Theory Becomes Practice Becomes Abstract Art

When you enter City Gallery, located at 994 State St., the first thing you notice is the vibrant painting in the window. Joyce Greenfield’s Boeing resembles an abstract plane, done in bright greens and blues. The colors evoke the natural tones of the earth, but the plane itself is manmade and mechanical, creating a dichotomy of natural versus human creation. There is a sense that the plane is a miniature planet, orbiting the earth.

Boeing is the first piece in the exhibition ​“PRAXIS,” which features clay sculpture, collage, and paintings by four artists — Greenfield, Roberta Friedman, Sheila Kaczmarek, and Kathy Kane. The gallery defines praxis as ​“the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice.”

The name works on two different levels: in the act of creating art, the artists are putting their skills into practice, but also, the art itself is the physical manifestation of an idea. Look closely enough, and every art piece in the PRAXIS exhibition has a story to tell.

Greenfield’s other work in the gallery continues the theme of combining nature and manmade structures. Facets shows what appears to be a skyline surrounded by trees, but the buildings and trees blend together to create a city that is partly grown and partly built. The titular ​“facets” of the scene are the different angles you can view it from: are the buildings supplanting the trees, or do they balance each other out to create a habitat for both people and animals?

Column #1 is part of a pair of Greenfield’s paintings that layer colorful rectangular shapes on a dark background, reminiscent of a Josef Alvers painting but with fewer straight lines. Although it is called a column, the shape almost resembles a window or a door. One feels one could step inside the canvas, like Alice falling into Wonderland, and the bright colors at its center guarantee something beautiful inside.

Although there are no informational plaques in the gallery, allowing the work to stand on its own, the artists submitted statements that are published on City Gallery’s website. Greenfield’s process is deeply entrenched in observation, and the cataloging of the world around her. ​“I spend time observing elements in live intense sessions of looking at my subjects in person, and in sketches, videos and photographs,” she said.

Kathy Kane draws inspiration from vivid colors and unconventional tools, evident in her vivacious painting Resurrection. Bubbling with yellows, greens, blues, and indigos, the painting evokes the feeling of water, with all its healing powers. One can imagine it as depicting what you see as you rise up from the bottom of a lake, or as you open your eyes when waking from sleep.

Sheila Kaczmarek’s four sculptures, Sea Palm, Defense Response, Feather Boa, and Ribbon Worm fit together to form a kind of sea monster. The blue-green pieces resemble sea anemones, or the trails water worms leave in sand. There’s a sense that the sculpture is alive, but rather that being threatening, it feels like a delightfully weird new friend. It seems like something you would find in the wild, not in an art gallery, an homage to nature made accessible to humans.

“I try to present a doorway through which the viewer is invited to enter and come away with some questions and [a] new way of looking at life,” said Kaczmarek. Her sculptures certainly raise a lot of questions — what is this? Is it an animal, and plant, something entirely else? — but they also provide a new way of looking at the natural world, through the lens of art.

Roberta Friedman’s Vortex collages depict a kind of black netting or grating over bright backgrounds. They suck the viewer in, and create a voyeuristically window-lattice effect, like looking into an apartment building lit from the inside. It’s like a Rear Window experiment, where one never knows what they’re going to see — the pale pink of a blooming romance? The calm blue of a private evening at home? The red slash of a possible murder? Without even painting a figure, Friedman evokes whole lives within her paintings.

“There are always new discoveries and ways to play with light and textures,” said Friedman. ​“The spontaneity of the printing process on a hot surface, the vibrancy of encaustic wax paints, and the richness of oil pigments and cold wax produce a cacophony of color and expression.” ​“Cacophony” is the perfect word to describe her collages, which feel like a sensory overload of color and patterns in the best way possible.

If PRAXIS is about the application of a lesson, then all of these artists have lessons to impart. Greenfield balances nature and manmade structures to show the duality of creation. Kane creates a softer kind of abstract art which brings to mind something coming to life. Kaczmarek encourages the viewer to embrace the weird and wonderful. And Friedman offers a glimpse into another world. Put together, the four artists’ work leaves the viewer with many lessons learned, and many more stories to tell.

“PRAXIS” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through July 28. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.