Senses Connect In An Artist’s Retrospective

By Lucy Gellman Arts Council of greater New Haven

Maybe the first thing you see is a black hole, an imperfect, sunken circle that looks like it could tunnel to the ends of the earth. Above it, clean slices of color turn it into an open eye. Green-and-red shapes bend and glow as they dance around the outer edge, worm-like and phosphorescent. A green-and-gold star explodes in the upper righthand corner of the paper. Ancient text blooms beneath all of it.
Welcome to Cynthia Beth Rubin’s Sensing Connections: A Retrospective Exhibition, running at Congregation Beth-El Keser Israel (BEKI) through the end of March. Pulled from over four decades of Rubin’s work, the exhibition gives viewers an intimate look at an artist’s evolution—and leaves them with a reminder of how small, delicate, and worthy of care the world around them is. 
While it spans decades—and on Rubin’s part, extensive and sometimes breathtaking travel in France, Senegal, Japan, Brussels, Canada and domestically—it feels more like the beginning of a conversation than the end of one. Viewers can email art@beki.org to set up an appointment to see the work.  

“It’s interesting for me to see how some things are coming back into my work that were there long ago,” Rubin said on a recent Friday, walking through the exhibition just hours before shabbat services began in the building. “It’s a way of activating forms in a way that we can relate to them.”
Two forms in particular take center stage in her work. The first, and perhaps her most well-known in New Haven, are microscopic phyto- and zooplankton, tiny organisms that are vital to both marine and terrestrial life. She also dives deep on a decades-long interest in memory, ritual and text, from Dead Sea Scroll Fragments and the Old Cairo Manuscript to woods that she once knew in college, and returned to decades later as an established artist. 
Nowhere, perhaps, is her work more meditative than when she blends and synthesizes those interests, reminding viewers that they are a speck in that long, layered continuum of history. The treat—and it is a treat—is the time and pleasure a viewer is able to take in getting there.
From the beginning of the show, installed across BEKI’s open atrium, first-floor hallway and downstairs gallery, her work stands out in its alive-ness, telling a story that is both about the natural world and her place as a creative in it.

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