Deck the Halls - WAM's Seasonal Celebration

In honor of the holiday season, WAM has decked our halls with a dozen festive trees!

From the "Worcester Tree" celebrating the city's businesses and institutions to the "Candy Tree" dripping with (artificial) sweets to the "Tree Spirits" on the Renaissance Court balcony, each creation brings a unique look to brighten our lobbies and galleries.

This year's holiday display was planned and arranged by Sally Jablonski of Herbert E. Berg Florist, with the help of the rest of her staff. Sally has been a friend of the Museum for close to thirty years. WAM contacted her in July to discuss plans to refresh our holiday decorations and expand their presence in the Museum.

Sally Jablonski and the "Rockin' Music Tree"

"I had no idea what the scope of the project would be," Sally remembers, but almost immediately, she began putting together ideas. "Once they told me how many trees they would need, I started surfing the internet, looking at art books, coming up with as many ideas as I could." Some of these included upside-down trees (such as the "Origami Tree" in the Lancaster Lobby) and mannequins decorated as trees (from which came our four "Tree Spirits"). Michelle Lowell, also of Herbert E. Berg Florist, helped develop the designs for this project.

There were many challenges along the way. The "Worcester Tree" is covered with creative ornaments and memorabilia donated by Worcester businesses and organizations, which Sally was gathering right up until a few days before the trees were erected. Meanwhile, she collected every retro item from the 70s and 80s she could find - toys, board games, records, old telephones, comic books and more. "I didn't know how it would all come together," she admits. Working with guest designer Julie Lapham, she created the "Retro Toy Tree" and the "Rockin' Music Tree," a pair of towering artificial pines in Salisbury Hall, framing the corridor leading to the Photo Revolution exhibition which inspired them.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was the "Manzanita Tree, a gold-painted rubber tree dripping with crystal ornaments, designed to stand in the Chapter House. "Almost right away, it started to fall apart from the humidity." Sally took the tree home, recreating it in a smaller (and sturdier) design, and brought it back the next day, ready to display.

The final version of the "Manzanita Tree"

Sally revealed that she found the four "Tree Spirits" the most fun to create. "They were difficult. I didn't even know how they would stand," she explains. "But difficult doesn't mean not fun." For these, she traveled into Boston, gathering materials she thought might be interesting to work with, from artificial pine cones and berries to peacock feathers. She was delighted with how they turned out, each one a unique creation.

Sally says she was largely inspired by her own holiday memories, going to see the Christmas display at Denholm's storefront in downtown Worcester, and spending the holiday at her grandmother's house. She hopes that visitors to WAM will walk away with new holiday memories, and that the trees will bring them joy and fun.

Sally will be returning in January to create an arrangement for WAM's Flora in Winter event; she has been an arranger since the 1990's (when the event was known as Tribute to Flora). Her 2020 arrangement is "still in the idea stage" - she has been paired with a work of art from WAM's collection to interpret through flowers, and is now researching designs and color palettes for inspiration.

We look forward to seeing what she comes up with next!

"Deck the Halls" will be on view through January 5, 2020.

- Sarah Leveille
Digital Media Specialist
December 16, 2019

Meet CMAI Artist Matthew Gamber

Each year, Worcester Art Museum’s Central Massachusetts Artist Initiative (CMAI) invites two artists who live or work in the greater Worcester area to have their art showcased in a solo installation in our Sidney and Rosalie Rose Gallery, alongside other contemporary artists in our permanent collection. The current CMAI artist is Matthew Gamber, an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Holy Cross.

Matthew Gamber’s series, This is (Still) the Golden Age, is a unique set of images created by pressing a piece of photographic paper to the screen of a cathode-ray television. The TV provides both the light source and the subject (a program or commercial) projected directly onto the photographic paper. The resulting still images are somewhat abstract–as the moving images are rendered into blurry shapes–yet still recognizable. He writes about the process and his inspiration in this interview with Lauren Szumita, Curatorial Assistant of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

Matthew Gamber, Leave it to Beaver, from This is (Still)
the Golden Age, 2006, gelatin silver print, (c) Matthew Gamber

LS:  To start, how did you come to be connected with Worcester?

