Artists Share Common Vision

True to its name, Arabesque dances. It’s a mixed media collage of human figures and architectural forms, pairing up, falling apart, melting in and out of one another. The piece reflects the method used to create it. It’s a piece arising from the work of the Etcetera Collaborative, a group of eight artists who created pieces together in the 1980s — and had a hand in creating City Gallery on Upper State Street.

The piece is part of ​“A Shared Retrospective,” a show up at City Gallery now until March 1. It features the work of Jane Harris, both by herself and working with others, and is a testament to both the strength of following your own vision and the possibilities that emerge through collaborating with others.

Early in her career — she’s a graphic designer by trade — Harris worked on Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar. She moved to Connecticut in the 1970s and fell in with a group of artists who congregated at the studio of fellow artist Caroline Chandler ​“to paint from models,” as the accompanying statement explains. ​“They had always discussed art and shared books, but in the early ​‘80s they began to collaborate on their art. Each of the eight members (Elizabeth Boyd, Caroline Chandler, Joyce Colter, Joan Cornog, Doris Christie, Margaret Greaves, Jane Harris, Sheila Kaczmarek, and Dorothy Van Duesen) would start a painting and then pass it on to a colleague to work on for a week. Some paintings would be finished after a month; others would be passed around and worked on for a year. Several exhibitions resulted from this five-year, collaborative experiment.”

And, the statement adds, ​“Chandler, Harris and Kaczmarek continued to collaborate, and together helped found City Gallery in 2003.”

The clarity of Harris’s own work is on ample display. As her statement suggests, her artwork is informed by her work as a graphic designer. It’s there in the way that she incorporates actual pages of text into her pieces; both Shadows and Balanced include what look like pages from old books that invite a curious viewer to come in close and read them. But it’s also there in Harris’s overall aesthetic. She gets a lot out of a few bold, simple lines and shapes, and isn’t afraid to lean into negative space. The same kinds of ideas prevail whether Harris is working with paint or photographs.

Among Harris’s works, on the back wall, is an area dedicated to collaborator Kaczmarek’s solo work. Deep Six and Distressed Coral work as a pair in subject, tone, and execution, drawing shapes and textures from the natural world and working them into her own style. Though Harris’s and Kaczmarek’s styles diverge in key ways — Harris tends to create negative space while Kaczmarek tends to fill it, to pick one example — one can also see how the two artists would be open to collaboration, with their shared interest in exploring texture and using objects found in the world to bring into their art.

It’s unclear whether Kaczmarek was specifically one of the artists involved in the collaboration that produced Arabesque, but it is tempting to think so. In a sign of just how many interpretive leaps a viewer can make at an art exhibit, if one wants to, one can see the predilection for darker, warbled surfaces in Deep Six at work in Arabesque as well.

What isn’t up for speculation is that Harris and Kaczmarek did indeed collaborate, with Caroline Chandler, on Untitled. By placing Harris’s and Kaczmarek’s solo work nearby, the exhibit gives the viewer a chance to try to tease apart which artist contributed which elements to the finished piece. Were there arguments? Or did it come together organically? How did they know when it was done? Whatever the case, the finished piece feels complete. The three artists speak as one.

“A Shared Retrospective” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Mar. 1. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and information.