Four Artists Mean What They Mean

The ribbon that winds its way through Esthea Kim’s four paintings — each titled as a series, Textures and Elements — presents itself as a mystery. The light cloudscapes Kim has painted on each of the canvases are ambiguous enough, as they suggest both peace and a sense that they conceal something. The ribbon connects them all, invites the viewer to understand the four paintings as a whole. But to what end? Is there a meaning to be sussed out? Or is the connection itself the meaning?

For Kim, the textures in her paintings ​“are, objectively, the particles, the fibers, the strands and the organic forms: also a twinkle of the movement, the air, and the wind,” and ​“the elements then take my gaze away toward the infinite reveries and the unseen,” she is quoted as saying in an accompanying statement. Kim’s cluster of four canvases is something of the centerpiece of ​“Textures and Elements,” a four-artist show running now through July 30 at City Gallery, 994 State St. The ribbon in the piece gets at the general principles that each of the artists has espoused for this show, in finding art in the incidental. Each of them points toward the sense of an order without spelling it out. In keeping it abstract, they make the case that art doesn’t have to have explicit meaning to be meaningful.

Joy Bush’s photographs ​“are the accidental and spontaneous abstractions which perplex and fascinate her,” an accompanying note states. Bush is quoted as saying that ​“inevitably, something that might easily have gone unnoticed shows itself, becomes important, and rearranges the familiar. These small wonders become an ideogrammatic language unto themselves.” It’s easy to see what she means in the way she brings out the structure and form of the cracks in the pavement she has photographed. It’s all too tempting to imagine the shape as a pictogram for a person, or a tree — even more so once the eye catches the footprint along the side of the image, as if Bush wasn’t the first person to stand there, look down, and wonder what the street might say if we could only read the language.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Davies draws inspiration from ​“the physical world of rich textures and patterns … the rhythm of tree bark, the flower shapes of lichen, or the lacy edges of a wave seeping into sand.” ​“In recent years,” Davies is quoted as saying, ​“my awareness of these beauties has been sharpened by the environmental peril that surrounds us. I feel a more urgent need to highlight them.” Davies’s rich work in this show has a way of suggesting both decay and growth. In the context of her comment, the source of the decay is perhaps obvious enough. But her pieces capture the patterns of growth, the way that nature adapts, in a most compelling way. Her pieces suggest that adaptation is happening according to processes we still aren’t all that close to understanding — to our detriment.

Bush and Davies share a kinship with each other and with Tom Peterson; Peterson’s ​“photographs for this exhibit were taken while walking in industrial neighborhoods that had been in a state of urban decay,” the accompanying note states. ​“I’ve imaged myself discovering small pieces of abstract art, while focusing on vibrant color with an emphasis on texture,” he says. Peterson’s compositions are rigorous enough that it can be surprising that they’re entirely accidental. Where Bush shows her hand in letting us understand what we see and how she’s framed it, Peterson hides that process more. But the sense is still the same, of a meaning just out of reach. That it’s there at all is what matters.

“Textures and Elements” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through July 30. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.