WILTON — A summer pop-up gallery will return to downtown Wilton this month with two exhibitions featuring photography, sound, sculpture, video and scent-based artwork.

Spectacle Box, a photographic collective formed by Michael N. Meyer and Todd R. Forsgren, will host the shows at 3 Goodspeed St., a small three-story building beside the Wilton Free Public Library.

The first exhibition, “The Bakery Community Fellowship Exhibition: Sami Cutrona and Andrew Foster,” opened July 10 with a reception. The show runs through Sunday, July 19, and features work by Cutrona and Foster, the inaugural awardees of The Bakery Photo Collective’s Community Fellowship.

The second exhibition, “Local Area Network,” opens July 31 with a reception from 5:30-6:30 p.m. The show runs through Aug. 19 and features work by Steve Norton, Lindsey French and Alex Young, Jesse Potts and Ann Bartges. The gallery will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Aug. 1 and by appointment for the remainder of the exhibition period.

Meyer said Norton, French, Young, Potts and Bartges are scheduled to attend the July 31 opening.

Spectacle Box’s Wilton space is not connected to the former cannery property on High Street. Meyer said he and his wife purchased the Goodspeed Street building as a flexible project space that could serve as a studio, gallery, interior design studio and guest space.

“The building is a small three-story structure beside the library downtown; it was built as a doctor’s office right around the turn of the (last) century and then functioned as a series of lawyers’ offices for 70 years until my wife and I took it over,” Meyer wrote in an email.

Meyer, an Auburn native, said his connection to the area comes partly through a nearby camp in Temple. Forsgren is a Bowdoin College graduate. The two met through Meyer’s childhood best friend, who was Forsgren’s roommate at Bowdoin.

Spectacle Box was formed in 2017 to support the exhibition and publication of work by artists using photographic technologies. The collective has participated in photo and art book fairs in the United States and Europe and has supported work by a rotating group of collaborators. This is the second summer Spectacle Box has brought programming to Wilton.

Last summer, Meyer said, was a learning experience because the gallery opened its first show only a few weeks after he and his wife closed on the property. The gallery saw its highest number of visitors during the Wilton Blueberry Festival, he said, and community response to the exhibits was positive.

For the July 10 exhibition, Meyer said he hopes visitors considered the different ways identity and daily life are constructed. Cutrona’s self-portraits explore how identity is defined by both intrinsic qualities and performances of self, while Foster’s work documents the daily rituals of parenthood and the cumulative effect of quotidian interactions, he said.

The Bakery Photo Collective’s Community Fellowship is intended to reduce financial barriers to facility access and exhibition opportunities for photographers and lens-based artists. Cutrona and Foster are the fellowship’s inaugural cohort.

“Local Area Network” takes its title from information technology, but Meyer said the exhibition focuses on real-world relationships among artists rather than virtual networks. The show began with Meyer inviting several artists, who then invited other artists, creating a chain of artistic connections.

Meyer said Norton’s sound work is a kaleidoscopic, algorithmically evolving soundscape that draws from airborne and waterborne field recordings made in Bangor City Forest. He said French and Young’s olfactory pieces take the familiar balsam fir sachets found in Maine tourist shops and expand their “smellscape” to consider the forest as a network of ecological, social and industrial concerns.

Potts’ sculptures and assemblages use the everyday ephemera of life while subverting perceptions through shifts in scale and trompe l’oeil patina, Meyer said. Bartges’ video work brings experimental digital media to the granular remnants of everyday life.

Across the exhibition, Meyer said, the works share “a sense of expanded possibilities in the experience of the everyday, a sense of the past, and possibilities for the future.”

Appointments to view the shows outside regular opening times may be arranged by emailing Meyer at [email protected] or calling 917-570-9649.

Meyer said he would like to continue the Wilton pop-up gallery for a third summer, though future plans remain open. No artist talks, workshops or community events are scheduled beyond the openings, but talks could be added on an ad hoc basis.

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