Brian Slattery Photos
Sack.
A crowd of colorful figures are running amok on a table in City Gallery. Their surfaces swirl with patterns, their forms just reminiscent enough of people or animals to endow them with a great deal of personality. They are, above all, fun — and part of “Phantasmagoria: Art to Amuse and Amaze,” a collection of mostly wax-encaustic paintings and sculptures by Ruth Sack running now at the gallery on Upper State Street through March 6.
“Times of sadness are over,” Sack said, to begin to explain her point in view in creating the pieces. By that she didn’t mean willfully disregarding the pandemic (which isn’t over) and the hardships so many have endured. She meant following her own path in her art, moving away from art that explored aging and illness and toward pieces that embraced joy — a path she has been on for over a year.
It began a few years ago when a friend and fellow artist passed away, and Sack bought a piece of art from the estate. “It had fluorescent orange in it, and every time I looked at that color I smiled,” Sack said. It started her exploring how to use encaustic wax — an artistic medium she’s worked with for years and teaches at Creative Arts Workshop — to put more color into her work.
That path continued into the pandemic; almost all the pieces in the show were made after March 2020. “I don’t have kids around anymore and my time is my own,” Sack said. Though she has always played with her artwork, reworking older pieces as she saw fit. “Wax is like that,” she said.
Looking around her studio, “I discovered I had rolled-up layers of wax” ready to use, she said. She had been using the wax as a mold or a block to make prints. In a shift, she got the idea to slice up the wax sheets to make paintings. Taking the “scumbles and scrumbles” of the surface of the wax, she could lay them down on a flat surface, put a wall around it, and “pour color into it, and I would have this strange arrangement, and I could see where it would take me.”
Exploring further what she could do with the material, she sliced them to make “logs of color” and began to experiment with forms — encasing Slinkies, kale, but mostly water balloons that she dipped in progressive layers of wax.
“The size was dictated by the medium I was working with, and I just started applying colors to it,” Sack said. As she built the forms, she noticed that they “looked like little dolls, or funny faces,” or figures in “bizarre postures.”
“I like that you could just look at it and come up with your own interpretation of what it was, but they’re always a little figurative. They have heads on them, for the most part,” she added.
Sack drew inspiration from the work of popular 1970s artist Niki de Sainte Phalle, who incorporated play into her art in a dramatic way. Sainte Phalle built massively, including a 14-acre sculpture garden in Italy, and turned some of her sculptures into playgrounds. “The first time I ever heard of her was when I slid down one of her monsters,” Sack said, at a playground in Jerusalem.
Is embracing play and making happy art a form of escape? “Oh, yeah!” Sack said. “What’s wrong with that?” Though she did ask herself the same question early in the process. “Is all art political? Is it worth doing if it’s not?”
As she thought about it more, however, she began to see the question from another angle. “The people who are looking at art are not necessarily the people whose minds are going to change,” Sack said, or need to. Besides, people can react by feeling preached at. Moreover, she said, “how many paintings or sculptures changed the world? Not many. Some did. Guernica did … but what other works can you think of?” And, she thought, “we gripe about things all the time … I think it’s great to make something you can laugh at, or something where you see them all together and think ‘this would make a great chess set,’ ” she said with a laugh. “Why not?”
“It’s good to take a moment to consider,” she added, but “it’s good to be happy,” too.
She’s already considering what direction to move in next. “I would like to go bigger on these,” Sack said of her pieces. Not to Sainte Phalle’s monumental size, she added, but large enough to present new structural challenges — and new opportunities for play, and perhaps joy.
Phantasmagoria: Art to Amuse and Amaze” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through March 6. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
