Artist Makes Mythology Natural

Even without knowing the name of the piece, the figure represented there looks like a mythological personage, a character freighted with symbols. It’s there in the decorations on her boots, and the way she walks through and astride the town at the same time. It’s there in the way she holds a building in her hand. In the artist’s style, she could be a giant, holding an actual building; she could also be showing us the vision she has in her head. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.

The Architect is one of the prints on display at a solo show of art by the New Haven-based visual artist and musician Shula Weinstein, running now at Never Ending Books through July 30. Weinstein has been a part of the circle of artists around Never Ending Books since the 1990s, but began exploring digital art only during the pandemic. Each piece, she said back in 2022, began with a photograph, often just a texture of something, that she would then begin to manipulate. It was about​“seeing beyond what it is. I want to just let my mind be free with it,” she said. By all accounts, and her social media accounts in particular, she continues to exercise that freedom, figuring out how else to transform what she sees, in both concept and execution.

Where many of her pieces are abstracts — and sometimes different versions of the same abstract — a few of the pieces in the show are notable for having figures in them. Guardian — A Puppet Show features exactly that, a shadow puppet dancing on a post through a town of vivid hues. What is the guardian protecting? Is it the stairs behind the figure, from the rest of the townspeople? Or is he protecting the entire town itself? Like The Architect, there’s a sense of mythology, folklore, fable about it, a story being told. Perhaps it’s up to us to make up the details.

Several pieces draw directly from nature, as Weinstein depicts landscapes saturated with color and filled with bold shapes. Another series, sometimes with the title Barge Dweller, plays with the idea of how to melt the line between interior and exterior spaces. Her abstractions of these ideas point out something about real spaces that do the same, from barges and houseboats to screened-in porches and tents and campers, places that fit all too well with the current season we’re in.

In this and all of Weinstein’s work, there’s a fascination with nature that points toward a deeper engagement with it, of flinging oneself headlong into it, learning to adapt. But there is also in every image the keen sense of seeing inside the artist, and of being able to see what it looks like to take in the world with open eyes and open mind. Maybe those two ideas are part of the same larger thing — and somewhere in that, with long-practicing artists, is a code for survival.

Shula Weinstein’s solo show runs at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., through July 30. Visit the space’s website for hours and more information about events.