Everyone lives their lives with vivid memories of “how I spent the Covid years!” Sarah Meyers Brent ground out the Covid chaos by combing her home and the town dumps for debris to create romantic, entangling wall sculptures. Brent is an artist with an unerring sense for compositional line, texture and color, evidenced by her solo exhibition, “Out Growth,” at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Brent’s “masterpiece” is one of her smaller works, “Portrait of a WomanandMotherDuringaPandemic.”Clearlyasculpturalself- portrait, the work invokes the swirling, “topsy-turvy” conflicted life of an artist and mother. To make this work she collected materials including a toy dinosaur, jewelry, plastic floral leaves and breast- like globules. But the star of the chaotic swirl is a dismembered Barbie doll, who twirls, crotch-up, above the fray. The diverse objects are united by an acrylic whitewash — except for Barbie’s golden curling locks of hair dangling downward. Leaving the hair blonde is a brilliant move for Brent because the curls add an erotic note to the female figure, displaying a willing to be free, to be sexy, to defy the isolation and panic of the lockdown.

Brent has a rewarding career because she has an artist-hand in two stylistic camps! Romantic Abstract Expressionism, and the Found-Object world of modern sculpture. “Beyond the Rainbow II,” an acrylic and charcoal on canvas, is a decorative work that echoes Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler’s beautiful washes of color on unsized canvas. But Brent overlays her pale pastel backgrounds with pink flowers, butterflies and dangling vines in an imaginary fairy world. Her lush floral landscape floats against a cloud of soft pastels and sunset skies.

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