Michael Madore is a naturalist—fascinated by details, taxonomies, and science—but one who can hardly bear to go out into the world.

Michael Madore, KONTAKT!!!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

His work is filled with nerve bundles, climbing tendrils, meticulously cross-hatched fortresses, densely rendered surfaces of swelling water, floral bursts, crystalline structures, careful lettering, birds, and systems of coils and whorls that link and blanket everything. His pieces are jam-packed, teeming, in a way, but with plenty of space and breathing room.

Seemingly conflicting signals and storylines get balanced out in Madore’s work and life. A bit of both outsider and insider, he has Asperger’s Syndrome. His work has an obsessive aspect to it; his artistic practice, he says, is a means of coping with the overload of distractions and information that bombard us, imposing order on a world that’s always unspooling. With an MFA from Yale, Madore also can talk about his work from a critical-historical perspective and make all kinds of connections to theory.

“It’s almost biological, just the need to make work,” says Madore. “It is my way of coping.”

Madore was born in Hartford, to a French-Canadian family. French—Quebecois French—was his first language. As a kid, he was embarrassed about his background and his mother tongue. The family moved to Maine and Quebec for a time, eventually settling back in Hartford. With an unpleasant home life and undiagnosed mental-health issues, Madore took to drawing schematics, using diagrams from household appliances and other sources as a means of creating coherence. “As a kid I always drew, but very secretly. I drew maps,” he says. “I grew up in a really chaotic household. My father was a really bad alcoholic. We were relatively poor.”

Michael Madore, Misfits 246-358 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Madore got a scholarship to Trinity College. He majored in English and minored in Art History before heading to New York City in 1977, where he worked in bookstores and as a proofreader for a time. With a day job in SoHo, he visited some galleries that featured outsider art and work by the Chicago Imagists, and Madore took an interest in it. “I was attracted because this was not the kind of art history and mainstream narrative that I learned at Trinity and kind of dismissed,” he says. He liked the fact that this was non-New York, non-minimalist art that didn’t have an overt meta-art quality. “It lit a light bulb in me,” says Madore. “I said, You don’t have to do art about art.”

His path to the academy led through the clinic. He moved back to Connecticut, this time to New Haven, in 1983. It was a psychiatrist at Yale—Madore says he’s had “an on-and-off relationship with psychiatry”—who encouraged him to apply to grad school after he was concluding time as a patient there. He got his MFA in painting in 1990.

Madore’s work is more engaged with the natural world, despite the fact that he says going outside is too much for him. He thinks about, reads about, and studies nature, but mostly from books, illustrated guides, movies, and online. “I’m not a nature person,” says Madore. “It’s just overwhelming, the detail. The idea of going into a forest is a nightmare.”

Michael Madore, Asset compromised!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Travel, in general, is something Madore avoids. “I’m a horrible traveler,” he says. “I can’t stand arriving or departing.” But his work is a kind of time and space travel. It takes him to remote regions and imagines distant futures, when people and their peculiarities and depredation are maybe no longer a factor.

Madore is working on a series based on Labrador in the future. Labrador is the remote peninsular region in northeastern Canada, with forests and mountains, stretches of exposed bedrock, and plenty of mostly undisturbed wildlife. Envisioning the coming decades, a piece like Labrador 2088 imagines plant and animal species displaced by climate change and man-made environmental flux. “I hesitate to call it a metaphor for global warming, but it is a way for me to project what are some of the changes that will affect boreal forests. Birds begin to migrate, and plants as well,” says Madore. “For me, it’s just a kind of way to pursue my interests in flora and fauna and mutations.”

Michael Madore, Labrador 2088, 2017 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Michael Madore – Artist
Hartford, CT
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Top photo Madore in his studio | All photos courtesy the artist

The post The Insider Outsider appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our November 2015 print issue. 

When he was a little younger, Peter Reynolds worked in the mail room at the Hartford Steam Boiler building, one of the tallest office buildings in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, abutting I-91. He often worked solo at the end of the day, and he says that if you could have watched him, between organizing stacks of packages and envelopes, you might have seen him popping, locking, and vibrating, working on dance moves during the downtime at the end of his shift.

Peter Reynolds (left) and Jolet Creary grew up dancing in Hartford and founded Studio 860 in 2012.

“I was the last one to leave, so by five o’clock I was in there jamming out,” says Reynolds.

Reynolds, 31, also known as P-Boogie, is a dancer and an educator, and one of the co-founders of Studio 860, a dynamic studio that teaches young people the arts of hip-hop and street dance. Reynolds helped launch Studio 860 in 2012 with Jolet Creary, the artistic director, in Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood. The second-floor studio is in a converted mill complex, a few buildings up from Real Art Ways, an arts and performance space with a movie theater and gallery; just a block or so away from a new CTfastrak rapid transit station; and up the road from thriving Puerto Rican, Portuguese, and Brazilian communities.

The area code for most of Connecticut is 860, and, as the name suggests, those behind the studio take pride in its connection to the region and particularly in its Hartford roots. Reynolds and Creary, who both grew up in Hartford, have put a lot of themselves into the studio—pulling up carpets, scraping off glue, and making the floors ready for the stomping and sliding of dancers’ feet. Their lives have been transformed by dance, and they work to inspire transformation in the dancers they teach and share the stage with. Their instruction focuses on fitness, artistic expression, community, and self-possession.

Dashawn Davis is part of Studio 860’s teen competitive dance team, Elite 860.

Creary started dancing when she was a toddler, at the feet of her grandmother, who danced around the house and at practically any time. From there, Creary studied Caribbean dance traditions at Hartford’s venerable West Indian Social Club, a cultural hub in the city’s North End. Soon she was watching Nutcracker videos and taking ballet lessons as well. Videos of Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul left their mark too.

