The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Gallery looks at ‘Perseverance’ in pandemic
If pandemic survivors learned nothing else in the “Outer Limits” episode that was 2020, it was perseverance.
And that’s the theme of a City Gallery exhibit during the month of January in New Haven. “Perseverance: Three Artists Work through Stressful Times” looks at the very way an artists copes with difficult times — through a chosen medium.
City Gallery artists Susan Newbold, Ruth Sack, and Michael Zack are represented here. Newbold makes mixedmedia pieces that capture the organic nature of beloved landscapes.
“I live on the coast of Maine during the summer months, and for the last 35 years have tried to capture its tumbling
rock cliffs, glistening water and distant hills,” she explains in a gallery release. But here she is forced to vicariously explore the likes of Ocean Point in East Boothbay and Witch Island in South Bristol.
Sack works in communication via shapes that “reference letterforms such as cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and calligraphies,” and “zigs and zags like X and Y-chromosomes, living organisms that together grow into a community of clustered shapes,” according to a gallery release.
Zack’s figure prints show subtle and nuanced colors that highlight people moving about their daily lives in familiar conversations and communities. “But shorn of distinguishing facial features and clothing detail, his figures become anyone and everyone, taken out of context and rearranged into a panorama that has a narrative all its own,” the release says.