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Wolcott artist Jonathan Allen brings his distinctive technique and style as a cartoonist to his new "Montauk series" of paintings, on exhibition through May 14 in the main dining room of the Good News Cafe and Gallery.
A 2006 graduate of the Paier College of Art in Hamden, Allen noted, "I've been drawing comics for years, but I've recently shifted my attention to painting, bringing elements of my comics into the format of large-scale painting."
Allen's exhibition, featuring 11 works grouped under the title "I Remember Montauk," is loosely based on the story popularized by conspiracy theorists who assert that a decommissioned U.S. Air Force Base at Montauk, at the eastern tip of Long Island, N.Y., was used secretly by the Defense Department in the 1980s for research into time and space travel.
Books such as "The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time" by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon have alleged this research program established a space-time portal that provided a link with an earlier program in 1943 called "The Philadelphia Experiment," which was purported to have accidentally "teleported" the destroyer USS Eldridge during a test of radar invisibility. Official sources have denied the existence of the Philadelphia or Montauk projects; proponents of the theories have postulated that mind control and reprogramming methods were used to erase the memories of surviving participants.
"I've taken elements of my research on these theories and turned them into a fragmented series of nonlinear comic book panels," Allen observed. "Rather than offer an informative interpretation of the material, I've tried to add to the confusion by imagining the series as a set of recovered and distorted methods of a hypothetical person who was involved in the (Montauk) project, but later had his memory erased."
Allen wryly observed that he would like to visit the abandoned Montauk base site some day, "hopefully returning with some cool photographs and not a ticket for trespassing."
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