Nancy Eisenfeld Takes Control

The wall to the left draws your eye as soon as you enter City Gallery on Upper State Street. It’s covered floor to ceiling with artwork. In one sense, the works are abstract, studies of light and shade, colors that sometimes contrast and sometimes fade into each other. They’re explorations of what pigments can do. In another sense, though, they can be read as mimicking natural forms. Some could be patterns in frozen ice. Others could be portraits of moving liquid, or the details of a column of billowing smoke, the fire sparking underneath.

It’s all part of the artistic vision of Nancy Eisenfeld in ​“Circumstances Beyond Control,” running now at City Gallery through April 28. ​“I believe in climate change,” Eisenfeld writes in an artistic statement. ​“There is scientific evidence here, now. We read about it in the paper all the time: firestorms, dissolving polar ice sheets, and more frequent tornados This evidence of destruction manifests itself in an urgent passion for work.”

In Eisenfeld’s case, responding to climate change meant doing art in a different way. For her sculptures in particular, she gathered or salvaged much of her materials — tree bark that had fallen off the tree, rusting wire, parts of things she found along the side of the road. All of this she hauled back to her studio in Erector Square and used to create new things.

The fervor of creation translated to the works themselves, which crackle with vitality. The matching of Eisenfeld’s kinetic style with the subject matter adds depth. Whether or not Eisenfeld was drawn to her particular color palettes because she was ruminating on climate change or because she just liked those particular colors, it makes for a potent combination, where the titles of the pieces allow a way in.

Storm Coming, for example, stands on its own as an abstract painting, but the name helps us focus on the roiling darkness as much as the sparks of light. It also helps us to distrust the source of that light. So often we’re trained to see light as a hopeful, comfortable gesture, a candle in a dark room, a lantern in a cave. Eisenfeld reminds us that light, in the form of fire, can also destroy.

Likewise, the titles of Wave and Underwater invite you to position yourself in relation to the subject in an uncomfortable way. This isn’t an ocean viewed from a distance, or from the safety of shore, or even from a surfboard. This is the ocean viewed from within. We’re submerged, looking up toward the light. It’s reminiscent of the steady drumbeat of news about the encroaching doom of our coastal cities. But the energy in the paintings isn’t a signal to give up and drown. We’re looking up toward the open air, not into the depths of the ocean. It’s a suggestion, perhaps, to rise to the surface and breathe again, and to leave behind all that you can’t take with you. It’s a chance, in a way, to start over, unencumbered.

Which makes it oddly touching that one of the sculptures in the show is called Whimsical. To outward appearances, and given the show’s concerns, the word whimsical doesn’t quite come to mind. It could be a wreck of something left over after a California wildfire. But here, the title is a reminder of the process Eisenfeld went through to create the piece. It’s confronting reality in the way that it embraces reusing materials, accepting limitations, working with what’s immediately at hand instead of striving always for what you want but is out of reach. But it finds plenty of space for life within those constraints. It’s possible, even, that the constraints make the piece more alive, more fun, than it would be otherwise.

Many artists are taking up climate change these days as a major theme in their work and finding their own ways to respond to it. Eisenfeld’s work just might at the cutting edge of it, for her willingness to get her hands the most dirty, eyes wide open, mind and heart racing.

Nancy Eisenfeld’s ​“Circumstances Beyond Control” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through April 21. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.