New Haven has made an unmistakable mark on the tattoo world. The New Haven Museum honors that legacy with Old School Ink, a new exhibition on view through March 10th, 2018. The show explores New Haven’s impact on tattooing at the regional, national, and international level. Guest curator Elinor Slomba brought on New Haven photojournalist Corey Hudson to help her understand where and why locals get their tattoos, the policies around them, and the way the art has changed over the years. She met with tattoo artists, historians, community members, and researched archives to understand the “Old School” New Haven tradition of tattooing and its reverberations beyond the city.

“Entering into a tattoo apprenticeship or becoming a tattooer is entering into this world that’s like a big family,” says Tracey Rose, Old School Ink contributor and co-owner of Lucky Soul Tattoo in Woodbridge, Connecticut. “You’re entering into something where you have grandfathers and great grandfathers. You have a lineage. Whether or not your direct lineage connects, you should know who those people are.”

Old School Ink
New Haven Museum
114 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, Connecticut
Through March 10th
10:00AM–5:00PM Tuesday to Friday, 12:00PM–5:00PM Saturday, 1:00PM–4:00PM first Sunday of the month
Tickets: $4 adults, $3 seniors, $2 students, free under 12

Logo courtesy of Tracey Rose, Lucky Soul Tattoo

The post New Haven’s Tattoo Legacy appeared first on Take Magazine.

Contemporary artist and abstract projectionist painter are not often terms one associates with a 14- year-old, but prodigy artist Qua is painting against the grain. Beginning in June 2017, Qua began a 17-evening live painting performance in New Haven, Connecticut, that began during the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and stretches into September. Qua has been inhabiting a 500-square-foot storefront of a downtown commercial space and filling the walls with a single abstract expressionist composition.

His performance, like his name, is unique: it includes collaborations with local artists and live music, and is centered around his high speed painting style fused with “local narratives and surreal imagery.” “I am a self-taught painter,” Qua writes via email. His name, while originally an accidental misspelling of the word “prequel,” now seems more prescient, he says, referencing the use of the word in the Latin phrase art qua art, or that art can be judged by aesthetics only.

Originally drawn to realism, Qua began experimenting with large abstraction when he began working in an artist studio by the Mill River almost two years ago. The large walls of the studio entranced Qua as he was able to paint compositions that “dwarfed me in size” and required more physical exertion. “Painting on a large scale requires the use of my full body, a more physical process including intensive arm movements and the use of my body as medium to house paint supplies and tools.”

Canvas 14, 4 1/2′ x 5′ mixed oil and acrylic, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.

While Qua does not consider himself a “professional artist”—yet—the breadth and intensity of his work demonstrates raw skill. Moving between sharp details and abstract movement of color and cascading images, Qua’s work is dreamlike and poignant, capturing the emotion of his paintings as well as the viewer. He also brings a unique force of performance to his painting process.

Canvas 3, 4 1/2′ x 5′ mixed oil and acrylic, 2015. Image courtesy of Qua.

Originally a “private performance,” Qua began to invite viewers into the grandiose exercise of his painting technique. Adorned in costume and immersed in choreography, Qua paints to music, and uses light and video projection—and sometimes darkness—to “create a private space for me to be with my shadow self.”

Due to the generous sponsorship of a commercial realtor in downtown New Haven, Qua has been making live performance paintings at 817 Chapel Street since early June. He performs there at sundown 4-5 nights a week on the second floor and then displays his work during the day. The show is scheduled to end September 15th.

Qua
Deep River, Connecticut
Website

All images courtesy of Qua

The post All Eyes on Qua appeared first on Take Magazine.

Eric Heimbold’s award winning documentary Blind Sushi, which screened at the Provincetown International Film Festival, takes the viewer through the forest, into a lake, and deep into the Connecticut woods in search of unique textures, seemingly inedible wildlife, and lots of wilderness thrills.

