Artist Photo
“374 Orchard Street,” mixed media collage and graphite on paper.
Bank and credit card statements. Stocks and bonds certificates. Dollar and twenty-dollar bills, barcodes, maps of Connecticut. The insides of security envelopes, in which — if you have been unlucky, overextended, or financially duped — you might have received a foreclosure notice.
Those are the entirely paper ephemera building materials out of which artist Ronnie Rysz has constructed the 11 delicate and thought-inducing collages in his new show, Default Notice. The collages are of foreclosed houses around town. There are also six linoleum cuts, much smaller, less detailed, and without collage elements, but also of foreclosed buildings.
Allan Appel Photo
The exhibition at the DaSilva Gallery in Westville runs through Oct. 30, with a reception Friday from 6 to 8 p.m.
Rysz describes his works’ subject matter as “the fragility of home ownership” and the overly optimistic view that the wave of foreclosures that rocked New Haven and the country in 2008 and 2009 is gone forever. Rysz asserts the show is not political, in that he takes no side on the issue.
Rysz, trained both at the School of Visual Art in New York and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, said he began thinking about the subject back in February, long before the theme of this year’s Citywide Open Studios was announced.
It’s fortuitous that the theme — dwelling — dovetails so nicely with Rysz’s intense graphic preoccupation with what he called the “mountain of paperwork” involved in home ownership.
When the subject began to bug him, Rysz said he began to research foreclosure listings online on the real estate and government sites. In some instances he drove by buildings on Winchester Avenue, near his former studio on Shelton Street, that had been foreclosed and were in varying states of shutteredness and even blight.
He talked to mortgage brokers and others, learning the various sides of the issue that resulted in the real estate and banking calamity — a slew of foreclosures occurring, it seemed, every weekend at the height of the downturn, and long afterward as well.
Artist Photo
“468 Lombard Street,” mixed media collage and graphite on paper.
Although Rysz had worked in some collage before, his metier has been primarily in the style of comic-book R. Crumb graphics with a satirical edge. This work is a genuine departure, he said.
That’s because Rysz, a renter by choice at his digs and home studio in Wooster Square, loves New Haven, where he’s lived for the past seven years. He said that through the exhibition he wants to take on a subject still unresolved and at the heart of city life: affordable housing, and the wisdom or folly of home ownership.
“I wanted to make a new way of looking at it,” he said.
He said he hopes the show is the beginning of a “civic dialogue about housing, what it is means to own, and the risks involved.”
In Rysz’s work, the paper representations of those risks form the walls, sidewalks, roofs, porches, and street scenes around the foreclosed houses. The base images from which Rysz worked came from Google maps, and his unlikely perspectives in many of the images, are an attempt to represent the various angles included from Google’s drive-by, car top camera point of view.
Front yards are at times city maps. The overgrown foliage in front of one foreclosed home appears in Rysz’s image as broccoli-like clumps of representations of U.S. currency.
The results are in most instances not admonitory, at least to this un-foreclosed homeowner, but at times bewitching — especially the azure lining of those security envelopes that make up so many of the artist’s walls.
Maybe that’s because I’ve always considered home ownership a form of long-term renting; that none of us really owns anything except in a legal sense; and it’s just as well because the built environment is itself fragile and evanescent as paper.
Interestingly, there are no people in Rysz’s houses. Maybe they’re gone, skipped out when their homes went underwater. Rysz said he didn’t include any real people, the most direct victims of foreclosure, in part because he doesn’t want to “take sides” in the matter.
“I talked to someone in the mortgage industry and she said there was on all fronts a lot of greed, and lack of responsibility. On both [buyer and seller] sides,” he said.
Yet there was also a major aesthetic consideration not to put people in his paper houses. “A human form takes over [a composition],” he offered.
“I wanted to stay focused on the architecture and the material. As soon as a figure gets introduced, it [also] becomes too personal,” he added.
Rysz added, however, that he has “suggested” habitation by people in the homes with the “hair of President Jackson on twenty-dollar bills,” (pictured).
Those twenties were only representations of the real twenties. In the whole of the 11 collages, the artist cut up perhaps two one-dollar bills, he said.
Rysz said bigger takes on this idea are to come. “I’ve scanned every single paper I’ve used in these [collages] into his computer,” he said.
That means he can produce large swatches of the stuff potentially to paste on buildings themselves, or create a room-size installation; those are just possibilities, not plans.
In the future he says he also intends to go to the actual homes that he has constructed from ephemeral materials and online images.
Rysz said he welcomes everybody to come look at his images — what he calls painting with paper — be they lawyers, bankers, or those who have gone through foreclosure or are contemplating with happiness, and/or dread, becoming homeowners.
“I don’t think art itself can physically cause a change [in the world]. It does have the ability to inspire action. I hope someone will come in and be inspired,” he added.
The DaSilva Gallery is located at 897 – 899 Whalley Ave. One of the City Wide Open Studio curator tours, led by Sam Toabe of Samson Projects in Boston, will include a visit to the DaSilva gallery and Rysz’s work on Oct. 17 at 4:45.