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Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2024 9:33 am
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(9)
Joy Bush photo
Bethlehem.
It’s the shape of an ancient Middle Eastern cityscape, verandahs and towers, arched doorways and windows like peeping eyes. But it’s not anywhere near the Middle East; it’s on a rock hilltop in Waterbury, and it’s part of Holy Land USA — to some, a roadside attraction, to others, a place of serious pilgrimage, and for Joy Bush, the subject of an almost 40-year-long series of photographs.
Some of those photos are up now at City Gallery in a show called “Ruins of a Holy Land,” running through April 28, with a reception on April 13.
by
Nora Grace-Flood |
Mar 22, 2024 3:57 pm
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(12)
Nora Grace-Flood Photos
Milling your own grain is like grinding coffee to order, according to Frisch, who does both.
Bill Frisch signed up for the city’s DNA of the Entrepreneur program — and found the right recipe to make his business, East Rock Breads, rise to the top.
City officials joined Frisch outside his shop at 942 State Street Friday to cut a formal ribbon for the new shop and publicize the secret ingredient to that shared success: $15,000 in funding from the city’s Leaseholder Improvement Program.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 14, 2024 9:24 am
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Esthea Kim
White Field 2.
Esthea Kim’s painting White Field 2, at first glance, could be a photograph of clouds or smoke, but its complex surface asks the viewer to take more than just one glance, to be drawn in. The more you look, the more you see: variations in colors and textures, bordering on movement. The sense of space and depth within the painting suggests something huge could be obscured by the smoky veil. What’s behind there? Threat or serenity? Or are the clouds all there is?
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 6, 2024 10:00 am
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William Frucht
From the series Coney Island.
WIlliam Frucht’s photograph from Coney Island combines rigor and humor to make for an engrossing image. On the rigorous side, there’s the strict geometry of the workout equipment, the thin band of ocean separating tan sand from slate sky. On the humorous side, there’s something entertaining about the poses; they’re exercising, but they’re also like kids on playground equipment. More generally, there’s the juxtaposition of the handful of people working out with the multitudes in the background lounging in the sun. For every person working to get their heart rate up, there are 10 more who maybe think they’re trying too hard.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 11, 2024 10:03 am
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Judy Atlas
Blue Flux.
Judy Atlas’s Blue Flux can evoke dozens of things if you let it: a cityscape in the rain, a snow field, the inside of an ice crystal, with just a little sun streaming through. But that’s not the game the painting asks you to play. It can also just be taken on its own terms, as color and texture, a composition that is satisfying because its elements are well balanced, without having to mean anything in particular. Or maybe put another way, it can evoke a few meanings at once, without ever needing to land on a single one; it’s the impression it leaves on the viewer that matters.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 19, 2023 9:45 am
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Harder with J Topog Rivulets 231.
After decades of printmaking, Barbara Harder revels in embracing the accidents. “I’m trying to make things the way I’m making them,” she said, but “sometimes I almost like tripping up,” because sometimes she likes the images she creates better. “You don’t have to beat yourself up more than you need to,” she continued. “It’s really nice to have the space as an artist to do that exploration, and wrestle with yourself, and the paper, and the ink.… It’s the hope that at times in the studio, I can have this spark… whether it’s done, or whether it’s perfect, or whatever it is, it just makes me happy. It’s something to keep after.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 19, 2023 9:08 am
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Roberta Friedman
Aglow.
Aglow has been given the right name. It’s an abstract of shapes and colors, but the vibrant yellow in the background suffuses it with sun, with life, as if the viewer is looking upward through something — the slide of a single cell, or a lattice of bridges — into a summer sky. The way the colors keep separate, yet flow together, makes the effect possible, and that is the result of the technique the artist uses. That technique, it turns out, is the focus of the show.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 15, 2023 8:36 am
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Linda Mickens
Unclaimed.
Linda Mickens’s sculpture Unclaimed stands at the back of City Gallery like an altar, a centerpiece. “This piece gives voice to the countless victims who died, isolated and alone, to a disease that devastated the world,” Mickens’s accompanying statement reads. “Their angels claim them, forever ensuring that their souls do not languish, nameless and faceless in mass graves for eternity.” The note clarifies what Unclaimed is about. But it’s not necessary to bring home the work’s emotional message. The pile of shoes, the tattered wings, the angel’s sad, caring expression are more than enough to bring out the artist’s concern for suffering, and her call for compassion and understanding.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 14, 2023 7:39 am
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Eleanor Polak Photos
The Jawns perform at Gather.
