November 7, 2014–January 31, 2015
Opening reception: November 7, 2014
Artspace
50 Orange St.
New Haven, CT 06510
Artspace announces Connecticut (un) Bound, a new exhibition featuring eight Connecticut artists commissioned with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to create work in response to the Chasanoff Book Work Collection at Yale University Art Gallery. These will be presented alongside objects borrowed from the collection at YUAG. Connecticut (un) Bound will coincide with Odd Volumes: Book Arts from the Allan Chasanoff Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery along with a companion show, Beyond the Codex, at Yale’s Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library.
The show, which represents the first formal collaboration between YUAG and Artspace, will include works with a rich mix of personal narrative, historical events, politics, industrial rise and decline, technological innovation, ecological and geographical forces, drama and pathos, all alluding to issues of concern to residents and visitors to Connecticut.
The commissioned projects are:
– Regan Avery: The Groton Avery Clan.
The artist’s personal family history, taken from a book of names of ancestors from Groton, is cut apart, deconstructed, and reanimated.
– Marion Belanger: No Place Like Home.
Photography, water analysis reports, and fish count statistics from the DEP come together in a nuanced visual essay on the life of the 40-mile Naugatuck River—the only one to begin and end in the state of Connecticut.
– David Borawski: 1970 Black Panther Trial.
Borawski’s project explodes the concept of media press coverage, legal text and the word of law in an immersive installation about a watershed event which continues to have resonance today.
– Maria Lara-Whelpley: Connecticut Place-maps.
Lara-Whelpley has created a set of hand-knit topographic textiles made of pages from geological atlases, census documents, navigational charts and other data-driven publications.
– Richard Rose: To The Letter: Reading New Haven.
Artist and letterpress printer Richard Rose has created an intimate, accordion-fold book that marries the digital and analog, showcasing his vast collection of images of New Haven’s signage and street typography.
– Alison Safford: Handbooks from the Tool & Die Industry.
Vintage tool and die handbooks spur a dialogue about the industrial manufacturing history of Connecticut, the artist’s family immigration to work within the industry, and the impossibility of “repairing” the past, either individual or collective.
– Rita Valley: Better Guns n’ Gardens Magazine.
Valley’s glossy publication created expressly for the exhibition probes themes of life and death, violence and rebirth, and Connecticut’s complex relationship to guns.
– Jo Yarrington, Morgan Post, Samuel Dole: Containment and Spillage.
This collaborative will use uranium printing to create a containment system of books to highlight the state’s problematic history of waste containment.
Martha Lewis (Artspace’s Education Curator), Jae Rossman (Assistant Director for Special Collections, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale) and Kerri Sancomb (Artspace Visual Arts Committee and University Library Conservator) served as exhibition jurors.
A special reading room at Artspace will feature contributions from Jeanne Criscola/Joan Fitzsimmons, Allison Hale, Johanna Moore/David Keef, Paulette Rosen and Aicha Woods/Cyra Levenson. In addition to the above works, Artspace’s exhibition will include pieces by Noriko Ambe, Doug Beube, Tina Blackburn, Diana Carulli, Kwang-Young Chun, Jacki Danylchuk, Paul De Guzman, Linda Ekstrom, Gregory Green, Lisa Kokin, Helmut Löhr, Joan Lyons, Momoko Koizumi, Nicole Morello, Bonnie O’Connell, Chris Perry, Susan Joy Share, Robbin Ami Silverberg, Pamela Spitzmueller, Irwin Susskind, Robert The, Beth Thielen, Heather Townsend, and Janet Zweig from the Yale University Art Gallery Chasanoff Book Art Collection.
Artspace is grateful to receive exhibition and operating support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, City of New Haven, Connecticut Office of the Arts, Greater New Haven Community Foundation, the IMLS, NEA, Yale University, local foundations, businesses and individual friends of Artspace.
Artspace is open Wednesdays & Thursday from noon to 6pm, Fridays & Saturdays from noon to 8pm. The gallery is free and open to the public.