Slices of life The thing’s the thing at Hera Gallery BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

To artists and art lovers alike, still lifes are a wealth of visual opportunities — not to mention their utility as psychological tests. The ability of the artist to select any immovable object or objects, literally a world of possibilities, includes the possibility of choosing nothing — perhaps the first white-on-white paintings of minimalism started out as still lifes. To frame significance rather than triviality is a core responsibility of a representational artist, and a still life is the essential effort.

A grab bag of disparate opportunities is being offered in "Cornucopia: 21st-Century Still Life." These 40 works in various media by 30 artists, eight of them from Rhode Island, have been juried by Peter Sutton, director of the Bruce Museum of Art and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is also an expert in 17th-century Dutch painting, a period when objects that conveyed status were being captured by artists with fetishistic precision.

In the 21st century, our tastes and appreciations are more eclectic. Nevertheless, there is still room for age-old subject matter to be appreciated. In the muted lushness of Angel Tucker’s work, pears and walnuts emerge from chiaroscuro shadows in one color photograph, and a thick steak on butcher paper contrasts with lemons and a glazed porcelain bowl in another. The jarring juxtaposition in the latter image can't help but grab our attention, and exploring the rich detail keeps us around for awhile.

Employing such visual richness is cheating only when the content is merely decorative. Linda Batchelor’s Matisse-like paper cut-out collages flirt with that danger. In one titled "Gay Paree," she places angular bottles against patterned backgrounds, but her flamboyant gypsy color contrasts make her pictures quite reviewable. Kimberly Meuse satisfies our eyes by placing golden marigolds in a shiny silver bowl, but she goes on to offer more in her watercolor, giving us a spectrum of hue variations within the reds of two nectarines on a red tablecloth, the colors reflected on the surface of the bowl.

Attracting our eyes with beauty is a straightforward process and as natural and appropriate as a gasp at a dramatic sunset. Many of the works in this show, however, seek to satisfy or at least intrigue our minds more than our eyes. Eric Goldberg does two variations of "In Memorium," one an etching and the other a painting. The objects are nondescript — spectacles, a fountain pen, a wristwatch, a tweed golf cap — atop a dress shirt. Poignant resonance is established by the title, making the coffee mug in the black-and-white image stare up at us forebodingly like a Cyclops, as it once did to its owner. Such is the totemic import that we reflexively assign to certain objects of personal meaning, a quality termed baraka in Arab cultures.

Sometimes commonplace things make their impression on us through ongoing day-to-day reiteration. Judy Cooperman’s "Lip Necessities" is a color photograph of row upon row of used lipsticks, a variation J. Alfred Prufrock’s measuring out his days in coffee spoons. Similar in approach and effect is Alexandra Broches’s untitled photograph of empty eggshell halves, likewise spilling off-frame in every direction to imply infinite extent.

Essence is all to artists who pay such classical respect to things. An untitled drawing by Sandra Cardillo deconstructs the curvilinear form of a bentwood chair amidst gestural graphite slashes. Amy Brnger renders microcosms in the context of macrocosms as she places ordinary still life objects — fruit, glinting glass, and ceramics— on tables before seasonal window views. Overwhelming us by sheer inundation is a tried-and-true attention-getting method, as in John S. Riedel’s "Still Life With Shoe Form." In it countless objects in a flattened field, from purple grapes to a contorted black statuette, collectively imply exuberant celebration.

Curator Sutton casts a wide net with this show, including bizarre fascinations with ambiguous thingness. Jen Raimondi’s "Given" has an amorphous blob, with the suggestion of a spinal cord under its flesh-colored buckskin, climbing onto a graceful velvet-padded footstool. The horror of thalidomide association plays against softness and delicacy. Russ Smith has compiled objects unified by context in "Postpartum Depression No. 1 / Small Potatoes," even as the vegetal tagline of the title undercuts the seriousness. An antiabortion agenda is more explicit in Raimondi’s sculpture, as actual potatoes float in murky "formaldehyde" and a naked baby doll sits atop a wastebasket.

"Cornucopia: 21st-Century Still Life" has much not mentioned above that exemplifies or expands the genre of still life. This show has something for everyone.