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Soaking rains or glorious sun, weather is hard to parse. Meteorologists can break down systems and make predictions, but they can’t begin to unpack the intimate, emotional relationship between the climate and the human critters that live in it.

Maybe nobody can. But artist Georgie Friedman attempts to, by turning a minimalist lens on wind and water. Her crisp show at the Foster Gallery at Noble and Greenough School, featuring photos, videos, and a video installation, has none of the hype of the Weather Channel, none of the majesty of an atmospheric Hudson River School painting. Still, Friedman’s spare, cool approach to weather savors the beauty of a gust of wind with a haiku-like clarity.

She attached cameras to high-altitude balloons and mounted images they shot in grids. When I saw works from this series before, I had a stubborn inclination to try to read narrative into them. It’s there in the twists and bobbles of the view — a record of flight.

But they’re so much more — a big picture. The grids abstract all those skies and horizons into pulses of blue, white, and gray. There’s a sense of fracture, but also of movement: sweeps and ticks that only incidentally rely on the camera’s flight, and more sharply depend on the artist’s compositional choices.

In “Flight VI, Descent II (Spin),” a luminous horizon streaks and tilts. Friedman distills a wild ride and an engulfing landscape into a simple line, swinging through a grid.

Her installation “Hovering Hurricane: Sandy 2012” features a video of rushing water projected over four cloud-shaped panels suspended from the ceiling. The sound of wind is constant, daunting. The sight of water overhead disorients. The panels cast black shadows on the ceiling, which the water appears to flow past. The shadows drift like seaweed. They look splayed, somehow human, wrecked.

But there I am, reflexively looking for story again, putting a human into the picture. Weather does that to people — we all have our stories about it. Friedman breaks down and decontextualizes weather’s familiar tropes. The results are often mesmerizing. They open up the scene, if only for a moment, before we trot in with our old tales of rainy days past.

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More information:

GEORGIE FRIEDMAN: Into the Wind

At: Foster Gallery, Noble and Greenough School,

10 Campus Drive, Dedham, through Sept. 30.

781-320-7227, www.fostergallery.org

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http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/09/09/friedman-mesmerizes-with-wind-and-water-foster/ib5UYiWvYm6DuQgIjbCtOI/story.html

GALLERIES

Friedman mesmerizes at Foster

By Cate McQuaid | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 09, 2014

Georgie Friedman’s installation “Hovering Hurricane: Sandy 2012.”

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