MG: I have been teaching at College of the Holy Cross since 2014, having taught at the school once before in 2008. In the time between those two appointments, I met many artists in the area, many of whom have become close friends and colleagues.

LS: We are excited to feature works from your series This is (Still) the Golden Age at WAM. Can you explain more about the process of creating this series?

MG: I wanted to create an image where the light was both the subject and the object. I began by thinking about the crossover between broadcast media and photography. On a primary level, photographs record the absence or presence of light. As contact prints (or photograms), these are a direct index of an object, but they also have the artist’s desire to have touched, which is an artistic gesture. What one sees is the recent absence of the object touching the light-sensitive surface–its residual shadow. The television image, the electronic image, its transmission exist in a continuum within the larger electromagnetic spectrum of which visible light is a small fraction.

LS: The images in this series date to the mid-2000s, but many of the featured programs, like The Brady Bunch, are much older. Were these developed from previous negatives, or were these re-runs that you caught on TV?

MG: Sports broadcasts, like Wimbledon, were captured at the time of the initial broadcast as if it were a decisive moment. However, several were reruns. Many postwar sitcoms, in particular, exist because they were first shot on film and then edited before broadcast. Our access to these programs could have only happened through A) the foresight of properly archiving the episodes and B) networks discovering an audience for resyndicated content. These shows replay continuously, and if one hasn't seen them, they can be rediscovered by a new generation. I am experiencing the episodes as my parents' generation might have first encountered them. When I made these cameraless negatives from the television, to me, it was as if they were broadcast for the first time.

LS: Since you captured the image by turning the television on, not sitting and waiting for a certain shot, did you have an idea of what the final product would look like?

MG: Before the widespread use of magnetic recording, which could transduce signals and could be replayed in the future, early television programs were broadcast into the atmosphere and lost—essentially live theatre seen at a distance. My technique requires that the television unit be in a completely darkened room. I am unsure of what the image will be when it comes up to full brightness on the cathode ray tube. This series was created from a long series of failures. For me, it was a discovery about what photography's shortcomings were in its ability to create a meaningful document of something in our everyday experience.

LS: I think one of the most exciting things about this work is that it's a type of cameraless photography. Can you comment on your practice?

MG: For me, it is the mistakes at the seams of intent that generate meaning in the artwork. I was interested in using photography for purposes for which it was not intended to be used. I tried to bring 19^th-century thinking to bear on the 21^st-century as a way to understand these what might be considered common uses of photography. In a sense, I wanted to create a kind of alternate history where Anna Atkins had tried to collect television broadcasts, rather than the wide variety of British flora. I wanted to imagine what it might have been like if one had skipped over the rise of Kodak and the development of what we know as photojournalism, cinema, or the vernacular.

LS: You seem to have this interest, in this series and others, in isolating different aspects of photography and exploring them a little bit further, maybe breaking down the value systems.

MG: Which came first: an idea or a technique? I'm not challenging any traditions of photography insomuch as I’m trying to understand why images are made the way are. I'm fascinated with the evolution of photographic conventions, whether intentional or entirely accidental. I'm interested in challenging rules we accept as a means to understand how conventions began.

LS: Is there anything that you hope viewers will take away from your work?

MG: I hope that viewers will make a connection between the photographs in the Photo Revolution exhibition. I was inspired by many of the artists whose work is in the show. I hope visitors see a shared dialogue in reevaluating what photography can show us. In the 1960s and ‘70s (in parallel development with MFA programs in academia), you find a number of young artists mining photography's past, challenging conventional uses of the medium. It was a means to explore aspects of lived experience that are not easily documented through a lens.

Works from This is (Still) the Golden Age will be on display in WAM’s Sidney and Rosalie Rose Gallery until March 29, 2020.

—   Lauren Szumita

Curatorial Assistant of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

December 10, 2019