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.
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 MABONseries 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.
