Month: September 2015

Insights On Site at the White-Ellery House

Life Observed – A one-day installation by Sarah Wonson

The Cape Ann Museum is pleased to present Life Observed, an installation by Sarah Wonson on Saturday, October 3 from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This program will take place at the Cape Ann Museum’s historic White-Ellery House (1710) and is free and open to the public as part of Escapes North 17th Century Saturdays. The House is located at 245 Washington Street in Gloucester at the Route 128 Grant Circle Rotary; parking is available off Poplar Street in the field behind the house.

Sarah Wonson, White-Ellery, 2014, woodblock print.

In Life Observed, Wonson’s interests in making art converge with her reverence for Colonial-period architecture. Returning home to Gloucester in 2011 after living away for eight years, Wonson began to take notice of the wealth of beautiful colonial-era homes around Cape Ann; each one with its own character, friendly, foreboding, comical, etc. “I wanted to learn more about Colonial period buildings,” states Wonson, “so I began visual research in The White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs.” These pamphlets, filled with atmospheric, shadowy black and white photographs of historic houses, captivated Wonson, and she has been drawing and contemplating them since. “[While] the formal aspects of the structures interested me initially, over time my focus has shifted towards the relationship between where we dwell and the human imprint we leave behind. The home is not just a building, it is a place where we store our experience.”

Last year, for a woodblock printing project called BIG INK, Wonson photographed the newly renovated diamond-paned windows at the White-Ellery House. “The White-Ellery [H]ouse fascinated me; the dark sturdy exterior, the visible construction and layers of ornamentation left behind on the walls, paint and wallpaper still evident from long ago … carpenter marks on the attic beams, evidence of a human hand long gone. [The] House … is empty, yet it feels full of experience.”  Having finished the woodblocks, she decided to work toward putting a show together at the White-Ellery. The result is a series of three dimensional representations of household objects that comment on the contemporary relationship of the home and the world at large. “Over time, the link between home, object and their utilities has been degraded.… When everything is disposable, when there is always another, why should we care about what we have?”

The White-Ellery House has served as the backdrop for a series of one-day contemporary art installations (Insights On Site) for seven years running. It was built in 1710 and is one of just a handful of First Period houses in Eastern Massachusetts that survives to this day. Unlike other structures of this period, the largely unfurnished house has had very few interior alterations over the years. Stepping inside today, visitors enter much the same house they would have 300 years ago.