The image is titled “Quarry Workshop, Carrara, Italy, 2014,” but look closer.
There’s a lot more to be seen.
“This is right up at the top of the mountains where corona marble is mined,” Jay Wolke said on a recent Sunday at the Riverside Arts Center, where he casually sat next to the image as local residents and art aficionados browsed nearby.
“You can even see at the top,” he gestured toward the image, where ominous gray clouds are rolling in. “They’re sort of cutting away at the mountain. Those are quarries where we get a lot of our marble from in the whole world. Certainly, much of the marble from the Roman era came directly from these mountains.”
There’s more.
A statue of a pregnant woman casts shadow on a workshop building at the base of the mountain.
“That’s what interested me,” said Wolke, a Bridgeport resident who until January spent three years on the arts center board. “How people adapted to this situation, the conditions.”
That image and dozens of others occupy the Freeark Gallery and FlexSpace at the Riverside Arts Center, 32 E. Quincy St., part of Wolke’s exhibition titled “Building Place: Big Boat, Little Pond. “
The show runs through Feb. 22 and can be viewed from 1-5 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. A panel discussion focusing on Wolke’s work will take place on Sunday, Feb. 9 at 3 p.m. Like the exhibition, the talk is free and open to the public.
The images were curated by Paul D’Amato and Laura Husar Garcia,. It wasn’t an easy assignment. The curators were not only in charge of choosing the images, but also where they were located within the galleries.
Choosing the images “took months,” D’Amato said. “It took all the time that Jay took to make the pictures. Jay and I spent a couple of times looking through folders of his favorite ones. They had to be scanned. They’re all made from film. There is a curation that happens when you decide what to scan versus what not to scan.”
He added: ‘But it really helps to have someone who didn’t make them help pick them, because as a photographer myself I know you can’t see the woods from the trees.”
The images are eclectic, and each one has a story behind it as unique as “Quarry Workshop.”
For example, “Take Red Purses, WWII Bomb Shelter, Milan, Italy, 2021” shows what appears to be a concrete silo with an upside-down funnel at the top. It’s not a silo; it’s a World War II-era bomb shelter. The upside-down funnel was designed to deflect falling bombs, Wolke said.
Joanne Aono, the gallery director, said “Building Space” is considered a spotlight exhibition for the arts center.
“When Jay had resigned his position on the board, because we don’t show board members, I said, Let’s show Jay,” Aono said. “Paul said, I want to curate it, and Laura said, so do I.”
The key to making great photographs, according to Husar Garcia, is curiosity, which she said Wolke has an abundance. A viewer might notice that with few exceptions most of the images don’t include people.
“I believe he leaves it up to the viewer to decipher their impression of what man does and what they are given,” she said.
You might expect in an image like “Quarry Workshop” that Wolke had taken hundreds of images before selecting just the right one. Not so. You need patience to make great photographs; he waited until the conditions were right to take a handful of photos – one of which is the one on the wall.
Riverside Arts Center fills an important community need, he said.
“You’ve got to have places like this,” he said. “This is about creative new ideas. People get complacent. They need to have something to pull them out of their complacency.”
Ann Filmer is the new Riverside Arts Center executive director, who started Dec. 2. Not surprisingly, she’s bullish about the 31-year-old organization’s future. She’ll be responsible for the financial health of the organization.
“I feel like RAC already has a strong vision of what it wants to be,” Filmer said. “I’ll be like, How can we make that vision more financially secure? Nonprofit arts is sometimes really challenging.”