We experience these unique ecosystems through the perspective of Ryan Knighton, a visually-impaired travel writer and Bun Lai, a sustainable sushi chef who creates fine cuisine from invasive species. The camera literally dives into the water with Knighton as he paws underwater for clams. We slowly follow Lai through his purposefully overgrown farm and garden. It’s their shared love for the natural world and willingness to get dirty that brings them together, and it’s their deep friendship that the film is most interested in documenting.

Knighton began to lose his sight at age 18. This important shift in his life operated more as a motivator than a potential challenge. “Blindness was one issue,” he says, “but what scared me more was boredom.”

The documentary shows that it’s this same fearless curiosity and drive to fight complacency that also shapes Bun Lai’s attitude towards travel, environmental preservation and ultimately cuisine. “I get to see what New England looks like from its invasive side,” he jokes while the two lift up rocks during low tide and feel around for fast-moving crabs. “I can’t get used to the feeling of things coming alive that used to feel like rocks,” says a squeamish Knighton.

In addition to their love of food and the pursuit of all things external and exciting, the film illustrates that Bun Lai and Ryan Knighton are both outsiders in their own way. Lai’s legitimacy as a sushi chef is questioned by some traditional chefs since he usually sticks to ingredients that are local to Connecticut or invasive. Knighton is a self-proclaimed “sight seer” who is vision-impaired, thus likely facing the stigma and sense of otherness folks with disabilities often confront.

Director Heimbol does an excellent job controlling the film’s tone, making sure the documentary does not travel into the overtly sentimental realm of inspiration porn. A viewer might understandably feel a bit wary even by the title, possibly anticipating that the short film will simply trade on its subject’s disability for sentiment rather than depict Knighton in his nuance. This does not happen.

The documentary does not depict Knighton’s foraging in the forest and noodling deep in the water for clams as novel accomplishments. What the director effortlessly shows instead is Knighton and Lai offering each other unique insights about textures, tastes, and histories while they explore together. In the same way Lai leads Knighton’s hand to feel an invasive species of lettuce naturally growing in his garden, Knighton invites Lai to consider more closely the textures and smell of the mud from the bottom of the lake.

Usually conversations about on-screen chemistry are reserved for rom-coms and sparse, naturalistic, off-off Broadway productions. But in Blind Sushi, Knighton and Lai’s chemistry and affection for each other’s position in the world is at the center of the film. Their constant laughter and close physical interaction characterizes their relationship as dear friends rather than a strange social experiment staged for the sake of a documentary with a good concept. For this reason, Blind Sushi transcends the tired cable television tropes of travel shows with a twist and offers viewers a lively perspective on the intersection of disability, travel, sustainability, and cuisine.

Visit blindsushi.com to request access to the film for free, and to see when it’s screening next at a festival near you.

Bun Lai–chef
Ryan Knighton–author
Blind Sushi
Website
Facebook

Top image, Bun Lai and Ryan Knighton, photo courtesy of Blind Sushi

The post Seeing, Feeling, Believing appeared first on Take Magazine.

Since childhood, Johannes DeYoung has been drawn to the power of moving images to reshape and reimagine time. In an era before smartphones and the explosive expansion of the Internet, DeYoung was equipped with a recorder and blank tapes. It was a new frontier for creative exploration that would later inform his passion for video art. “I made videos with my grandmother that easily fell into the realm of surreal and absurdist adolescent fantasy,” he says. “At that age, I had no concept of video art, and filmmaking seemed completely inaccessible, both financially and materially, so the stuff I made gave me real joy.”

DeYoung is now the senior critic and director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale University School of Art where he teaches animation and moving-image production. He’s also on the curatorial advisory board for ArtSpace New Haven. As an artist and teacher, DeYoung believes that we are living in an exciting landscape for artists of all mediums, and that the vernacular of digital media has become deeply culturally ingrained over the last century, shaping the ways in which filmic tropes inform the way we think.

