"Sauntering Days," the name of the current exhibition at Harper's East Hampton, captures this in between not quite anything time in the early spring calendar on the East End.
As the days are grayish and the hints of color more tantalizing than fully satisfying, this group show of paintings and sculptures by John Joseph Mitchell, Ellen Siebers, and Elisa Soliven gives us moody, diminutive, contemplative, and complex works to chew on while we wait for warmer and clearer days.
Spread throughout the main space, its annex, and the upstairs, the paintings by Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Siebers measure out at not much more than a foot square, in the case of the latter, while Mr. Mitchell's rectangular panel dimensions seem to top out around 19 inches. They are installed on walls with what feels like yards of eyewash between them, making them appear like seedlings popping up in an otherwise blank ground.
The ceramic pieces of Ms. Soliven -- vessels, busts, and wall pieces -- are also to scale, with maximum heights at around 20 inches.
The exhibition is sensitively installed, going for a quiet effect with occasional bursts of showiness. The works in each room build upon each other to a collective hum and occasional individual rumble.
The main room has examples of all three artists, hanging discretely to better understand each one's preoccupations and styles. Some of Ms. Sieber's brightest and showiest works here are on the south wall, interrupted around the midline by Ms. Soliven's wall hanging "Squares and Cross."
Her works, like those of the painters, straddle an axis of abstract and recognizable imagery. The busts and vessels allude to a classical Western tradition, but she keeps the surfaces patterned and unknowable. She has said that she likes to rework her pieces, even after they have dried, allowing her to layer clay and remnants from other pieces into a work over time. Its passage becomes evident through these processes, referring to a history before the object and the duration of an individual piece's making.
Ms. Soliven, who received her M.F.A. from Hunter College in Manhattan and works in Brooklyn, has an urban sensibility about her work. The ceramic can often seem hard, like concrete, despite its sometimes opulent decoration.
Mr. Mitchell works in Tuckahoe, N.J., a hamlet of a rural South Jersey town on the bay and backwater inlets across from the barrier island of Ocean City, far from the centers of the art world. He grew up in a neighboring town settled by Europeans in 1693 and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia for his M.F.A.
His gentle abstractions of sea scenes and interiors seem familiar, as they capture a region similarly rich in colonial history that also has served as a resort area from the 19th century onward. Dunes and wetlands, antique chairs and tables, a field of chickens, and historic architecture make appearances along with a seat on a boardwalk Ferris wheel.
The colors he uses to create his landscapes and other scenes are flat and generalized (he paints on panel, working with the support, not against it). Hues can be both expected or highly expressionistic, as in "Watering Flowers," which takes a warm yellow evening glow in the sky to imbue everything depicted in brown, beige, and ochre. The long puffy sleeves and long skirt of the person doing the watering evokes history, a dream, or even a ghost.
It is notable that none of his figures' faces here have features. When night comes, as it does in "Sunflowers at Night" in the mezzanine, the room is dark and moody, and light comes from a white platter on a blue covered table and the blooms of the sunflowers that spark in the background. As still as some of Mr. Mitchell's paintings are, they can also suggest motion, as in "Boathouse," in which sky, sea, grass, and tree seem to be caught in a gale.
Hanging across the way in every room, Ms. Siebers's work shows small naturalistic scenes inserted into many of the Impressionistic or shard-like abstract backgrounds in colors that can be joyful and exuberant, even when placed within a somber composition. They are the light coming through on gray days and within this setting. Her compositions and treatment of light harken back to early modernism and postmodernism. The effect can look like she has placed a cellphone displaying an image on top of her backgrounds and then painted that image. The subject matter of these insets might be a chair in an otherwise Cubist background. In the painting "In the Warm Evening," two subjects in apparently Renaissance garb are standing in a room.
Other works bring what might otherwise have been an inset to the forefront, as in "Golden Hour," Ms. Siebers's Cezanne-esque depiction of apples (or maybe peaches and plums) on a table, or "Tangerine Narcissus," which receives pride of place on the floating wall that introduces the work on the mezzanine. She paints on panel as well, but the works have a luminous finish. Her use of jewel tones can be captivating, but her subjects might be hiding a darker secret.
Born in the Midwest, her artistic path has come through the University of Iowa, where she received her master's degree. As many artists do these days, she lives in Hudson, N.Y., between Kingston and Albany, an area where some of our own area's creative people have found themselves, maybe also seeking a brighter path.
The exhibition will be in the gallery through May 8.
