"Grid and Amaze" at the Judy Black Park in Washington Depot

Now–27 | Washington Depot, CT

The Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens in Washington Depot hosts "Grid and Amaze," a joint exhibition by Stacy Bogdonoff and Elizabeth MacDonald through June 27, open Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Both artists work in ways that foreground material process and structure, and both maintain studios in the northwest corner of Connecticut. Bogdonoff, who keeps studios in Kent and New York City, is a mixed media artist who came to full-time art practice after a career as a professional chef and food entrepreneur. She works with textiles, vintage fabric, paper, paint, rust, found objects, and unconventional tools—upholstery needles, drugstore combs, pliers in service of a body of work organized around the themes of home, safety, and shelter. Her 2024 solo show at the New York Public Library brought her work to a wider audience; she has since continued showing in juried and invitational exhibitions across New York City, the Hudson Valley, and New England. The title of her contribution, "Grid," signals the geometric structuring that has increasingly organized her practice—the grid as both formal constraint and a way of making sense of accumulated materials and memories.

MacDonald, who lives in Bridgewater and received the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award in visual arts in 1999, works primarily in clay. Her ceramic tile panels are installed in public and private collections internationally, including commissions for a hospital chapel in New Milford and Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven. Her work is less about the finished object than about the dynamic that emerges from the process of making. she describes laying out the pieces before her like a jigsaw puzzle, trusting that an image will evolve that is stronger than anything she could preconceive. "Amaze" is her half of the show's title: both the labyrinthine structure and the feeling of being caught inside one.

Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens, 1 Green Hill Rd., Washington Depot, CT. Open Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. More at judyblackpark.org.