Abstract Meets Concrete At City Gallery

At first, artist Tom Peterson’s images, entitled Hidden Mysteries, could be abstract textures of black and white, possible rendered by computer, a pattern of repeating fractals. Then it becomes clear: they’re actually photographs of the surface of water in low light. They’re natural patterns made into more intentional shapes by the act of photographing them and processing those images.

The blurring of abstract and concrete is a feature of City Gallery’s latest show, ​“6 x 6: An Invitational,” running at the gallery on Upper State Street until March 17. The show features the work of 12 artists across a variety of media, and is brought together by the ways that, side by side, the abstract and representational images seem to inform each other the longer you look.

In Phyllis Crowley’s Red Glow, the framing and attention to color might first prevent the eye from seeing what the image is. It’s just flashes of red, stripes of silver, a haze of white. It takes a moment for the eye to orient itself and see that this might be a picture of a part of the conveyer belt for luggage at an airport, or another piece of machinery. It’s a concrete image rendered more abstract.

Crowley’s approach feels in some ways the opposite of William Frucht’s approach in his untitled images. They’re of manmade structures that are slowly decaying in the woods, but get a little more surreal as the eye finds certain details, culminating perhaps in a chunk of cement suspended improbably in a web of rebar that doesn’t look strong enough to be holding up the weight. Michael Zack’s Flight takes what appear to be exact replicas of the silhouettes of people and turns them into textured shadows. Karleen Loughran uses the process of solar printing (which is more or less what it sounds like) to create far more than the shadows of objects. Her vibrant images with arcs of color look almost painterly.

Connie Pfeiffer’s Essence, long columns of papers running almost floor to ceiling in the gallery, seem at first like an example of calligraphy, until you see that what’s really there is less decipherable, and more energetic.

The most abstract pieces in the show, Katherine Evans’s Aqua Zen and Emilia Dubicki’s Sounding Line, seem almost like a collaboration. Both explore the effects of fields of color, and what happens when you place colors of high contrast against one another. Evans does it using bold color choices of blues and oranges, greens and a touch of magenta. Dubicki does it with black and white, shades of gray. Taken together, they can read as if they’re after the same thing. But with the eye so thoroughly opened, Dubicki’s piece has an effect on the photography nearby.

Jane Lederer’s photographs can at first not look like photographs, but abstract shapes of black and white. Then they snap into focus to show that they are, in fact, exactly what the titles of the images suggest. On the left, there’s a thistle. On the right, a graveyard. The exhibit overall has a way of pleasantly disorienting the eye to teach us, all over again, that our brains may make sense of the information our eyes give them, so that we recognize letters, faces, houses and trees, streets and sky. But all our eyes are really seeing is light.