Still from Ego Loser, Johannes DeYoung

“I am drawn to time-based media because it is a synthesizer; it is a site to conjure complex arrangements of materials and ideas, and get them moving together for a while,” he says. “It is a place where imagination actualizes.” His video series Ego Loser and Diamond Head both explore “the limits of self in time” while focusing on different narrative strategies. “Diamond Head, for example, is a love story based on South Seas travelogues,” DeYoung says. “I collaborated on that piece with my wife, painter Natalie Westbrook. We wrote the script as an exquisite cadaver,” implementing a series of brightly painted and collaged kaleidoscope images to create the video narrative.

Diamond Head Installation, 2013, acrylic paint and photo collage, Johannes deYoung and Natalie Westbrook

DeYoung’s work is sure to intrigue the viewer. Ego Loser, for instance, is an ongoing production of talking heads that uses cut method generated scripts: “the scripts are literally written, cut apart, and reassembled,” he says. “Many of the Ego Loser scripts incorporate detrital language like email spam or generic self-help prose, cut apart and rearranged.” The overarching effect is both cerebral and absurd. “Seriousness is an accident of time, smiling is an accident of time…Preoccupation is an accident of time,” croons the animation through layered and jumbled background beats.

In the fall, DeYoung will participate in a two-person show at Crush Curatorial in New York with Westbrook, in which they will both show solo and collaborative work. Over the summer, DeYoung will be working with a group of artists “in a series of explorations in Augmented and Virtual Reality,” he says. “We received an applied research grant funding the project last year, which buys us time to experiment in a collective studio environment this summer. I have no idea what will come of that work, but it is sure to be a thrilling ride.”

Johannes DeYoung–digital media artist
New Haven, Connecticut
Website

Top image, video still from Ego Loser, photos courtesy of Johannes DeYoung

The post An Accident of Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

“My entire life is my studio,” says Robert “Bob” Gregson, conceptual and graphic artist, modern architecture fanatic, sculptor, thinker, author, teacher, and prankster. He says this with a laugh. Indeed, Gregson laughs a lot when he tries to explain his art. If you spend any time at all with him, you realize that the world is Gregson’s canvas, and he intends to have fun painting it.

A public artist of near legendary status in Connecticut since his graduation from the University of Hartford in 1970, Gregson has enlisted thousands of strangers over the years to play along with his often audacious stunts. Best known for his years of work in Hartford through the Knox Foundation and, later, his own non-profit, Sidewalk, Inc., he seemed to be on a one-man mission to revitalize the Insurance City’s downtown.

Among his creations was “Thursday Is a Work of Art.” On that day each week in downtown Hartford, he and his co-conspirators unleashed all manner of gleeful mayhem, including skywriters, sword fighters, parachutists, bump dancers, street games, oversized furniture and clowns. “It was very controversial at times,” he says with another laugh. “I had to leave Hartford for a while.”

Gregson’s latest foray in the public sphere is “Out of Order,” at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven. In it, Gregson invites visitors to create their own art space by remodeling his wall installations and sculptures, the latter mounted on the wheeled casters on the floor. All of the pieces are painted in geometric Mondrian-like patterns, in every conceivable permutation, from bold (yellow, red, black) to muted (grey, silver, brown). A prodigious amount of work went into installing the month-long show, which ends June 30. I counted 32 moving parts in the downstairs gallery alone. Think: Playscape for adults.

Out of Order opening

Outside of two years at the Art Institute of Chicago, earning his master’s degree, Gregson has lived in the Nutmeg State since his undergraduate years in Hartford. “I never felt a part of where I came from, New Jersey, and I was not good at suffering alone in Brooklyn like a hipster,” says Gregson, who was also creative director for Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism for 22 years. “I had a lot of friends here. Early on, people became a medium for me. I started off in art school doing traditional representational work and was even highly mocked for it by other students. At some point, I was taking one of my pieces down from the wall and noticed that some of the other students had started to play with them. It was more fun than just hanging stuff on the wall, more dynamic. I thought, ‘The art work is a prop for this experience.’”

