The show features four artists. Photographer Angela Gwinner offers black and white Italian cityscapes, and Alexandra de Steigeur contributes compelling photographs of Star Island, where winter itself becomes a visceral inhabitant of the otherwise vacant sea/landscape. The main hall, however, is dominated with works by sculptor Kris Lanzer and paintings by Kim Massaro.

Gallery co-owner Susan Schwake Larochelle approached Lanzer about creating an installation last winter. Lanzer, who earned her MFA from SUNY Albany in 1996 and recently exhibited “Rooted/Uprooted: A Walk in the Woods” at Artstream, said she felt she needed a concept before she could start work on the project.

Then one post-holiday January day, as Lanzer herself was falling into a pattern of hibernation, a friend exclaimed, “All I want to do right now is bury myself!”

“Those were the perfect words,” Lanzer reflected in an interview. “This time of year is so hard on people. It’s not just the cold, but it’s an inner hardship. More people get stuck inside. Not just inside your house, but in your head as well.”

When Massaro was invited to participate in the show, she picked up on the sentiment. In her artists’ statement, she reflects on its dual opportunity.

“In the dead of winter is a period of time, a feeling and a state of mind,” Massaro writes. “Inevitably the activities of the year slow down into a beautiful, cold and dark hiatus. The birds dancing above a spark of life in an otherwise bleak landscape. This is an important time for hibernation and solitude which brings forth regrowth, discovery and often death.”

And so there are images of tombstones and black crows, darkly foreboding woods and coffin-like chambers, but there’s also the flame of winter sunsets, the glitter of stars, the quiet trace of life in bird tracks and in unwanted Christmas paraphernalia.

Lanzer’s Christmas-themed “Installation for ‘In the Dead of Winter’” fills the center of the room with evergreen boughs, draped from the ceiling and rising from the floor. They look a bit frosty; upon closer examination they’re spray-painted with pallid gray highlights, nested with pallid gray ornaments—globes, Santas, teddy bears, aluminum tree stands. The installation was constructed on-site from a collection of unwanted Christmas ornaments and artificial trees, collected mainly from yard sales throughout 2005. In the center of the floor, the items shape themselves around a soft, white, coffin-like impression, lit by a garland of sparkly white lights.

There’s a video at the gallery that documents the creation of the installation, but once the show ends on March 1, the piece itself will disappear forever. In her sculpture, Lanzer provokes visitors to question, to experience an inner dialogue, to want to reach out and touch the exhibit. By creating a physical reaction that engages more than the visual sense, she works with the viewer to establish a tactile memory from something that will soon disappear.

Nearby, another Lanzer installation shares the same ephemeral quality and play between light and dark. In a row of five-foot tall black-and-white photographs printed on white poly cloth (made from recycled plastic containers) and draped from metal rods, birds have left tracks in the glittering white snow of a cemetery. In one instance, the fan-like imprint of tail feathers upon landing is the only clue to their identity, to the direction of coming and going. The fluttering, mysterious nature of the bird’s appearance is echoed in their ghostly impression on the billowy panels.

Birds also appear in Massaro’s paintings. As she notes in her artist’s statement, “Bird communities enrich the landscape and the dialogue between man, earth and sky. In art, literature, religion, and myth, birds have acted as a harbinger of change.”

And so they do here. Many of her paintings are set at the moment when day turns to night. In some of the landscapes, the tops of the trees are touched with the last splashes of yellow sunlight while the woods are a tangle of dark blue, purple and green. In others, the balance has toppled into night. In nearly all them, crows and other birds guide the viewer, as if from this world into another, their images black against the white snow, or against the dark blue night sky, or swooping amid a tangle of branches in a palette more tonal than colorful, paint applied thickly with a knife. One of the most arresting paintings is “Massacre of Innocence,” in which crows pause in the midst of tearing apart a goldfinch, mortally askew in their midst.

Massaro, 32, earned her MFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire in 2002. Previously, she had focused exclusively on pure landscapes, “often of the woods and more wild sort of nature,” she said in an interview. “I think they were corresponding with a time in my life when I felt I kind of needed to bury myself and isolate myself. What happened was those paintings started to become a little idiosyncratic.”

The birds originated in a drawing she created about the invasion of Iraq, with the raven as a messenger of death. They began appearing regularly in her paintings about a year ago, but it was only when she moved to Lowell, Mass., in October, and began the series for this show, that they made themselves a permanent thread in her work.

“Moving from rural New Hampshire into a more diverse urban environment really burst the bubble on the former landscapes, and I’ve really just been free to let that go. These paintings that are in the show are kind of a part of that, a transitional state, a move into a different type of subject matter even. … There are all of these factors, world events, my feelings about my immediate world, the world at large, has led me to want to make paintings that have more of an overall kind of human experience,” she said.

The show also includes watercolor studies and drawings by Massaro, which reflect her thought process in pursuing this new line of work. For Massaro, things will likely shift again in May, when she moves with her husband to Utah.

Far from bleak, “In the Dead of Winter” offers the kind of hope that comes from transformation, both a reflection of our earthbound lives and an invitation to be more in tune with its rhythms.