Rita Hannafin
Rita Hannafin's Float, on display for Open Studios.
Rita Hannafin’s Float hangs in the midst of City Gallery’s latest show on Upper State Street, a quilt of bright, shifting colors, surprising shapes, dynamic contrasts, and ultimately, cohesion.
It’s an apt encapsulation of City Gallery’s October show. Normally, City Gallery’s monthly shows feature one or two of its member artists. For this month, through Oct. 27, all 16 of the gallery’s member artists are participating in a show, which is itself part of New Haven Open Studios, a month-long celebration of visual arts loosely centered around Erector Square’s warren of artist studios but in fact stretching from one side of New Haven to the other, and this year, into surrounding towns as well.
Roberta Friedman
Rebounding #1, #2, #3.
As if keyed into party mode, several artists have selected brightly colored pieces to include in the show. Sue Rollins’s partially abstract canvases evoke windswept, verdant landscapes on brilliant days. Jennifer Davies’s Parings (2) enlivens the wall with shimmering, watery changes in hue. Kathy Kane’s MABON series of paintings lean hard into the vibrant possibilities of abstract watercolor. Judy Atlas’s series of abstracts, Reconstructs, moves from austerity to strikingly colorful tones.
But Roberta Friedman’s Rebounding series comes closest to matching Hannafin’s quilt in its boldness and flair. The canvases are a riot of vibrating colors, and upon closer inspection, can almost read as a code, a secret language, conveying a message that we may not consciously understand, but can definitely feel.
Tom Peterson
Men's Boca, Manikin Watch, Just Me, Lunchbreak (clockwise from l.)
Even the pieces that don’t explicitly deploy a panoply of hues still head toward motion and energy. Joyce Greenfield’s trio of pieces, with nods toward landscape, have a kinetic hum to them. Sheila Kaczmarek’s sculpture Aurelia IV has the feeling of a sea creature that could come to life at any moment. Meg Bloom’s sculptures No Place to Hide and Rollin look like they would waver like flags in the wind. Barbara Harder’s JTopoq: Dear Jane 4 has an understated color palette but a very playful sense of form, with calligraphic shapes that jump from one of Harder’s pieces to another.
The context of the rest of the show adds Tom Peterson’s photographs of street scenes, which already have a sly cleverness about them, in the way a man inadvertently echoes manikins, in the way people are caught mid-action. The shadows racing across the stairs in the photos mirror the light and darkness in Hannafin’s quilt. Peterson’s photos, in a sense, show us the quilt of the life in the street around us.
“Open Studios @ City” runs through Oct. 27 at City Gallery, 994 State St. For hours and more information about events, visit City Gallery’s website. For listings of all New Haven Open Studios events, visit Erector Square’s website.