Reynolds had formative exposure to hip-hop dance as a kid at summer camp. “I had an instructor—his name was Tommy Hill, so even his name I thought was cool, because of Tommy Hilfiger,” he says. “And he was from England, so he also had an accent and everything. He was real cool.”

Reynolds remembers Hill demonstrating some moves as the two were up early one morning waiting for the day’s events to start. The counselor broke out some eye-catching tricks, isolating body parts and letting the movement ripple through his arms and shoulders like a visible energy current. “He had all these chains and bracelets on, and I remember him vibrating and ticking,” he recalls.

Street dance, hip-hop dance, contemporary African American vernacular dance—this genre has been steadily dominating mainstream American culture for decades now, maybe just slightly behind its musical counterpart. Think of the Fly Girls dance troupe from TV’s In Living Color or the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, about the largely gay and black New York City voguing scene that inspired Madonna. More recently, look to Rize, the 2005 documentary about the LA krumping scene, or to the high-profile status of Memphis jookin’ dancer Lil Buck, who has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, at a TEDx conference, and with the New York City Ballet. Or just watch hit shows like Dancing with the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance.

The increased prominence of dance means more people are interested in the subject, but it may also mean there’s a greater gap between pop culture representations and real-world connections. “Over the years, dance has become a lot more commercialized,” explains Creary, “but there’s still a lot of dance that hasn’t been seen on television in its fullest form. There’s been a lot of commercialization of hip-hop, and not just hip-hop, but also jazz, modern, ballet—everything—and even African dance.”

Creary teaches West African dance at Trinity College in Hartford. She is also the choreographer and artistic director of EQuilibrium Dance Theatre, Connecticut’s first hip-hop dance company. Though it’s only three years old, Studio 860 has evolved into a spawning ground for regional dance talent, a hub for traveling dance instructors and performers, and a supportive community of creative young people.

In late summer, student dancers gathered at the studio before heading down to an open-air jazz series at Bushnell Park, the majestic park abutting the state capitol at Hartford’s center, to raise funds for a trip to Atlanta for World of Dance, an international dance competition. Twenty-two student dancers performed on the team. Sixteen-year-old Jasmine McPherson of Hartford was one of the competing dancers, and one of the fund-raisers. The 11th grader, who’s been studying ballet since she was five, plans on pursuing a career in dance. McPherson appreciates the perspective she gets at Studio 860, the ways in which Creary and Reynolds and other instructors orient dance within culture, and how the studio is a model of a viable livelihood within the arts.

Twenty-two of Studio 860’s student dancers competed in the international dance competition World of Dance in Atlanta in August.

“It’s not that we’re just taking a class to dance; we also do a history lesson on how things started and how things progress,” says McPherson. “I’m not just learning about dance, I’m learning about the business aspect, about how you run your own studio. What it takes to fundraise, what it takes to get a business off the ground.”

Those bits of history might come in the form of a mini-lecture from Creary on the origins of some of the traditions taught at the studio, but it might also come in the form of firsthand exposure to guest artists who are foundational dancers within the genre. “Because hip-hop is so young, in reality a lot of the people that invented the style are still around,” says Creary. “So it’s easier for us to access it, to actually get some type of oral history.”

History aside, students at Studio 860 are learning serious dance. Rooted in street dance and hip-hop, the movements demonstrate a grace, control, and creativity that helps explain why this art form is captivating new audiences. Hip-hop dance, like the music, pulls from unexpected sources. Hip-hop music was built on a foundation of funk and soul rhythms, deconstructed—chopped into pieces and reconfigured with added elements. Everything from jazz, classical, film soundtracks, rock, and found sounds got stitched in, with percussive rapping in complex phrasing layered over the top. It’s an avant-garde collage of sly and high-contrast reappropriations.

The same is true of the dance. So many of the genre’s eye-grabbing moves involve a marked juxtaposition of near-stationary body parts with other body parts isolated in extreme motion, or a tendency to cultivate a series of dramatic slow-motion movements jammed against a few fierce and rapid articulations: a jutting of the head, a pivot of wrists and hands, a quick sideways bend of the knees and ankles to approximate a kind of broken-boned slump. Other moves seem to depict powerful surges of energy coursing through the body, making it ripple and bulge at the edge of what can be contained by muscle, bone, and skin. And virtuoso variations on timeless moves like the moonwalk, the wave, and the robot can still astonish audiences.

Though it’s only three years old, Studio 860 has evolved into a spawning ground for regional dance talent.

Creary and Reynolds point out that hip-hop dance uses a vocabulary of movements plucked from sources outside of dance. Elements inspired by silent films, mime, sci-fi, martial arts, animation, and stop-motion flipbooks have all worked their way onto the dance floor.

Beyond the physical skills, the sense of cultural history, and the insight into arts administration, many of the students at Studio 860 experience something deeper and more basic, notes Creary.

“A lot of our students are getting a sense of self-confidence out of this,” she says. “It’s definitely therapeutic. We have some people that come in here . . . whatever’s going on outside, when they come in here they feel an acceptance. We have a lot of people that say this is their family. There’s a sense of belonging. Even if they’re not going to become professional dancers, they’re given that opportunity to perform. They’re given that opportunity to be seen being taken out of whatever their environment is. I always say that you can do whatever you want when you’re dancing. It’s a crazy high that you get from dancing.”

Top photo Linda Miller is part of Studio 860’s teen competitive dance team, Elite 860 | All photos by Ian Barnard

The post Fly Moves appeared first on Take Magazine.