William Frucht
From the series Coney Island.
WIlliam Frucht’s photograph from Coney Island combines rigor and humor to make for an engrossing image. On the rigorous side, there’s the strict geometry of the workout equipment, the thin band of ocean separating tan sand from slate sky. On the humorous side, there’s something entertaining about the poses; they’re exercising, but they’re also like kids on playground equipment. More generally, there’s the juxtaposition of the handful of people working out with the multitudes in the background lounging in the sun. For every person working to get their heart rate up, there are 10 more who maybe think they’re trying too hard.
Candace Ovesey
Andrea.
The image is part of “Family Act,” running at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Feb. 25. It features works by gallery member William Frucht, his sisters Sara Frucht and Martha Rives, and his wife, Candace Ovesey. The pieces in the show run from photography to painting, sculpture to digital art, mixed media to animated computer graphics, and from thoroughly representational to totally abstract. The portrait of the family that emerges is of members united by the fact of their artistic pursuits, but each of them following their own creative paths.
In the press release for the show, William Frucht described how, without any particular familial pressure, “we all gravitated, sooner or later, to the visual arts.” Ovesey practices drawing and sculpturing; her piece “is a bas relief, where I dug down into the clay to create layers underneath,” she is quoted as saying. William is a photographer whose latest images deploy a panoramic film camera “that takes in different parts of the scene at different times, like some unforeseen merger of the classical and quantum worlds. This third path lies mostly in the future.”
Sara, who is also a programmer and mathematician, uses “mathematical formulas and computer code” to create “symmetry, tiling patterns, splines, fractals, color, transparency, and of course randomness.” Rives uses mixed media to create “representations of the living world: birth and rebirth, the rhythms of trees, the resilience of life under the pressures we humans put on it, the lush and glossy profusion of the tropics, patterns and rhythmic repetitions that are not quite patterns.”
Bleached.
Andrea, Ovesey’s contribution to the show, is as stated. Ovesey shows her work in the best sense; the piece has a handmade, worn-in quality that amplifies its subject. Rives, meanwhile, contributes several pieces to the show. Overall, they have the effect of making the walls of the gallery explode with color. Individually, their echoes of natural forms are easy to see, as is, ultimately, the resilience Rives speaks of — resilience that will almost certainly outlive us.
Sara Frucht
String Theory.
Rives and Sara Frucht’s pieces at first seem opposed in the sense that Rives draws from the unruly forms of plants and Frucht from the elegance of numbers. But they have more in common than first appears. It starts with both artists’ affinities for color, and for shifting forms. (Frucht makes the movement quite literal with some of the animations on display as part of the show.) It continues with the ways that many of the natural forms that inspire Rives follow the contours of the fractals that find their way into Frucht’s pieces. Both artists are following their own inclinations, but as a family sometimes does, they also move together.
“Family Act” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Feb. 25, when there is a closing reception from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
