PANDEMIC ARCHIVE
URSA GALLERY SHOW OFFERS INSIGHT INTO ARTISTS’ MINDS IN AGE OF COVID-19
TThe inaugural exhibit at the new Ursa Gallery in Bridgeport’s Arcade Mall packs a lot into a small space, beginning with its cryptic triptych title, “Accordion Time, Unfolding: a Pandemic Archive.” The main event is immersive, an archive more felt than seen, initially at least. It is the gallery’s very own wallpaper. Fashioned from 890 printed pages of digital messages and images exchanged by a group of seven area artists, the wallpaper is a record of their lives leading up to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and coping with the lockdown shock that followed. Alexandra Rutsch Brock, Patricia Fabricant, Ellen Hackl Fagan, Katherine Jackson, Patricia Miranda, Josette Urso and Jo Yarrington are the artists featured in the show. “We’re not expecting everybody to read the whole thing,” said Brock, a co-curator of the exhibit. “It’s symbolic. It’s a documentation in real time of the pandemic. This is our conversation. It’s chronological. There is no editing. It is what it is, 100 percent.”
In fact, someone would need a pair of binoculars and several days to read all 890 messages exchanged between the seven women.
They run in columns from ceiling to floor and cover all four walls of the gallery’s main room. Nevertheless, those at eye-level form a readable, if fractured, chronicle.
“There’s a point on the wall where the pandemic hits,” said Cris Dam, the Ursa Gallery owner who spent his teens in Shelton and now lives in Westport. “You can see the tone of the conversation completely changing.”
To demonstrate, Brock, who lives in Stamford and teaches high school art in New Rochelle, N.Y., walked to the section of the wall where the lockdown month of March bleeds into April. She points to a photo of park picnic tables cordoned off by police tape and another of one of the artists consoling herself with a pint of ice cream.
There are exchanges about the stress of teaching on Zoom, about which supermarkets and liquor stores deliver, about recipes and masks and deaths.
“It was just a way of communicating and keeping everybody sane, dealing with drama and nervousness and how to wash your groceries, and at the same time talking about art or the movies you’re watching or the book you’re reading or just helping through meltdowns,” Brock said.
The raw data nature of the archive — Brock called it “uncurated” — is reinforced by its pure origin. Only in hindsight would Brock say it began in October 2019, when the seven women decided to take advantage of low airfares to fly to London for a #MeToo movement exhibit at the Tate Modern.
A few met for the first time just before departing, but all were part of the same art orbit and most had local connections. Brock’s cocurator, Miranda, has taught art at the University of New Haven.
Yarrington is a professor of studio art at Fairfield University. Fagan lives in Greenwich and owns the Odetta Gallery there.
Together, they began calling themselves the London Calling Collective and kept in touch using WhatsApp. Then the pandemic hit and communications became more urgent.
“It became a real lifeline,” Brock said. “We never thought to put it on display. This was just honest conversation.”
She and Fagan first talked about somehow exhibiting the Collective’s exchanges in August, when Fagan had a show in Harlem. The idea was sidelined; instead, the Collective began a project inspired by the USPS Art Project, in which hundreds of artists shared work by mail, beginning last April.
For their own project, each Collective member created an image on the first page of a sevenpage fold-out book, then mailed it on to other members to complete.
The seven pandemic books by the seven women came to be displayed as “Accordion Time” on pedestals in the Ursa Gallery, surrounded by the wallpaper archive.
Meanwhile, Brock had been talking with gallery owner Dam about a completely different inaugural exhibit, one with a political theme to be called “Witch Hunt,” timed to November’s Bridgeport Art Trail. The two had known each other for years, since Dam operated a gallery in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn.
But pandemic chaos and an overdose of election-year politics worked against “Witch Hunt.” Suddenly there was a race to finish the fold-out books and get the Collective’s pandemic messages printed and pasted up.
The 890 pages on the wall end on May 27, 2020. “That’s all we could fit,” said Brock. But that is just a quarter of the 3,783 pages in the entire archive. It begins on Oct. 3, 2019, and arbitrarily ends on Oct. 13, 2020. It is displayed in a 2-foot-tall stack just inside the gallery entrance.
Dam, an artist himself, said people relate to the dialogue they can read in the archive. “It has made me think I really want to have shows about what’s happening in the world at the moment. I want this to be contemporary,” he said, meaning contemporary in the general sense.
Dam signed the lease for the gallery last January but already had a studio elsewhere in the Arcade. He conceived it in collaboration with Dustin Malstrom, a friend since high
school in Shelton.
Both wound up in New York, where Malstrom started an architecture and design business. After Williamsburg, Dam spent several years in Berlin. The two now live minutes apart in Westport.
“From Brooklyn to Bridgeport” is how the Ursa Gallery introduces itself on its website. Dam said he chose Ursa for a name because star constellations influence his own art and because he sees the gallery as a constellation of talent.
The third component of the pandemic archive exhibit does in fact showcase individual work by each of the seven members of the London Calling Collective.
Altogether there are about 50 pieces on display, a deceptively large number. Many are smaller, mixed-media constructions so cleverly mounted that they look like pop-up components of the wallpaper archive itself.
Miranda, Brock’s co-curator, has a series called “Pearls Before Swine” in which she’s copied and dyed pages of Bible verse, then highlighted gendered words with freshwater pearls.
Yarrington has a golden, backlit sculpture partly fashioned from player piano music rolls.
Easier to spot because they are displayed on shelves is a series of oil cans of the spouted type used to lubricate machinery or instruments, except these are translucent and brightly colored.
They are by Jackson, a Brooklyn artist with a Harvard doctorate in English who writes that her cans allude to fragrant oils, lightgiving oils or the harm done by the oil industry.
The largest single piece in the exhibit, in the gallery’s back room, is an abstract oil painting by the Brooklyn artist Urso.
Brock’s contribution is half a dozen paintings in gouache on paper embroidered with stitched thread. One just inside the gallery entrance, where the wallpaper pandemic archive begins, is of a solitary eye weeping raindrop tears. It is titled “Looking.”
“Accordion Time, Unfolding: a Pandemic Archive” runs to Feb. 12. The gallery is open to walk-in visitors on Saturdays. On Jan. 27 the artists will conduct a Zoom talk, and on Jan. 30 they will be at the gallery for a meet and greet.
“IT’S SYMBOLIC. IT’S A DOCUMENTATION IN REAL TIME OF THE PANDEMIC. THIS IS OUR CONVERSATION. IT’S CHRONOLOGICAL. THERE IS NO EDITING.”