A necklace by Ani Hoover, a artist who is no stranger to working with circles.

Numerous artists at Studio Hart’s invitational show

Circles, big and small, literal and fanciful, Euclidean perfect and artwork approximations, are thematic in the current exhibit at Studio Hart. Works of a dozen or so artists are on display.

Artist Josef Bajus continues to push the envelope on paper cut-outs of ever more complex form and ingenious construction. His central piece in the present show consists of a row of paper cut-out and constructed lens forms featuring fractured photographic imagery of a junk yard heap of old car and truck tires. Similar imagery then turns up in other pieces featuring variants on lens form paper cut-outs, or in some cases torn paper in basically circular constructs. One is a kind of pit of the inferno vision of multiple paper layers in a spectral progression from bright infrared to somber violet, each paper torn open in the center, in a circle, exposing the next lower level, smaller circle, deeper color.

Bajus’s lenses are cut paper forms. Gerald Mead has series of small wall sculpture works employing actual lenses, glass lenses, or other translucent material, as in a camera, as in the eye. Meditations on the art of photography, the art of seeing, for the recording of visual imagery, on film and in human memory.

Sometimes the circles are hard to see. As in Felice Koenig’s drawing of myriad tiny circles in a dense mass, like a microscopic view of cells in living tissue. A graphite-on-paper variant of her signature acrylic paint panels of dots on dots on dots in closely packed array, a small example of which is also on display. Or Kate Parzych’s cyanotype photo—visually somewhat similar to the Koenig graphite drawing, then to her dots-on-dots painting—of tiny-bubble foam against a watery dark background. Stare at any of these pieces long enough and you’ll start seeing patterns that may or may not be there.

From photographer Brendan Bannon there is a beautiful in- and out-of-focus luxuriant superabundance of nature view of spiky weeds and wildflowers against a distant background landscape/waterscape. Also, a complex of overlapping ripple circles on water, like where a moment before a fish surfaced, then disappeared. The cognitive/visual experience of not what you see, but just missed seeing.

Meticulous realist painter A. J. Fries has a painting in shades of gray of a cluster of soap bubbles on a still water surface—like in the kitchen sink—reflecting ceiling fluorescent tube lights.

Monica Angle has a large Japanese-reminiscent watercolor monoprint double fan-like construction in mixed pastel shades and casually indeterminate patterns vaguely suggestive of landscape/seascape/skyscape.

Ani Hoover has a plastic circles and ties elaborate necklace, bodice ornament. Also, two bright red and pink oil paint on paper variations on the same just circles idea. And a yarn on canvas embroidery comically mocking the idea, called Dead Circles.

Maggie Parks has a small framed construction of paper and fabric and paint and thread, the circles in this case as if suspended, like upside-down little balloons. And Justin Sztukowski has an ink-on-glass rumination on polka dots in black and white, in shallow depth.

Finally, Barbara Hart has a Joseph Cornell-reminiscent wire cage containing a number of raku-technique ceramic balls, bluish to brownish in hue, hand-molded, seemingly, and hollow, like geodes, and pieced, as if for giant beads for an oversize necklace. Very beautiful, rather enigmatic, objets.

The circles theme show continues through July 28.