City Gallery Offers A Three-Course Meal

A dirty bowl next to a post covered in peeling paint. Natural forms, of leaves or coral, ready to float into space. Heaving waves under heavy winds. These three distinct artistic viewpoints are part of the same exhibit at City Gallery on upper State Street until Jan. 26.

The exhibit, entitled ​“Winter Light,” combines photography by William Frucht, printmaking by Barbara Harder, and paintings by Joyce Greenfield.

Frucht’s photographs are from Ellis Island, Saltsburg, Penn., and perhaps most intriguing, the rhinoceros house inside the Catskill Game Farm in Catskill, N.Y. The farm, which opened in 1933, was once ​“the largest privately owned zoo in North America,” Frucht explained. But in the years of operation before it closed in 2006, ​“when the tourist industry dried up,” the owners ​“got kind of desperate. The original owner had died. There was another generation who were much less committed to animal welfare and conservation, and they started selling animals for canned hunts. A canned hunt is basically when, for a client, they release an animal into an outdoor enclosure and the person gets to shoot it. There is no sport about this — it’s pure slaughter — but people are willing to pay for this to get a rhinoceros hide, or a giraffe. But once word got out that they were doing this, no other zoo or animal supplier or wildlife conservation group would give them animals.”

After 2006, the property lay dormant until new owners acquired it and, beginning in 2015, started raising money for renovations. The game farm now boasts a boutique hotel called the Long Neck Inn (in what used to be the giraffe house), sites for glamping. It also has plenty of hiking in the nearby mountains. But renovations to the site aren’t complete, and so the owners also contract with a company called Abandoned America to allow tours for photographers of the as-yet-unrenovated parts of the zoo. Frucht is glad to see the property, though ​“of course, the only parts I find interesting are the unrenovated parts,” Frucht deadpanned.

On the opposite wall from Frucht’s photographs — and in sharp contrast to them — Barbara Harder’s creations seem to float away from the walls. Their collective title of Migration is apt; these monotypes and intaglios on Asian paper move with the smallest shift in the air. For Harder, a master printmaker who teaches at Creative Arts Workshop, the paper itself is part of the art. She was the first recipient of the Bitsie Clark Award in 2018 and used her grant to visit Japan and study washi, a traditional paper made by hand. In Harder’s work, the materials and the techniques come together to create wall hangings that seem lighter than air.

Then, in a third section of the gallery, Joyce Greenfield’s paintings bring the colors of the natural world to vivid life. ​“Light is the focus of my work,” she writes in an artist statement. ​“My interest in light has to do with its many personalities: its composition, its interplay with objects, weather, time of day, the seasons, and its drama and playfulness. I also enjoy manipulating it to evoke feeling.” Much of her past work is representational, of house exteriors and interiors and natural landscapes. In her series of paintings at City Gallery, Greenfield abstracts those landscapes to great effect. The titles of many of them — Icy Cliff, Storm on the Horizon, Winter Moon — reassure the viewer of the images’ roots in the real world, but the color is what really pulls the eye in, conveying the raw energy of a tumultuous sea, a beaten shoreline, a fiery sunset.

“This exhibit was difficult to set up because it felt like, with a very few exceptions, the pieces didn’t really relate to each other. Barbara’s stuff is really organic, and there’s all these light greens and blues — very ethereal. It’s beautiful,” Frucht said. Meanwhile, ​“mine are tack-sharp and depressing,” he said with a laugh. And ​“Joyce is something else again. She’s really exuberant. She’s got all kinds of violent weather events happening. So it was a little hard to put together.”

Then the three artists realized that their work didn’t have to explicitly connect to be shown together; they could tell three different stories. ​“Once we got the idea that everyone has their own space,” Frucht said, ​“it’s like a three-course meal. They somewhat relate to each other but really they’re three different flavors.”

“Winter Light” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Jan. 26. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.