FAMILY ACT: A Family of Visual Artists at City Gallery

[Jen Payne]

Featuring Work by Sara Frucht, William Frucht, Candace Ovesey, and Martha Rives

City Gallery welcomes four members of the Frucht family for FAMILY ACT, with work by gallery member William Frucht, his sisters Sara Frucht and Martha Rives, and his wife, Candace Ovesey. The show will feature photography, painting, sculpture, digital art, mixed media, and animated computer graphics. It runs Friday, February 2 - Sunday, February 25, with a Reception on Sunday, February 25, from 2-4pm.

“We were not one of those families where our father sat all the children down one day and said, ‘You’ll be a lawyer, you’ll be a soldier’ and so on,” says William Frucht. “Still, it seemed clear early on that Martha was going to be the artist, Billy the writer, and Sara the mathematician. To a certain extent that’s what happened, except that we all gravitated, sooner or later, to the visual arts.” After Bill and Candace had been married for a while, she got into the act, too.

After practicing pen-and-ink and pastel drawing for many years, Candace started sculpting during the Covid pandemic. “Currently I am studying both drawing and sculpting at Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan. I work mostly with terracotta clay, sometimes adding color with pen brushes. The piece on display here is a bas relief, where I dug down into the clay to create layers underneath.”

Her husband, photographer Bill Frucht, has been a member of City Gallery for seven years.. “My photography has followed two distinct paths,” he explains. “One path is photographing abandoned or distressed places with a large medium-format film camera and a tripod. The images that emerge are meditations on the slow evolution of the world: I am in a dialogue with the past, photographing processes that unfold over years and decades. The second path is street photography using a small digital camera. I immerse myself in the moment, trying not to think but simply flow, reacting to fleeting gestures, expressions, and chance arrangements of light and shadow that flicker into existence like virtual particles and then as quickly vanish.” Bill’s most recent work represents a third relationship with time. “Using 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.”

Bill’s younger sister Sara Frucht is an artist, programmer and mathematician. “I believe math can best be understood visually, and that its beauty and elegance can be best expressed through art,” she says. “Rather than using paints and canvas to create art, I use mathematical formulas and computer code. My main tools are symmetry, tiling patterns, splines, fractals, color, transparency, and of course randomness. In all of my art, I am inspired by the purity of form and the luminosity of light and color interacting with it. I believe that the beauty of geometric forms can awaken in us a sense of connection with the physical world at its deepest level.”

Martha Rives, Bill’s older sister, works from her studio in Exeter, New Hampshire, where she's been focusing on mixed media art since Covid. “All of the pieces in this show were done as the country was emerging from the pandemic. They are 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. Artmaking is about asking questions, exploring ideas, and doing the hard work of making a concept meet one’s visualization in a tangible form that is coherent and beautiful. I’m really having fun with this medium, and I plan on carrying through with my theme of ‘Life Rhythms’ for many more pieces.”

FAMILY ACT is free and open to the public, and will be on view Friday, February 2 - Sunday, February 25, with a Reception on Sunday, February 25, from 2-4pm. City Gallery is located at 994 State Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Gallery hours are Friday - Sunday, 12pm - 4 pm, or by appointment. For further information please contact City Gallery, [e-mail], www.city-gallery.org.