'Rear View: Life Examined' at Pine Hills library

What if you curate rather strong artwork by a handful of accomplished artists and ... install it in the neighborhood library? Well, first it will remind you to visit the library, in this case the Pine Hills Branch of the Albany Public Library. So "check it out." You'll need to hunt a bit on both floors to find it all and absorb the rich theme of "Rear View," about artwork relating to memory. It's a substantial effort that was curated in partnership with the Opalka Gallery, with nine artists and some 55 works in all.

One piece is certainly not hard to find, if you look upward in the wide, bright stairwell. This site-specific installation by Kenneth Ragsdale is a visual and spiritual anchor for the show, because Ragsdale's work is rigorously dependent on memory. These large white paper objects — a chair, a piece of an excavator, some ambiguous column shapes — are suspended like giant popcorn kernels on horizontal strings. They are fragments of mental imagery lifted from the artist's rural childhood, filtered over time to make them fanciful, incomplete, and exquisite.

The subtle poetry of Leona Christie's work is based on the memories made by her brother Gavin Christie, who types routine facts into a vintage word processing machine. Their collaboration resulted in totally white works, words embossed on plain paper in repeated rows. For "All of the Dick Clark Specials That I Have Watched," identical lines of text become a pattern that implies the repetition of Gavin's experience.

Some works, like the pairs of photographs by Daesha Devon-Harris, are clearly about the passage of time and the implication of remembering the visible changes in all of us. Large color portraits give us flattering, compassionate views of the subjects, and smaller black and white transparencies are glimpses into a disappearing past. These...