Lawns Transformed Into Sculpture Galleries

On the front lawn of the Marvelwood Drive home of Ted Baldwin and Barbara Geller, a young giraffe stretches for food. Nearby, its towering parent surveys the landscape.

A stork cackles while a giant black spider meanders through the low-growing, bamboo-like grass.

All are neighbors in the Baldwins free-range residential paradise.

Some homeowners adorn their lawns with inflatable Santas, wicker deer, and other holiday displays. In the spring, others put outwhirligigs or garden gnomes. A few, however, defy the status quo. Their yards are year-round outdoor galleries, showplaces for the art they create, or just love to collect. For some outdoor gallerists, showing their art is a means of communicating and creating interest for neighbors and passersby. For others, showing their art makes sense for practical as well as aesthetic reasons.

Baldwin, a retired state judge, said that a shady canopy of trees around his house made growing a conventional lawn difficult. So he and Geller, a state Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services regional director, planted the special grass. It seemed to call out for some of the exotic inhabitants that now slow traffic and bring smiles on the sharp curve outside their home.

Exposed to the elements, some of the welded and assembled creatures develop a rusty patina. Others retain their original finish. Baldwin said that curating his display was simply a matter of showing the things they like. If we like them, we buy them, he said.

Less than a mile away on another well-traveled, residential road, Dog draws the eye with its machine-like appendages and commanding presence.

The Ramsdell Street sculpture is the work of Marcus Schaeffer, aka Markus Surrealius, who fabricates and restores metal sculpture at Versteeg Art Fabricators in Bethany. He has worked on public sculptures including Tony Rosenthals well known Alamothe cube sculpture at Astor Place in New York City. The company also restored Alexander Calders Gallows and Lollipops, the monumental kinetic sculpture at Yales Beinecke Plaza.

Dog wasinspired by the Yale bulldog mascot and Yales relationship with the city. The general aesthetic he said, was also influenced by early industrial design and heavy machinery like steam shovels and locomotives. Like most of my art, its based on a philosophy/conceptual framework aesthetic I refer to as pre-dystopianism. The abandoned remnants of futures that never were, as it were. Art that riffs on the perennial tendency to romanticize the past and insist that everything is worse today and that it will all fall apart real soon now.Also theres a bit of steampunk retro-futurism in the design.

Schaeffer said the homeowner, Camille Keeler, requested the sculpture be placed on the Ramsdell Street property; also, there was no space to exhibit the piece where he had previously lived. Finally, as Schaeffer said, the whole point of sculpture for me is to allow other people to experience it. Its a way of communicating concepts that are hard to put into words. That everyone tends to interpret art differently and see different meanings in it a bonus.

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Lawns Transformed Into Sculpture Galleries