Meg Bloom’s artwork floats in the window of City Gallery on Upper State Street. Her piece, made of handmade paper and plant matter, hovers somewhere between a cloud and an organism, seemingly defying gravity. The piece gives a sense of the surprising art inside; usually, the gallery’s monthly shows feature one or two artists, but this month many of the City Gallery artists have banded together for “Open Studios @ City,” the gallery’s contribution to Open Studios, which runs through the month at galleries and studios around town, including events at Creative Arts Workshop, Eli Whitney Museum Barn, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Highwood Square, Institute Library, Kehler Liddell Gallery, Marlin Works, NXTHVN, Erector Square and Westville.
The City Gallery artists are Judy Atlas, Bloom, Joy Bush, Phyllis Crowley, Jennifer Davies, Roberta Friedman, William Frucht, Rita Hannafin, Barbara Harder, Rob Jacoby, Sheila Kaczmarek, Kathy Kane, Catherine Lavoie, Beatriz Olsen, and Tom Peterson.
While Erector Square’s and Westville’s goings-on are tentpole events for the month-long explosion of visual art in New Haven, City Gallery’s show is a reminder that Open Studios is, at its heart, a celebration not just of the art community in the Elm City, but of each individual artist, and the media, style, and viewpoint they each contribute to make the scene as diverse and vibrant as it is. “Open Studios @ City” shows that kind of artistic diversity even among the gallery’s members.
Where Bloom’s piece floats, Catherine Lavoie’s Woodland 1.0 has weight. Its colors are heavier and more varied. But it finds some kinship with Bloom’s piece as well: there’s a commitment to the abstract, and to an exploration of the chosen materials, in this case hand-dyed cotton fabrics. Woodland 1.0 shows what fabric, and perhaps fabric alone, can do in its ability to create texture and set off colors against one another to create a variegated pattern.
Tom Peterson’s Uptown Girls series of black-and-white photographs are studies in sharp contrasts, with bleach-white mannequins appearing in the angular environments of buildings reflected in shop windows. Barbara Harder’s Concordia: Consurgo/Rise Up features book pages spattered with vivid red paint that brings to mind a splash of blood. Beatriz Olson’s Colorful Collections is a vibrant abstract work, where the colors set off one another with palpable energy.
Meanwhile, in her trio of pieces — Re-thinking, Second Thoughts, and More Re-thinking — Roberta Friedman makes the process of making the art part of the art itself. It might be tempting to read the pieces from one end to the other as an evolution, but the titles Friedman gives them suggest something different. The pieces are stops in a line of exploration that doesn’t necessarily connote progress so much as a possibly endless reworking of an idea: more or less texture, more or less color, a swirling swatch of shapes. The pieces and their titles also suggest that this process is, in fact, quite fun. And why shouldn’t it be? Friedman suggests that the joy lies as much in making the pieces as finishing them. Each piece contains the promise of more.
“Open Studios @ City” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Oct. 26. Open Studios runs all month across New Haven; check Erector Square‘s Open Studios website for a full list of events.
