In an area that specializes in small art galleries, none is smaller than The Curated Fridge – the front and one side of artist Yorgos Efthymiadis’ kitchen refrigerator in his home in East Somerville.
The lates quartely show in a gallery history of more than nine years opened Friday, with more than 50 photographers giving their take on the theme “cinematic” hand-picked from more than 500 submissions by curators Alexa Cushing and Connor Noll. (Aside from a reception, which doesn’t yet have a set date, the show is viewable online. It in June it moves to Boston’s Panopticon Gallery for more in-person visits.)
Though Efthymiadis houses and organizes the pop-up exhibitions, he rarely curates the shows. He has artists mail their photo submissions to his home; the team makes their selections and gets to work on install, the lack of space obliging a game of photo Tetris on the fridge. When his collaborators aren’t local, he gives curators the option to make a virtual layout before he installs the work, or just decide how to display it himself. Since the team was all local on this one, Efthymiadis and the curators were all involved in the process, deciding which piece made sense next to the other, and how to make it all fit.
It’s truly an artist-driven project: Submissions for The Curated Fridge have always been and will always be free. As a working artist, “I always have to submit to calls and I’m annoyed when I have to spend money on those,” Efthymiadis said. “It shouldn’t be like this.”
Each “cinematic” piece has a different approach to the theme, some wildly innovative. One major highlight of the show is its frame-within-a-frame compositions. Pieces by Barbara Sexton, Haley Cooper, Daniel Meegan and Rachel Nixon use the effect beautifully; the double frame is a window to another world, or perhaps a way of trapping the viewer. In the works of Mel Musto, Liz Potter and Karen Elizabeth Baker, photos feel ripe with the nostalgia of a high school film. Others, such as works by Ricardo Martinez and Morghan McQuaige, simply use light in a way that is masterful, totally arresting.
Visit the Fridge’s spring exhibit here.
Share your own 150-word appreciation for a piece of visual art or art happening with photo to editor@cambridgeday.com with the subject line “Behold.”
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