Gather, the coffee shop and restaurant located at 952 State St., ran wild with drums, guitars, sound systems, and more from the four bands that performed there on Friday night. With a combined 17 band members and double that amount of audience members, the shop felt like it could burst at the seams. Instead of exploding outward, the energy in the room folded in on itself to create a volcanic mass of writhing bodies and whirring rhythms.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 24, 2023 7:33 am
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(1)
Eleanor Polak Photos
Mustafe Mussa performs for audience at Gather.
Outside of Gather, the cafe at 952 State St., rain poured down in torrents. Wet-haired and clutching their umbrellas like lifesavers, people filed in, ready to dry off and cheer up. Fortunately, this Friday evening Gather could offer both. Nine performers — two musicians and seven comics — were busy setting up for a show. As Jake Strom sold tickets to the incoming audience members, his fellow comedian Mustafe Mussa stood ready and waiting with a roll of paper towels.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 18, 2023 9:24 am
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Esthea Kim
Textures and Elements.
The ribbon that winds its way through Esthea Kim’s four paintings — each titled as a series, Textures and Elements — presents itself as a mystery. The light cloudscapes Kim has painted on each of the canvases are ambiguous enough, as they suggest both peace and a sense that they conceal something. The ribbon connects them all, invites the viewer to understand the four paintings as a whole. But to what end? Is there a meaning to be sussed out? Or is the connection itself the meaning?
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 10, 2023 8:37 am
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(2)
Eleanor Polak Photos
Bajzelle plays at Gather.
A crowd assembled in the basement of Gather, at 952 State St., lit only by a few strings of red bulbs and the lurid screens of old-fashioned television sets. The scene felt intimate and grungy, stripped to the bare essentials of a show: lights, sound, and people. David Taylor Coffey, soft spot, and Bajzelle prepared to fill Gather with a buffet of genres and sounds. The audience swelled inside the confined space, with enough enthusiasm and energy to fill a stadium. What was an empty basement transformed into a party as soon as someone plugged in the mic.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 23, 2023 7:57 am
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Eleanor Polak Photos
Elm City Robots performs at Gather.
The interior of Gather, a coffee shop and community spot located at 952 State St., looked like a magical grotto. Low lighting shone over chalkboard-graffitied walls hung with vines. Amidst the vibrant scene, local bands Elm City Robots and Model Decoy prepared to play the third week of their Thursday night June residency.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 15, 2023 8:09 am
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Water Under the Bridge.
It’s hard to look at Joyce Greenfield’s Water Under the Bridge and not think of the recent smoke from forest fires in Canada that choked the air last week. All the signals are there — a wall of angry flames, a sky full of soot, the land seeming to melt away in the heat. But that’s not what the painting has to be. It could be autumn, the fiery colors the result of the changing of foliage. The dark sky could be rain clouds. Either way, the painting is about transformation. Fast or slow, destructive, creative, cyclical, the brush strokes mark the change.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2023 8:45 am
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A small sculpture hangs from the ceiling of City Gallery on Upper State Street and floats, as if it’s alive and capable of hovering in midair, or perhaps is a bit of plant life floating in the ocean. All around it, the walls are decorated with pieces that read like fungal growth, or the traces of growth, or perhaps the tracks left by some land or sea creature. They and the rest of the pieces in the gallery are so thoroughly integrated that it would be possible to believe that they were made by a single artist. But it’s really the work of two artists — Meg Bloom and Cyra Levenson — working in conversation with one another. And as the title of the show — “Regenerations,” running through April 30 — suggests, that conversation has been nothing but fruitful.
Cops handcuff Wezenter in her hallway, as seen through police body cam footage.
“Police with a search warrant!” a cop shouted after pounding five times with his fist on an East Street apartment’s door.
Seconds later, he and four fellow officers rammed the door in and wound up pointing a gun at a 20-year-old who’d been asleep in bed — only to realize minutes later they’d raided the wrong apartment.
Cop cars outside on East Street Tuesday following suspect's death.
Nora Grace-Flood photo
Stacey Wezenter outside her third-floor apartment and beside her still-broken door.
