Lucy Gellman Photos
More than a year after Wells Fargo announced that it was closing the John Slade Ely House and curator Paul Clabby lost his job — and his home — the building will open its doors to take on a new artistic future, while stopping to acknowledge its embattled past.
Floorboards may heave under the weight of memories. Beams may flicker with recollection of the art they soared over, and walls with that of the art they proudly displayed. But that’s the thought behind it: Without such acknowledgement, the nod to a collective displacement, there can’t really be a moment to heal and move forward.
Lique and Marsh
Friday night, No-Pop founders Laura Marsh and Phil Lique will present “Borrowed Time,” a one night, three-hour participatory installation and No-Pop retrospective at the Ely House that attempts to define, navigate, and reclaim displacement, with all its messy complications and complexities. For Marsh, who defines the term as “being disassociated from home,” it’s personal: she and Lique were among those booted from Daggett Street Square in March 2015, and they’ve been thinking about its ramifications since. So when curator Debbie Hesse approached them in June about “a way for the space to be living again … to heal and deal with” its history, they jumped to accept.
After its opening Friday, the exhibition can be accessed by appointment until Sept. 8.
“Ever since we were displaced from Daggett and started No Pop, a lot of my work became about trying to find a nest,” she said as she walked around Ely House Monday, readying it for Friday’s exhibition. “In thinking about the history of the Ely House, and how Wells Fargo came in and basically closed the doors to this institution and it’s now reopening … I think that these types of spaces become a new dialogue to talk about displacement, replacement, how to rejuvenate a space and make it active again.”
“When we were asked to do the show, we really wanted to fill the space,” added Lique. “From Daggett, the attitude that we maybe had was that you’re supposed to hide in a factory and be weird and make art, and that’s what artists do. The genesis of No Pop was … having the realization that it would be bolder and better and healthier to be out front and proactive about being an artist than it is to try to hide and be an artist quietly. That’s kind of like the wellspring of where that energy comes from.“
It’s important, they added, for them to them to see the building through a sort of healing process. Both are close with Clabby; both joined over 1,000 artists in signing a petition last year to keep the Ely House’s doors open. So “Borrowed Time” moves into the realm of site-specific art while maintaining a foundation specific to No Pop, Marsh and Lique’s Park Street incubator.
Like The Occult News Stand, a “freestanding sculpture and performance booth,” portable and spectral at once, where Lique will offer tarot card readings and attendees can page through copies of PANTSDESTROYER, No Pop’s zine.
Or The Green Room, a space defined not just by a green screen and large film equipment, but also Marsh’s careful, bright hangings and interest in varied materials and creating a feeling of comfort. Plastic vines and soft, fabric flowers hang by beanbag chairs, as if to say: Hello there! You look like you could use a good sit.
It’s there, Marsh hopes, that New Haven’s artists, displaced and at home alike — and rarely treated with the plush luxury of a media-like green room — will come to both regroup and tell their own stories of displacement, whether it is from home, from an object or work of art, or something else. She plans to videotape the testimonies and use them as archival material, not just for herself, but for the city’s creative populations.
“Friday night will really give people a chance to come back in and reconnect with the space,” Marsh said. “I want viewers to experience these immersive installations that they’re included in. So I’m really excited to sit down and talk … it’s sort of a combination of the things that we do already, and steering it in the direction of ‘Hey: you’re part of our audience. You’re active in this space right now.’”
As of this week, the show will offer one more meditation on displacement, unintended when the artists started planning the show in June. On Oct. 1, the two will climb into a U‑Haul and move to Miami, where Marsh has taken a position as a curator. No Pop will be going with them.
While they started the space a year ago without fully knowing how it would evolve — and the answer so far is well, based on the turnouts their exhibitions have had in the past months — Lique said that the movie feels fairly organic. And it opens up space for other artists in New Haven, other people trying to get their footing, to express themselves.
“I feel like there’s a link,” he said. “We’ve come full circle and we’re making a decision to displace ourselves from New Haven now. It’s reclaiming that word as something that can be positive too. We’re talking about displacement as moving on, people who got kicked out or were ousted. But … you’re allowed to speak to displacing yourself from somewhere that’s not working for you anymore … or to go somewhere that is new and different.”
“In the wake of that, I think there’s a relationship between displacement and a void,” he added. “I want to leave New Haven and see people do cool stuff in our absence. I want that. In my own mind, in a very selfish way, I want people to realize that we left and they should carry the torch. When you leave there’s a void, and something needs to fill a void. This is an end to a sentence. There will be a pause, and then you can continue dialogue.”