Alternative Scenery

“Alternative Space Weekend” is right.

Each room inside the rustic, industrial Goffe Street Armory, where City-Wide Open Studios enjoyed its many-splendored 2015 opener this past weekend, is appreciably different from any other. The rooms are sized and laid-out differently. They catch sunlight differently, and at different times of day, and many lack artificial lighting, so that’s a big deal.

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Knights of Columbus Museum

Even leaving out specialty rooms—like the armory’s old drill hall, locker room and kitchen—the details are regularly irregular. Some rooms have radiator pipes, in this corner or that. One has a layer of metal caging against a wall. Another has dark wood paneling all around. Another is painted with a zagging pink streak like it’s charting data on a huge line graph.

They’re all decaying differently, too. This room’s paint might be pretty intact. The next’s might be peeling like a bad sunburn.

But if you’re a lover of interesting scenery, there’s nothing bad about it—especially when the armory’s rooms are handed over to 170+ artists, to be filled with their different works, like the ones pictured above. (To see the above photos, plus a few extras, in their full, uncropped, uncompressed glory—and in both landscape and portrait formats—check out the email version.)

Photo Key

1. Works by Mariah Isely.
2. “I Cannot Remember the Tender-Headed Rain / Perhaps We Do Not Yet Exist” by Hong Hong.
3. “Urban Totems” by Brian C. Walters II.
4. Joey Loos and her work “To Kiss a Miss is Counted Bliss.”
5. “Unsettled Nostalgia” by Mohamad Hafez.
6. Works by Zeb Mayer.
7. Works by Nick Pfaff.
8. “Thought Process” by Jeffrey Starkes.
9. “River” by Susan Linsley.
10. “Shift” by Amy Vensel.
11. “Pool Noodle Pixel Pets” by Dan Bernier and Dan Gries.
12. Works by Shaunda Holloway.
13. Works by Martha Savage.
14. Work by Laura Marsh.
15. “Kitchen Island” (performance) by John O’Donnell.
16. “False Pride” by Amanda Walker.
17. Work by Curt Pardee.
18. Mark Anderson and works.
19. “Blissful Intergration” by Joe Fekieta.
20. Harper Keehn inside his “Teardrop Trailer.”

Written and photographed by Dan Mims.

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Dan has worked for a couple of major media companies, but he likes Daily Nutmeg best. As DN’s editor, he writes, photographs, edits and otherwise shepherds ideas into fully realized feature stories.

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