In a world where we are visually assaulted by pop, bang and zap, West Orange-based artist and curator Nancy Gail Ring brings us an exquisite three woman show, “Pale Language.” It’s up now at the New Jersey Arts Incubator (NJAI) through October, and I wish I could go there for a bit of time each day and spend quiet time, meditating on the works. 

“Pale Language is both beautiful and beautifully named. For one, like poetry, the works hold many levels of meaning. For another, there is the language that  Ring shares with her fellow artists, Port Washington, New York painter Martha Ferguson and New York City based site specific artist Alice Momm.

More about the works in a moment. Let us first spend some time with how the women came together, the NJAI and the show's opening this past Saturday evening Sept. 10.

Making art is largely a solitary process, punctuated perhaps with input from family or friends. Artists need their fellows — be it for technical issues or deeper discussion. Ring and Martha Ferguson found one another on returning as mid career artists to study for their Master of Fine Arts degrees at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Ring and Momm’s meeting was more by happy happenstance; both were living on the Upper West Side of New York and met when their now young teenagers were at the same playground.

“We wanted to show together,” Ring said. “At some point in time, our works began to come together. We’re all thinking about poetic, not literal responses to the world.”

Fast forward to now, when Ring connected with Carol Berman, the executive director of West Orange’s New Jersey Arts Incubator. The result is not only this extraordinary show but also “Sundays With Nancy,” Sunday afternoon professional development workshops with Ring at the gallery, with topics ranging from how to win coveted artist residencies to presenting your art. NJAI will also bring in a one woman show of Ring’s works in November.

The opening was a pretty hip affair, with many artists and friends in the arts, including a handful of engaged teenagers. Berman greeted the assembled:”We give New Jersey Artist the creative freedom to do what they will in our vanilla box,” Berman said. That vanilla box is a spacious commercial space facing the rear upper courtyard of the Essex Green Shopping Center. Other events include the monthly Café Zed open mic and singer songwriter performance series and The Theater Project's presentation of “Fully Committed”  which opens Oct. 13 and runs along with the exhibit through Oct. 30.

During the opening, Ring made a brief, telling statement:”’Pale Language’ is an exhibit of works in response to the culture around us that is dominated by spectacle. We wanted to present something that talks about the power of subtlety and the value of introspection,” Ring said.

As to the art, the artists worked together on the design, encouraging Momm, who usually works with site specific outdoor installations to create one indoors. The result is a fabric tree and a floor to ceiling rope ladder made of twigs and strings — a rope ladder only a doll could climb and out of reach of the tree’s branches. The installation is an intriguing counterpoint to Momm’s cut, found leaves (shown above) transformed both into beguiling abstract shapes — some playful; others  metaphors of an autumnal fragility.

Ring’s three large scale, mixed media works on paper are mythic in power and evocation — a fallen tree (“It Didn’t Take”) paired with a segment of that fallen tree and exposed root ball reappearing in “He/She Didn’t Take” as the legs of a fallen human figure, a Daphne for our age. There is emergence and regeneration as well as loss, as with the third image, a mass of cut flowers. All are executed in the muted palette of “Pale Language” language and punctuated with cloth, ribbon, a spool.

“I think of each of these works as a portrait,” Ring said. “All are about both trauma, death, endings as well as beauty and rebirth.”

Ferguson is thinking about transitions in her seven large works done on acrylic or oil and graphite on vellum. Using architectural forms — outlines of buildings, an open window, 19^th century arched bridges — the artist is both representational and abstract. In her series “Water Under the Bridge” part of a four part series, she invites you into a three dimensional space but a grid of yellow vertical lines pull you back to the plane. In these, the river mirrors the bridge. Questions of mirroring reality become more complex:Ferguson has painted the scene on the reverse side of the transparent vellum.

“I love vellum, its versatility," Ferguson said. “I am thinking about order and chaos in these works, about structure being both confining and liberating.”

The NJAI is at the Essex Green Shopping Center, 495 Prospect Avenue, West Orange. Park near Panera’s and follow the courtyard to north of the AMC murals. see www.njai.org for more information. The artist development workshops "Sundays with Nancy," will take place on Sunday Sept. 18 and Sunday Oct. 9 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Contact nancy.ring@verizon.net for more information and to register.