A 35-year-old East Street resident suspected of involvement in child pornography was found dead in his apartment Tuesday five days after police surprise-searched his apartment — as part of a raid that began with cops busting down the wrong door and handcuffing an innocent neighbor.
by
Thomas Breen |
Mar 23, 2023 2:51 pm
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(8)
Thomas Breen photos
Dev Deputy Carlos Eyzaguirre, Mayor Elicker, builder Alex Opuszynski and son Atlas, and Alder Eli Sabin at Thursday's groundbreaking ...
... for 15 new apartments planned for vacant State St. lot.
Shovels in hand and a mound of dark brown dirt underfoot, city officials joined a former nurse-turned-commercial real estate broker-turned-housing developer — along with his hard-hatted toddler son — for a ceremonial groundbreaking for 15 new apartments to be built atop a vacant Upper State Street lot.
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 9, 2023 8:39 am
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The paths of light streak across the darkness, like the afterglow of the sun across your retina after you close your eyes on a summer day. Or perhaps like the smoky path in the air left behind by a kid waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, or a flashlight. It’s actually the sun dancing across water, but for artist Phyllis Crowley, it’s not the source of the light that matters. It’s the shapes the light leaves behind, a record of the way it moved — and the way it suggests a meaning, just out of reach.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 28, 2023 2:31 pm
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(4)
Nora Grace-Flood photo
Caroline Smith and crew at work on Upper State.
Caroline Smith slid a shovel beneath some slush obscuring a State Street sidewalk — and cleared a pathway to keep some of the city’s small businesses open for snow day shoppers.
She was joined by a handful of other volunteers looking to lend some muscle to a slew of stores thrown off by the previous night’s snowstorm.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2023 8:39 am
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Rita Hannafin
Sanctuary in the City.
The scene depicted in Rita Hannafin’s Sanctuary in the City could be of several places in the New Haven area, places that seem wilder than they should be given their proximity to people, whether it’s a stretch of the West River, or the Quinnipiac River before it reaches Fair Haven, or a part of the shoreline in West Haven.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 7, 2023 9:04 am
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(2)
Karen Ponzio Photo
Alexander Silver Angeloff and a sampling of his creations.
When you walk into The Cultured Café on State Street, you are greeted by the feeling that you’ve walked into as natural a habitat as you can find that is not actually outside. Philodendrons wind around glass jars full of fermenting vegetables on a wooden counter. Above, cotton ball-like clouds dot a blue sky ceiling. What the café serves is also as close to nature as it can be, courtesy of the café’s owner Alexander Silver Angeloff, who is trying to make the path into the world of natural health safe, welcoming, and delicious.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 12, 2023 8:43 am
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(1)
William Frucht
Ellis Island Island #6 and Ellis Island Hospital #1.
Everything in William Frucht’s photographs is having its layers peeled away — of paint, varnish, wood, metal — by time and neglect. At first glance they could be of century-old buildings anywhere in the Northeast, until a certain famous statue appears in the window of one of the buildings. Then the pictures snap into focus; they’re of the buildings on Ellis Island, the famous point of arrival for the great wave of immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century, when U.S. immigration was perhaps the most open it has been in its history as a global power.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2022 8:33 am
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The layers of overlapping textures, patterns, and colors are, in truth, abstract. But they evoke much of what we see in our lives. Maybe it’s a picture in a magazine of the surface of an insect leg, magnified a thousand times. Maybe it’s a close up of fabric, or water running down a window. For the painter, Judy Atlas, the connection between the painting and the world is the viewer’s to make. For Atlas herself, the connections between the paintings tell their own story, too.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2022 8:59 am
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Rita Hannafin’s quilt, front and center on the back wall of City Gallery, is at first glance a piece immersed in a folk tradition. But look closer and Hannafin’s more playful nature comes out. The first of the nine boxes in the center is full of patterns and colors — among the more abstract shapes are prints of cars, glasses, leaves, and helicopters. In the next box over, one of the sections of the box is replaced by a white box with a square peephole in it, from which a small pattern peeks out. In the next large box over, another white box appears. This plan repeats all the way through the piece; there’s a sense of those peepholes taking over, each iteration making it more geometric and more abstract. And in veering away from old patterns of quilting but establishing a new one, Hannafin is stretching the form without breaking it. She’s showing what else can be done.
