City Gallery Sees All About It

Shadowy ciphers stand in a crowd, their relationships to each other unclear. Some of them are on their phones. Some are walking. Some are standing. Are they talking to one another or just passing by? Do they even notice one another?

Michael Zacks’s Attendees is one of several pieces in ​“City Paper,” running at City Gallery on Upper State Street now through July 29. In the aptly named exhibit, Zacks and fellow artists Mary Lesser and William Frucht show three different angles to looking at the manmade environment we choose to live in.

In his work, Zacks focuses in on a familiar theme in talk about cities — the way people can be anonymous in them. There isn’t a single recognizable face on any of Zacks’s figures, no way you’d be able to identify them in a crowd. But Zacks isn’t just re-creating Edward Hopper’s famous isolation. There’s playfulness in his work, too, expectation. There’s the chance that one of his figures will accidentally collide with another of them, maybe because they’re at first too busy looking at their phones. When they bump into each other, they’ll stop what they’re doing and look up, and their faces will suddenly appear in all their detail. To some extent, if we’re anonymous in cities, it’s because we choose to be; it’s a situation can change with a single hello.

If Zacks’s works tip between isolation and opportunity, Lesser has a knack for creating scenes that suggest both fun and mayhem. It begins with the painting of the fire hydrant near the front of the gallery, the two hoses attached twisting in the air, spurting water. Are they cooling a bunch of delighted kids on a hot day, or is there a fire raging out of control? The blimps hovering over the roller coaster in Ups and Downs could be for tourism or surveillance. And perhaps most effectively, the parachutes floating in the pink sky about a boat in Coming Down could belong to parasailors, skydivers, or paratroopers. Is a pleasant summer afternoon or the beginning of an invasion? Lesser’s work gets at the way that cities can crackle with that dual sense of threat and thrill.

In both cases, Zacks’s and Lesser’s abstractions are the artists applying a certain aesthetic lens to their surroundings, coming up with images transformed by their imaginations. In that context, Frucht’s photographs of urban landscapes — houses and factories, sidewalks and street corners, the insides of buildings that look derelict — seem at first to show the city as it is. But look a little closer. The colors in Frucht’s images are maybe a little deeper, a little richer than usual, saturated to catch the eye, to make us linger. And then, perhaps, to pull meaning from what we see. It’s a reminder that the cityscapes around us, in one sense, are what we see in them, and become what we make them to be.

“City Paper” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through July 29. Click here for hours and more information.