Cloudy With A Chance Of Sculpture

A storm stretches a ragged arm of cloudy debris across the wall of City Gallery. Wire tangles in paper mist. Then it all converges in the storm’s eye, a maelstrom of wreckage and energy. It’s a sculpture about destruction, but it’s an act of creation, too, and a meditation on change.

Nancy Eisenfeld’s Whirl is situated at the center of ​“Forecast,” her solo show of sculpture, paintings, and collage up now at City Gallery on upper State Street until May 27. These ingenious pieces, constructed from wire and wood, tile and paper, and finished with paint, show an artist taking on the big theme of climate change in her art while also pushing herself formally, with thought-provoking, absorbing, and — given our latest brush with extreme weather, eerily timely — results.

The show’s most static pieces are intentionally so. Dam and Force Field, hung together as a pair near the gallery’s entrance, have a sense of smallness and confinement, true to their names. But Eisenfeld infuses both pieces with a sense of pent-up energy that — especially in the context of the other pieces in the exhibition — conveys a sense of narrative. We dam water to contain energy, try to use it (and the water) to our own purposes. But dams require maintenance. They can break; if you leave them alone for long enough, they can silt up and become waterfalls. They also have something in common with the seawalls built all over the country, an attempt to keep the ocean from going where we don’t want it to go. A lot of them are working. But for how much longer? What do we do when they break?

Because meanwhile, natural forces are just that — forces, powerful and bursting with energy, which Eisenfeld captures in a few different pieces, like Lightning. The piece, paper pulp on tar paper, draws its beauty partially from letting its chosen media run free, embracing the unplanned. But there’s editing too, decision-making, putting borders on it, a frame around it, and calling it done. It suggests another way to deal with natural phenomena that isn’t currently widely employed by the Army Corps of Engineers. Rather than aiming for containment, we can reach a kind of balance, working with the forces of weather and tides to reach an accommodation.

Though other pieces in the exhibit remind us that ultimately, the most powerful natural forces can’t be controlled. They can only be experienced, witnessed. Falls is on its surface a gorgeously constructed piece of wire and paper, conveying the energy of running, crashing water that makes people continually visit famous waterfalls the world over. It’s also an echo of what happens when you leave a dam alone long enough, when nature at last patiently overcomes the works of humans.

It doesn’t feel like Eisenfeld is asking us to find destruction beautiful; she’s not asking us to find something pretty in the ravages of Hurricane Maria on the island of Puerto Rico, or the 100-foot trees snapped like twigs just north of New Haven. What she is tapping into is the sense of awe and humility that nature at its most furious engenders. She’s asking us to pay attention to that, to not take it for granted, and figure out how to live with it.

“We live surrounded by growth and decay, life and death,” Eisenfeld writes in her artist statement accompanying the exhibit. ​“The overriding question is what is the forecast for the future? The answer is open ended.” Eisenfeld’s exhibit makes a strong case for more artists to join scientists, engineers, and policymakers in helping us frame that question, and moving forward in the search for the answers.

Forecast runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through May 27. Click here for gallery hours and more information.