Our "back to nature" summer show features two artists inspired by the beauty and structure of the organic world, but at the same time visually grounded in their urban, twenty-first century environment.

Tina Feingold spent last fall at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and the group of paintings and drawings in this exhibition reflect the influence of her experience in this wooded setting. Feingold, who received her MFA from Boston University’s Painting and Drawing program, is known for heavily layered paintings that grapple with the opposing forces of gravity and buoyancy, surface and depth, and representation and abstraction. Her work retains a connection with the physical world even at its most abstract, especially in paintings that explore elements like air and liquid, and objects like orbs and vertebrae. In Feingold's new work, a strong graphic quality emerges as powerful vertical stripes echo the interplay between tall pine trees and the light and shadow that play off them, creating the particular geometry and poetry of the woods.

Ilene Sunshine collects discarded Christmas trees on the streets of New York City, and she gives these abandoned, dilapidated objects a new lease on life in three-dimensional works that bring the trees once again into a cultural context. Long involved in creating sculpture that is expressive yet minimal, Sunshine’s radar for the structure underlying common things is uncanny; she writes that for her, "the tree can become a fish skeleton or a star; the leaf is a lung...." Sunshine is drawn to other detritus of urban life as well, scavenging common natural and synthetic objects including gingko leaves and bubble wrap, pine cones and plastic berry baskets -- and she combines these materials in a new body of wall sculptures that point up the rhythms and forms that animate the physical world.

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY is located at 129 Braintree Street in Allston, second floor, near Able Rug and the Sports Depot. Please note our special summer hours -- June: Wednesday through Saturday, from noon - 5 p.m., and July: Wednesday through Friday, noon - 5 p.m. For more information, please call Randi Hopkins or Beth Kantrowitz at 617-254-7027. Visit our website at www.allstonskirt.com.