New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Be well, says City-Wide Open Studios
3 weekends of artwork in various locations
One of the commissioned art installations on the last weekend of City-Wide Open Studios is “BOOBS” by Suzanne Kachmar, a traveling exhibit of local artists addressing Breast Cancer Awareness Month and responding to a variety of feminist issues. It will examine the breast in many contexts.
Another to be featured in that Oct. 26-28 “Alternative Weekend” at Yale Campus West, has Neil Daigle Orians targeting “Conversion Therapy,” for its “violence and mistreatment inflicted on queer youth.”
At a preview event, Orians said he researched the therapies “and I’m mimicking them and subverting the tactics they use” in order to instead foster “queer affirmation, love, acceptance.”
CWOS begins Friday and features artists exhibiting, making, talking about and selling art. The location of this last of three weekends is the former Bayer campus in Orange and a hub for scientific research at Yale, which fits the theme of this
year’s CWOS festival — wellbeing.
Also among the commissions/special art projects later in the month is The Center for Adult Swaddling, which is described this way: “Through the experience of a tight swaddle, imitating the structure of the womb, this collaborative and interdisciplinary project invites visitors to return to fetus-like states to experience a comforting bundled environment.”
That’s similar to the fetal position some take after hearing a certain prominent politician speak.
At a CWOS preview at Artspace New Haven (which runs the open studios events), we asked “Swaddling” organizer Aude Jomini how this connects to art.
“My job is to make things connect that don’t connect,” Jomini said. “I’m interested in crossing boundaries and I’m interested in disciplines that never were together. Like trying to put them together and see what happens.”
There is a science behind this experiment, as Jomini calls it, involving the practice of Otonamaki therapy of Japan. For this, designers, medical practitioners, artists and scholars have contributed an art-world response to medical studies from Yale New Haven Health Children’s Hospital and a recent paper in the Journal of Pediatrics.
“If people want to participate, it’s open for public participation. We’ll demonstrate the technique ... it’s soft, you don’t have to get enclosed in any way. We’ll have pillows and cushions. We’ll be demonstrating it as a performance throughout... But it’s interesting to us in a way that it’s a new idea.”
Another project, “The Underneath” by Martha Lewis & Marion Belanger (artists-in-residence at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station), “examines our place in the greater ecosystem by creating a womb-like environment of roots, dirt, insects, and both filtered and natural light.”
In “Science for a Better Life,” Jeff Ostergren looks at the West Campus history — as Bayer Pharmaceuticals and its history of materials, products and advertising. The company created good products such as aspirin, but had “also a little bit of a checkered past,” said Ostergren. “They were strong marketers of heroin in the 1800s” and were involved with the Nazi regime, he said.
So Ostergren will be using found objects, such as coasters and furniture, and creating paintings and sculptures mixing paint colors with ground-up or dissolved materials from Bayer products, such as Alka-Seltzer. “So it will be sort of a big installation within the space where people can move throughout with a wide variety of (objects).”
Also among the projects is “Hero Stories: Open (Mic) Studio” with Lilianna Marie Baczeski — from Adam Christoferson’s Musical Intervention nonprofit effort that helps street people make art and record songs.
“Lili is bringing the artistic element,” said Christoferson. “She’s going to be allowing people to make their own album art. The goal of it is to create a piece (of music) there, create that album art and get that music onto iTunes and Spotify for people to actually purchase.”
City-Wide Open Studios begins with a Party in the Streets/Opening Reception at Artspace on Orange Street Friday, Oct. 5, where inside you can find one work by every participating CWOS artist, arranged in a grid by weekend. And there will be a range of wellness-themed experiences (yoga, massage, drinks of sustainable ingredients by Bun Lai of Miya’s, performance and live sketching) along with a DJ.
It also coincides with First Friday: Noodles on 9 from 6-9 p.m. on Orange Street, where you can sample noodle dishes from different cultures.
On Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 6-7, the focus is on visual art at Erector Square Weekend in Fair Haven (site of many artist studios), 315 Peck St # C12.
Weekend two is split between Westville in Focus Oct. 13, noon to 6 p.m., and private studios in New Haven, West Haven, North Haven and Hamden from noon to 6 p.m. Oct. 14.
The final weekend, with a preview day added on Friday, is Alternative Spaces Weekend Oct. 26-28, also noon to 6 p.m. “One of the exciting things about Alternative Spaces Weekend,” said organizer Elinor Slomba of Verge Arts Group, is this year it will feature various “social practice and performance-based elements and every day will be different ... Friday, Saturday and Sunday.” (A calendar will be available on entry.)