Parallel Play
Never Ending Books
New Haven
Through June 30
The tiny paintings are arranged on a shelf at Never Ending Books as though they're family photos, one next to the other in a meandering row. But the images aren't of the faces of relatives, or weddings, or vacations on faraway beaches; they're portraits, instead, of an exploratory mind.
There's a semi-abstracted painting of two cats at play. Another of a dog. Others are more fanciful: A figure ascends a staircase where a round face, somewhere between a moon and a clock, gazes downward. The placid silhouette of a cross-legged figure sits in an electric blue haze.
All together, the paintings come across as a tour of a personal history and psyche, rich and vivid—an impression borne out in the statement from Mary Herron, the artist who made them.
She writes that she "comes from strong women: pioneers and homesteaders on her father's side to intrepid immigrants from the poet Sappho's legendary island in Greece on her mom's side. Mary grew up 40 minutes from New York City. Her parents were lovers of cultural events and took her with them on their forays into the art world. From the age of three her weekends were often filled with museums, ballets at the Met, and classical concerts. In third grade after a visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was reprimanded for sketching nudes in class. While still in elementary school, Mary was granted a scholarship for a studio art class at the Hudson River Museum. Always the rebel, Mary successfully aced her Elementary Ed MS thesis with her submitted art quilt."
"Mary shares her cheeky joy and mischievous grit in her creations," the statement continues. "Mary's art reflects her eclectic taste in many different styles of painting, Her love of fairy tales, nature, stained glass and impressionist art are captured in encaustic wax, glass painting, watercolors and acrylics. Mary enjoys using most any medium with color."
The pieces are part of Parallel Play, a group show including Herron and fellow artists Nan Adams, Anne Cherry, Susan O'Leary, and Shula Weinstein, running now at Never Ending Books on State Street through the end of the month. The art in the exhibition is full of fanciful flights, the result of minds unafraid to wander. But the artists also reveal themselves as kindred spirits, walking, as the title of the show suggests, parallel paths.
Susan O'Leary's mandala-like creations may use concentric circles as their motivating idea, but the way she has constructed them, they feel more like spirals, drawing the viewer's eye toward their centers, where trees and suns, figures of rest and peace, reside.
Anne Cherry's Dreamscapes hang suspended from the ceiling, floating in the Never Ending Books space like benevolent moths. One is an elaborate diorama of an interior space. Another is artfully arranged so that at certain angles, it appears as a dislocated shape. At other angles, the forms resolve into something the mind latches onto—a container, a basket, a ship.
Shula Weinstein has several digital collages in the show, but shows a more tactile side as well. Her piece Laundry Day, full of the shapes of boats, houses, and stars, is warm and inviting, but the subject and its cheeky title open the mind. This is a place to air the imagination, to hang ideas in the window and give them a chance to breathe before wearing them again.
Nan Adams's pieces, meanwhile, are marked by their dates, which allows the viewer to track the path of her artistic inclinations over time. Sometimes she becomes more representational, sometimes more abstract. Sometimes she favors bold lines for her figures, other times color fields. At every time, however, she shares with her fellow artists in Parallel Play a sense of handmade, crafted texture.
All told, the show makes the walls of Never Ending Books glow with a friendly warmth. That makes sense: the artists in the show are all longstanding practitioners in the New Haven arts scene, and some of them have revolved around the community of Never Ending Books for decades. The strength and longevity of the relationships matter. When this reporter visited the show, a couple people who worked at Never Ending Books were setting up long tables in the space for a community dinner. This only drove the point home more—that the show feels like a family portrait because, in a way, that's exactly what it is.
