Union of artists

By Dinah Cardin
Correspondent

October 16, 2008 10:37 am

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Art and movie lovers will convene this weekend in a loft on a little-known street in Salem named after a popular flower. The Tulip Street Gallery will host Art Union, a show featuring the work of artists from the North Shore, Boston and beyond, who met on local film sets.

"All that paint over there is left over from the Bruce Willis movie ('The Surrogates')," Shawn Prior, the gallery's owner, said last week as he prepared the 3,200-square-foot loft space for the groundbreaking show set for Saturday, Oct. 18.

Prior's second-story industrial loft is behind Gardner Mattress on Canal Street, tucked in a building that also houses a car-repair business and a landscaping company.

Until this weekend's show, the gallery has been significantly underground. It's served as the site of private birthday and going-away parties, bringing together Salem's creative community of yoga instructors, crafters, painters and musicians.

Prior, a 1984 graduate of Marblehead High School who returned to the area last year and rented the loft, made friends while working for Union 829 Artists and Sign Painters, and came up with the idea for Art Union a couple of months ago.

Artists in the show ¬— who are from Salem, Rowley, Gloucester, Danvers, Cambridge and Jamaica Plain — will display their work, which includes whimsical elephant heads and painted Ouija boards. There's also a painting of fish made to look like seaplanes, as well as dark, voodoo-influenced birdman figurines and a curious little piece called "Voodoo Baby" that integrates — within a box — a crow, a doll and several masks. Gallerygoers will also see sculptures, puppets, oil paintings, photography and an animated video piece on a loop.

Film boom

Massachusetts has experienced a boom in filmmaking recently, thanks to tax credits designed to lure the movie industry. According to the Massachusetts Film Office, almost 20 movies have been filmed in the Boston area in 2007 and 2008,¬ with some still in production.

Art Union participants worked on many, including "The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," starring Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner, filmed at Castle Hill in Ipswich; a Sandra Bullock movie called "The Proposal," shot in Rockport and farther to the south at Medfield State Hospital; "Shutter Island," directed by Martin Scorsese; and "The Box," starring Cameron Diaz.

Talk of constructing movie studios south of Boston (and even occasional scuttlebutt about building one in Salem) has union workers smiling with their paintbrushes at the ready.

"Movies are about making a fantasy, and our role is just a painting or a backdrop," Prior said. "I haven't had any inkling of who makes these things or how they're made. Now I'm looking at it differently. It's been really fun peeking into this whole Hollywood thing. It really is Never, Neverland. It's just so silly."

James Tolman of Gloucester, co-curator of Art Union, met Prior on the set of "The Surrogates" while the two were building sets at a workshop in Woburn.

The movie is about robots, with Willis playing a cop. More interestingly, this was where Prior and Tolman discovered that their fellow union workers were, like them, creating brilliant artwork on the side.

Open space

The airy and exposed-beam loft, a former wood shop, is reason enough to attend the opening.

"It's like Escher's house," says Tolman, referring to M.C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist known for complicated, gridlike drawings that explored perspective and architecture.

Prior is just as much a lucky trash-picker and right-place-right-time collector of modern furniture and art as he is an artist. He knows a lot about art. He jumps from piece to piece, sharing its famed history.

The name Jackson Pollock is thrown out, as well as the name of an illustrator for The New Yorker. An antique chess set featuring British fairy tales is shared. Prior shows his own work, complicated modern paintings and Joseph Cornell-inspired boxes that contain vintage, naked black-and-white photographs of women, maps, buttons and egg-shaped objects

In addition to creating stimulating pieces, Prior has pursued some interesting business ventures. He said he helped found New York State's first organic slaughterhouse, giving him the nickname, among some of his North Shore friends, "Slaughterhouse Shawn." He also acted as a coffee and customs broker. He recalls working with The Boston Flower Exchange and regularly filling his former South Boston loft with fresh cut tulips, never imagining he would live in a loft on Salem's Tulip Street.

On a recent evening, the large, red-painted doors of the service entrance were open to let the setting sun splash on 1960s vintage furnishings. Prior is in love with 1960s design lines. It is his era.

Large speakers blared the raspy voice of Ray LaMontagne as behind-the-scenes preparations for the art show commenced. Several olive-green vinyl booths — retrieved from last year's remodeling of the Salem Diner ¬— divide a large room. Vintage lamps featuring the female form are placed neatly next to bonsai trees on bamboo tables. Old suitcases are thoughtfully lined up along a wall.

The space is playful with the keys and guts of a piano perched near the loft's dramatic ramped entrance. Old, wide-seated bicycles are parked here and there as works of art in their own right, tempting a whirl around the spacious loft.

Prior's goal is to use his once-secret space to get the public involved and make local art more inclusive and accessible. He is inspired by Salem's emerging art scene and by the collaboration he sees around him, even by recent partnerships between the Peabody Essex Museum and the Salem Arts Association.

"How do you get on a gallery mailing list? Can you bring the kids?" said Prior, a father. "Whoever knew there was a union for artists, and now they're getting together as a union of artists."