Rita Hannafin’s quilt, front and center on the back wall of City Gallery, is at first glance a piece immersed in a folk tradition. But look closer and Hannafin’s more playful nature comes out. The first of the nine boxes in the center is full of patterns and colors — among the more abstract shapes are prints of cars, glasses, leaves, and helicopters. In the next box over, one of the sections of the box is replaced by a white box with a square peephole in it, from which a small pattern peeks out. In the next large box over, another white box appears. This plan repeats all the way through the piece; there’s a sense of those peepholes taking over, each iteration making it more geometric and more abstract. And in veering away from old patterns of quilting but establishing a new one, Hannafin is stretching the form without breaking it. She’s showing what else can be done.
The piece is part of “Open Source @ City,” running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Oct. 30. The show is City Gallery’s contribution to Open Source (formerly Citywide Open Studios), the Artspace-helmed celebration of visual art across the Elm City that culminates in a flurry of events held between Oct. 21 and Oct. 30. But the show also represents a kind of opening for City Gallery, as it welcomes two new members — Hannafin and Esthea Kim — into its own roster of artists.
“My lifelong love of art has found its expression in fabric. I revel in the simple act of placing one fabric next to another. I am attracted to the endless possibilities offered by the materials and techniques. When I relax into the flow of movement and sewing, I know I am in the zone where all possibilities exist,” Hannafin writes in a personal statement. Some of her pieces are more representational, and others more abstract. “Inspiration comes from various sources, both visual and intellectual,” she continues. “Sometimes an idea just bursts into my mind, and I can’t rest until I transform it into an art quilt. My camera is a trusty companion for visual documentation. It records interesting bits of the world around me, revealing curious combinations of color, shape and line. With ideas and visual stimulation to inspire me, I find the meaning in doing. This makes my passing sensations and ideas tactile and permanent. My hands show me the way.”
Kim, meanwhile, “is an interdisciplinary artist integrating sculpture, installation and painting,” reads an accompanying statement. Her paintings “represent a captured notion from memories and express the sensed and theorized through fading and poetic imagery in a visually succinct way. Transposed from her perception, her painting transfers atmospheric vastness into repeated gestural brushstrokes and built up textures. While fleetingly capturing light in-between layers, these brushstrokes combine with hard-edged elements, condensing infinite views and the unseen into a single flattened composition.”
That patient process results in luminous work; the piece shimmers in person in a way that an image of it doesn’t quite capture. Our brains, always seeking patterns and labels, want to call it a painting of a cloud, but the painting resists something that easy. There’s a sense of the painting capturing something half-seen. Maybe it’s moving too fast for us to perceive it, or it’s too far away. Or, taking a more metaphorical route, it’s a visualization of something we only half-remember, or barely understand. It’s a painting of something that’s just out of reach.
Hannafin’s and Kim’s pieces further diversify what’s on offer at City Gallery, whether it’s Meg Bloom’s seemingly fragile sculptures that revel in texture (see left), Michael Zack’s noirish silhouettes of men in motion, or Jennifer Davies’s evocation of tree bark that’s so exacting you might expect to feel the bark itself if you were to touch it. Tom Peterson’s bold, highly abstract compositions reduce landscapes to their essentials, while Roberta Friedman’s swirling canvases offer a sense of objects in motion, maybe commotion.
“Open Source @ City” shows how City Gallery itself is growing and changing, and offers a taste of the smorgasbord of art to come — especially by Oct. 21, when exhibitions will appear across the city, from Bloom to Never Ending Books, from the Q House to Armanda Brewing, from the Skate Bowl to the Farmington Canal Trail. The Open Source festival may have changed. Open Source may not have the single anchoring event — say, the enormous single weekends at the Goffe Street Armory — that Citywide Open Studios had. But in its more diffuse, spread-out structure and schedule, it’s arguable that it reaches out to more of the city that it did in the past, and lets more of the city in.
“Open Source @ City” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Oct. 30. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information. Visit Artspace’s website for more information on the full range of programming for Open Source.
