City Gallery Gets Kaleidoscopic

Remember the fun you had as a kid, maybe early in the morning before your parents got up, and you grabbed that colorful cardboard tube, ran to the window, pointed it up toward the sky, and turned and turned the end piece, making sparkly pieces of glass, plastic, or crystal rearrange themselves, reflecting light and making new patterns?

Give it a shake or another turn, and the pieces would flow again?

A grown-up version of that pleasure in pattern, shape, and light is on view in ​“Kaleidoscope,” the new group show that opens at City Gallery on upper State Street. An opening reception is on Saturday. The show runs through Jan. 29.

It features the acrylic-on-canvas paintings of Judy Atlas, Meg Bloom​‘s mixed-media sculptural hangings and constructions, the large-format photographs of Phyllis Crowley, and the acrylic-on-mylar canvases and other tactile mixed-media creations of Nancy Eisenfeld.

Long-time photographer and teacher of same at Creative Arts Workshop, Crowley is showing a wall of photographs that dominates the small white rectangular space.

Crowley spoke with the Independent as finishing touches were being put on the show’s installation. Although she’s often worked in multiple images, she said this is the first time that she’s arranged the photographs, some tangent to each others and others overlapping, in an effort to create a kind of narrative.

What that narrative is, of course, she wasn’t about to tell. ​“I feel there’s a relationship. You have to find it,” she said.

She did reveal a hint, however, in saying that as she culled images from her library of thousands for the show, she was interested in light. Most photographers are; the art has been called by more than one wise person the art of light. But Crowley, whose work has often dealt with reflections of light off water or through mists and fogs, was taking it a step further. She was looking, she said, not only for light that creates a feeling, but for sources of lights.

That’s why the wall of images she has come up with contains images of a gas burner, a slant of light across a floor, and light mingling with the smoke rising from a street griller’s work on a street in New York, among other images.

There’s also a glinting knife superimposed over a cutting board, and the photons are flying.

In short, there’s a kaleidoscopic effect achieved — the feeling that the images can be moved around like squares of letters on a Scrabble board. What they ​“spell,” their narrative or story, is up to what the viewer brings.

Crowley said she looked at the wall and saw warmth and fun. What could be more so than a lit burner? she asked, whereas this timid reporter, ever fearful of burning his house down, sees serious threat in that particular source of light.

Crowley’s images are also all deliberately unframed, as are all the images in the show — including Bloom’s sculptures, and Atlas’s and Eisenfeld’s light-filled compositions that you transit through on the way to Crowley’s wall.

That absence of framing is to grease the wheels of the images associating with each other, Crowley said.

The effect is genuinely kaleidoscopic. Probably the best way to view the work of these four artists is to see the room as a single installation.

As with your childhood scope, you can start on either side and at either end and appreciate the ever-changing associations of patterns, shapes, colors, and lights.

There will an artists’ talk on Jan. 29, from 2:00 — 4:00 p.m., where the light crew talk about their work, and the show is viewable during City Gallery’s regular hours.

Oh, and don’t forget, as you enter, there’s a kid’s kaleidoscope to the left by the door. No one will mind if you have a look at it first.