Cheshire now and in memory
“As Fire to the Sun no,. 2 2018,’’ by Pete Hocking, in the show “To Look and Look Again,’’ at the Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School, Providence, through Oct. 13. The two-person show (Hocking and Sam Allerton Green) focuses on the artists’ perception of time and space. Hocking’s work depicts landscapes from his childhood home in Cheshire, Conn. He melds the current landscape with his childhood memories of the town.
Roaring Brook Falls, in Cheshire, as seen in late October.
The First Congregational Church in Cheshire.
The Barker Character, Comic and Cartoon Museum, in Cheshire.
While Cheshire has around 30,000 residents, and is close to New Haven, there remains something approaching countryside in parts of this exurban/suburban town. Sadly, it is best known for the horrific murders that took place there on July 23, 2007, when Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters were raped and murdered, and her husband, Dr. William Petit, was severely injured, during a home invasion.
The murders, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, are serving life sentences.
Cheshire hosts the Barker Character, Comic and Cartoon Museum, with its large collection of memorabilia, novelties and such ephemera as lunch boxes and Pez dispensers bearing the likenesses of characters from television, cartoons and comics.
There’s also a Cold War fallout shelter near an AT&T cell tower. What with Putin, Kim and Xi, perhaps it should be renovated.
New structures from the confusion
"In love with night'' (oil on canvas), by DEBORAH ZLOTSKY, at the Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School, in Providence.
The gallery notes says she's interested in "systems and languages emerging from the accumulation of visual relationships in continual revision....Eventually, the confusion of relationships slipping out of balance begins to create new structures and forms.''