By Judy Benson
Artist Chris Coffin and UConn Professor Matthew McKenzie met at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery last year and started a conversation over a piece Coffin contributed to an exhibit of multiple artists’ depictions of Long Island Sound.
“I walked into the gallery and saw him looking at my work, and we ended up having this interesting conversation about navigation,” recalled Coffin, a Fairfield resident.
McKenzie, who teaches history and maritime studies at the UConn Avery Point campus where the gallery is located, was intrigued by Coffin’s unique perspective.
“I was struck by the way he uses his experiences on the water to create art,” McKenzie said. “What I like about his stuff is that it captures both where you want to go and where the sea wants to take you, the wind and the waves and the water.”
Now, in what McKenzie calls a “serendipitous convergence,” the two have teamed up on unique project titled, “The Art and Science of Navigation.” Their proposal was recently chosen for this year’s Connecticut Sea Grant Arts Support Award, sponsoring the creation of an exhibit of artwork, artifacts and multimedia pieces that will explore the history of nautical navigation as well as the maritime and natural history of Avery Point. The pair also plan a series of lectures and open forums for the public and students.
“The collective experience in the gallery will be both an art exhibit and a classroom,” Coffin said. “It will be a melding of academics, maritime history and aesthetics.”
When Coffin and McKenzie first met, the gallery was hosting an exhibit titled Sight and Sound: Artists Consider Long Island Sound. A complementary panel discussion was also taking place, bringing together several artists and Avery Point faculty including McKenzie to share perspectives on the works. The exhibit, curated by Richard Klein, was made possible by support from the CT Sea Grant arts award.
Syma Ebbin, CT Sea Grant research coordinator who initiated and oversees the arts support program, was happy to see the creative synergy emerging from last year’s exhibition. She and Klein collaborated on organizing the panel.
“This is exactly the type of out-of-the-box, interdisciplinary, creative output this program seeks to foster,” she said. “The integration of innovative pedagogies and undergraduate UConn students into the project is really exciting.”
Calling himself a performance and multimedia artist, Coffin uses his first-hand experiences traversing the Sound on a 14-foot prone paddleboard as the basis for his works, capturing video, still and iPhone images as well as GPS data of his journeys and incorporating nautical charts. McKenzie is an expert and teacher of formal navigation skills, owning a sailboat and serving as relief captain aboard the Onrust, a historic replica vessel that offers sailing trips from the Connecticut River Museum in Essex.
“He’s teaching me some basic navigation practices that I didn’t know,” Coffin said. “He’s filling in the gaps in a very academic way.”
As part of the project, McKenzie plans to teach Coffin how to sail, expanding the range of ways he experiences being on the water that will inform his artwork.
“I hope that through this project, the public sees that something as technical as navigation has an artistic element,” McKenzie said. “We hope this helps break down the artificial tension between the arts and science.”
Judy Benson is the communications coordinator for Connecticut Sea Grant