Carol Moses is one among many talented artists opening her studio to display her creative works as Brickbottom Studios opens its doors to the public.

By Josie Grove

Brickbottom Studios has been nestled in east Somerville for over 20 years. Last weekend, the artists who live and work in the studios opened their doors to the public. Hundreds of people flocked to the out-of-the-way white building to see what was inside.

Jessica Straus was exhibiting on the first floor. Her sculptures, both figurative and abstract, are constructed from small rectangles cut out of recycled metal: colorful road signs and olive oil cans were like scales, accented with dull metal funnels, spouts, and handles. The collection, appropriately titled “Scrap!” had a pop art sensibility from the fragments of recognizable labels, reimagined as something else entirely.

Up the stairs, Open Studio-goers might have found the studio/lab space of Wally Gilbert. The artist/astrophysicist beckoned viewers inside to wonder at large format images of stars, galaxies, and black holes taken through a telescope. Gilbert explained that there are similarities in creating an image to convey scientific information and creating an art image. “The choices you make when telling a scientific story are like the choices you make in an artistic story,” he said. He might de-emphasize certain things for a scientific image in order to make it clearer, but then accentuate those things to make a more beautiful image. “What you show depends on what you want to communicate. Those are fundamentally artistic choices.”

“Scrap!” by Jessica Straus.

Carol Moses was showing her work around the corner. She typically works in drawing and painting, but was showing a recent series of portrait photographs with written interviews. Inspired by photographer Felix Nadar, Moses set out to capture people who she described as her ‘contemporaries’. “I had a fixed set of questions I asked each person. The questions had nothing to do with who the person is, they’re more universal. Moses photographed her subjects during the interviews, showing their faces in thought as they considered how to respond to the interview questions.

Although she works at Feet of Clay studios in Brookline, Laurie Bloom showed her ceramics on the next floor up. Her pieces are whimsical, with recognizable shapes of animals and faces built in small round shapes onto flat bases. “There’s so much freedom in clay,” said Bloom. She described her process as similar to collage, building layers up to create the whole works. As she tenderly bubble-wrapped a piece up for a customer, she said goodbye to it out loud. “I remember every single piece,” she said.

The vibrant posters in studio 303 would probably be familiar to some viewers. Felice Regan co-founded the Graphic Workshop wit Chris Mesarch, and the Workshop’s posters of political and environmental were shown last fall at their alma mater, MassArt. The group started in the midst of a student strike in 1970. “They closed the school, and we started making posters,” says Regan. Mesarch remembers the period. “All the students on strike were supposed to do something active to protest.” Mesarch and Regan, roommates at the time, started silkscreening posters.

“We never use computers,” said Regan. “The light hits the offset, and the colors are richer and brighter than computer printing.”

Co-founder Mesarch exhibits her paintings across the hall. She left the Graphic Workshop to focus on painting. “I wanted to paint, not to be a designer, just to paint.” She was more interested in communicating the essence of a thought or a feeling with an image alone, rather than using words to make a statement. Many of her paintings are on folded objects, such as fans or take-out boxes, with swirling, organic shapes playing against rigid geometry.

There were dozens more open studios, and even more Brickbottom occupants who chose not to open their doors. Though the studios are now nearing thirty years old, the building is still a hotbed of creativity in Somerville.