Everything is Touching
Works by Brianna Bass
Theaterworks
Hartford
Oct. 14, 2026
Artist Brianna Bass utilizes the gap between what we see and what exists in a fascinating exhibition on display at Theaterworks in downtown Hartford.
Titled Everything is Touching, the exhibition is presented alongside the premiere of the latest theater production at Theaterworks, Little Bear Ridge Road. Bass’s work, belonging to a style called geometric abstraction, was striking from the moment I entered the gallery. The works on the wall resembled the pictures in the old Magic Eye books that popped out into 3D images if you knew the trick.
Upon closer inspection, I saw that the works on display weren’t digital prints, but actual paintings. Bass used a technique called impasto to literally lift the paint off the page. The paint is textured into streaks, small gloops and ridges that provide a satisfying physicality to the images.
Bass chose the style to purposefully create a dichotomy between her art form and the techniques she used. While many of Bass’s works look like waves, pulsars and other loosely defined shapes, they are made up of thousands of small rectangular parts.
She said that geometric abstraction is often defined by flatness and precision. The use of impasto is supposed to create a duality of randomness and order in the works.
In addition to the interplay between the planned and unplanned, Bass uses the contrasting styles to make artwork that changes depending on the viewer’s perspective. From a distance, Consonant Fray is a fuschia and cream-colored waveform, vibrating atop a near-black backdrop. It looks as if the light-colored ribbons are casting their own purplish shadows.
When I got close to the painting I could see the rectangles that comprised the work were anything but fuschia. Instead the piece was an array of blood reds, olive greens, sunshine yellows and faded pinks – anything but fuschia or cream. Like the Magic Eye books, the image I saw is a matter of distance and perspective. Seeing a painting change colors before my eyes goes far beyond the illusions found in those books.
Bass draws inspiration from the universe itself for her art. She contemplates deep space objects, energies and the history of the light we see from stars that may not even exist anymore. But she also finds infinity in objects much closer than stars. She told me a story about visiting the bank with her mother, and how staring into the thick pieces of glass she saw there revealed repeating rainbows that spiraled down into infinity.
“When light bends and is broken and is manipulated through these different mediums, it's like the veil of the mundane and the veil of reality kind of getting peeled back just a little bit so that you can start to see that there are more mechanisms going on than we're aware of,” she said.
Even the great pictures Bass provided don’t do justice to her artwork. Get down to Theaterworks to see her work in person, and stick around for Little Bear Ridge Road, which yours truly will be reviewing next.
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Everything is Touching is on display at Theaterworks through Nov. 9.
Jamil goes to the premiere of Little Bear Ridge Road.
