Foreclosed Houses Go On Display, As Art

October 16, 2015, The New Haven Independent, by Allen Appel- Bank and credit card statements. Stocks and bonds certificates. Dollar and twenty-dollar bills, barcodes, maps of Connecticut. The insides of security envelopes, in which — if you have been unlucky, overextended, or financially duped — you might have received a foreclosure notice. Those are the entirely paper ephemera building materials out of which artist Ronnie Rysz has constructed the 11 delicate and thought-inducing collages in his new show, Default Notice. The collages are of foreclosed houses around town. There are also six linoleum cuts, much smaller, less detailed, and without collage elements, but also of foreclosed buildings. The exhibition at the DaSilva Gallery in Westville runs through Oct. 30, with a reception Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. Rysz describes his works’ subject matter as “the fragility of home ownership” and the overly optimistic view that the wave of foreclosures that rocked New Haven and the country in 2008 and 2009 is gone forever. Rysz asserts the show is not political, in that he takes no side on the issue. Rysz, trained both at the School of Visual Art in New York and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, said he began thinking about the subject back in February, long before the theme of this year’s Citywide Open Studios was announced...

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