper up to the cloudy windows, blocking any mid-fall sunlight. Now the moment had arrived.
He beamed the flashlight at the wall. A shelf of fantastical wood-and-paper sculptures in miniature, each carved or cut in painstaking detail, sprang to life.
Down the hall, Julie Fraenkel was walking visitors through her papier-mâché wonderland of a space, describing each smiling, impish puppet to anyone who asked. A New Havener paused beneath one, blindfolded and suspended from the ceiling. Was it falling or flying? they asked.
Fraenkel turned the question over in her mind. Across the way in a different building of Erector Square, Meg Bloom and Holly Whiting found themselves stranded in a midst of similar thoughts, caught up in words like intentionality and organic as they shared their work with passers by.
As this year’s three-weekend City Wide Open Studios drew to a close, it was these artists and many other artists who personified the year’s theme of “dwelling,” showing off studios that doubled as creative homes away from home: warm, personable spaces that let off a creative buzz.
Bloom’s studio looked onto a world crowded with fantastical shapes and creatures, some suspended from the ceiling while others hung from the walls. Interested in the intersection of the organic and the inorganic, she has built her practice around working with silk and rayon paper, organza that curls and flips at the end when heated, beeswax, and a heat gun. While much of the artistic process takes place outside because the heat gun (and the wax) is toxic and dangerous in enclosed spaces, she has made the studio itself into another sort of world entirely, dreamlike forms — bobbing jellyfish, desiccated fruit borne from handmade paper, thick, heavy canvases on the walls — springing to life.
“I come here sometimes and I think: ‘Wow. Who is this crazy person?” she said. “But like a lot to do installation stuff.”
{meda_7}One flight of stairs up, crouched beside a clean pile of logs all collected from the city, Eliza Shaw Valk was also transforming a studio into something wholly her own, showing off a series of blocks that she’s sawed and sanded, and now plans to recreate the cities of her childhood with. A marked-up schematic for her next exhibition, an installation on social media and the power (or seeming power) of “Puppies and Poppies,” lay in one hand as she spoke.
That sense — that the space can inform the works as much as the works can inform the space — continued one building across the lot, where Daniel Eugene displayed his most recent project, a series of line images printed on fabric.
Fraenkel walked visitors through two-dimensional oil sketches and richly gesturing, calf-high sculptures — a fairly recent development “from the emotions, whatever kind of human emotion I’m thinking of … things that symbolize those emotions” — that have taken over the space, turning it into half-kabuki, half-dollhouse, and all Neverland.
Painter Zachary Keeting explained that his cavernous, drafty space with grand wood floors — in a city he’d never intended to stay in for this long — informs his large-scale, deeply emotional, and sometimes aggressive works and practice of painting several hours a day.
“I move through life in the paintings,” he said on Saturday, a drop-cloth still drying on the floor from the night before. “I jokingly refer to them as cafe scenes — multiple conversations overlapping. Multiple voices overlapping. I want them to be convincing documents of moving through life.” The studio and his practice, he added, have made him think of the city in a totally different way too.
That was also true for Jeff Mueller of Dexterity Press, who moved to Chicago five years ago when his wife, fellow artist and studiomate Kerri Sancomb, got a job planning exhibitions in the Yale library system. For him, the space has become linked inextricably, not only with his livelihood, but his affinity for New Haven.
“In my personal space, the best part [of this weekend] is just having people be in the space … I like the spirit of it. Sometimes I’ll find things that I’ll just really get excited about” he said, summing the weekend up. “I feel like we have a pretty nice thing happening here.”