It's Not A Fire—It's Art!

As Old Lyme's Director of Emergency Management, Dave Roberge has contended with hurricanes, floods, power outages, fires, and blizzards. Art shows at Florence Griswold Museum don't usually make it on to his list of things to worry about.

But when Matthew Geller's sculpture is fully turned on this weekend, Roberge is concerned that he's going to be getting a lot of reports of a fire at the museum.
Located on the museum's lawn, Geller's sculpture Anticipator incorporates water vapor to really make it come alive.  

"The mist is constantly in flux, because of the wind," Geller said. "On sunny days, it has rainbows."

When he's used water vapor as an element of his sculpture elsewhere, however, Geller admits it has sometimes been mistaken for smoke and that has prompted a few 911 calls in the past. 

"I don't want to get calls because there's smoke," said Roberge, who was keen to get the word out in advance. "It's harmless water vapor and it's not a fire, it's art." 

An Air of Anticipation

Geller's sculpture Anticipator will be celebrated with an opening on Saturday, June 8, and will be fully operational Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The sculpture itself is at once an homage to nature and to man's ambition to harness its power. It literally grows as twisted metal like a tree from the trunk of a fallen tree originally planted by Florence Griswold.  

"Before the Industrial Revolution, nature was where you went for food, for wood, no one thought of nature as being beautiful," Geller said. It was only after the Industrial Revolution, he said, that people began to wax nostalgic for what they saw as a more idyllic pastoral lifestyle. Idealized visions of nature inspired a generation of impressionists at the Old Lyme Art Colony, who spent their days painting en plein air. 

The Old Lyme Art Colony celebrated nature, Geller said, but he notes there's an "irony about trying to idealize nature. I thought I would do a sculpture that plays into that." 

Geller has incorporated water vapor into a number of his works in the past but he thought it would be particularly appropriate for the sculpture he created for the Florence Griswold Museum. The museum itself, he said, functions as a town square of sorts, because it brings together strangers and neighbors for events and conversation.

"It is, in essence, a town square," he said. "It should have a fountain."