That was the proverbial lightbulb-over-the-head moment for Gregson. “I began to ask, ‘What is it that I’m contributing with my art?’” The answer was a framework that gives people permission to play.
After looking back over the past half-century of his art career, Gregson concludes, “I have led a lot of lives.”

“Just A Phase” offers a closer look at Gregson’s many lives; the short film was created by his nephew, also named Robert Gregson.

Robert Gregson-Artist
Orange, Connecticut
Website
Facebook

The post Connecticut’s Merry Prankster appeared first on Take Magazine.

As Supreme Leader Donald Trump hovers his ax over funding for the arts, it feels like now is a very good time to spend your money on paintings, drawings, poetry, sculptures, pottery, and BandCamp downloads. But art can be pricey, and elusive, and you’ve already given what you can to Planned Parenthood and the UNHCR. Which is why we’d like to introduce you to: flair, specifically New Haven’s annual Flair Fair.

Flair, you may recall from Mike Judge’s 1999 cult comedy, Office Space, is what Jennifer Aniston’s character was lacking. Patches, pins and stickers, small-form art, and messaging that decorate your clothes and bags the way paintings decorate the walls of your home. Flair is all that and more. It’s fashion, it’s style, it’s your Facebook likes. It’s art.

That was what motivated Alex Dakoulas when he opened up his web shop, Strange Ways, in 2014. (The physical storefront opened in the arty Westville neighborhood of New Haven in 2015.) “Strange Ways was founded featuring artists and designers and smaller brands,” says Dakoulas. “We’re not selling fine art or high-end clothing. I wanted to make things affordable; I want people to support these artists without spending a lot of money.” Strange Ways sells patches, pins, screen prints, pennants, and other collectibles. “These smaller-price items keep people coming to the shop and supporting the artist in a more accessible way,” Dakoulas says.

Flair Fair, New Haven, Connecticut | Photo by Antonio C. Esposito

The 32-year-old is also the organizer of the Flair Fair, an event premised on the same idea as Strange Ways. Last year, 300 people came to the festival to browse about a dozen vendors’ works. This year’s (free) fair, which takes place April 15, will have about the same number of vendors—some different, some the same—in addition to a food truck at Lyric Hall.

And if you’re wondering about “flair”: Yes. Though pins and patches have largely been a prominent aesthetic for a couple of subcultures (punk, hip-hop), “flair” as a name for these pieces did actually come from the movie. “We took it from Office Space,” Dakoulas says. “It feels weird saying we brought that back, but, across the country, that’s helped revitalize the trend. [I thought,] ‘I’m gonna call it flair,’ and then everyone started using it.” He adds that people primarily do come into the store and to the market for pins and patches. “That’s really what people have been drawn to from the start,” Dakoulas says. “I think there’s a resurgence in it.” He points to similar trends of self-expression and custom art in the ’60s. “I think what makes pins and patches different now than before is that artists are using the medium really well.”

Dakoulas has a degree in graphic design from MassArt in Boston. After he graduated, he designed footwear for Converse and then Puma, before deciding he wanted to sell his own designs and the work of artists he admired. “I have personal thoughts about what works better as a pin or a patch or a button or a sticker,” he says. “I think pins are really cool because they’re sort of like jewelry. The patches are great for statement pieces.” Some flair is better for bags, some is better for people who like texture, some is better for people who want to go bigger.

“The great thing is flair is accessible,” Dakoulas adds. “It’s not expensive; the pins are very easy to buy or stick on your lapel or your bag. The great thing about [flair] is they don’t cater toward any one demographic. What you buy is an expression of yourself.”

Alex Dakoulas – founder of the Flair Fair

Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Images by Antonio C. Esposito

The post A Fair for Flair appeared first on Take Magazine.