“As a multidisciplinary artist who often collaborates with scientists, travels on expeditions at sea to create works that shed light on the natural world, works with data, and tries to connect the viewer with places and processes hidden from view, this body of work is an inward pivot – each painting, a personal meditation. I hope to capture these distortions of time, flurry of emotions, fluctuations as I drag the paintbrush to the beat of my own breath. Time is passing, a time less linear and more dimensional.”  – Rebecca Rutstein, 2021

Rutstein presents nine large-scale paintings and smaller works in her second solo exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary.

In her new series,Topographies of Time, Rutstein’s language of abstraction and exploration of hidden networks pivots inward, as she reflects on the impact of the global pandemic and our experience of simultaneous  interconnectedness and isolation. She suggests that our shared experience of time has shifted, stretched, bent and slowed, or alternately becomes frantic in fits and starts, as normalcy has been upended by world events.

Many of Rutstein’s paintings incorporate cellular networks of forms, lines or bands of colors that reveal an experience of time that is changing, elongating and warping as routines shift and days blur their boundaries. The series is a record of altering emotional states during the global pandemic: feelings of containment, anxiety, gratitude and new possibilities.