“Wayne Geist, Donald Zinteck and Michael Morin: Inaugural Exhibit”

Through Oct. 1 in ZGM Fine Arts, 1045 Elmwood Ave.; 510-0251 or www.zgmfinearts.com

Trumping most of the art on the walls, the edifice itself takes star billing in this show. The upper level of this building at 1045 Elmwood Ave., a former synagogue that doubles as a studio for local commercial photographer Don Zinteck, was recently transformed into a quaint, light-filled gallery space apt for deep reflection. That’s no doubt owing to the building’s former role as a house of worship, and to the diffuse light filtering through the circular stained-glass window high on the east wall. It’s a welcome addition to the city’s growing gallery scene.

For its inaugural exhibition, ZGM presents a three-person show featuring work by its namesakes: photographers Zinteck and Wayne Geist and print-maker/ painter Michael Morin. Of Zinteck’s mostly staid photographic work, a standout is “Winter Escape,” a scene of rural snowbound beauty in which a thin line of houses punctuates a vast sky and earth of gleaming white.

Geist’s work, mostly rough-edged digital collages rife with symbolism, has some of the look of Photoshop gone haywire. His most intriguing pieces are a pair of roughly stitched photographic fragmentations (“Eighth Avenue” and “Aviation High School”), in which a dozen or so separate photographs come together at skewed angles to form a complete scene, pointing to the artist’s Cubist intentions and prompting us to reflect on the passage of time implicit in any click of the shutter.

Morin shows a variety of work, from an accomplished tempera painting of a man in profile, “All That You Dream,” to a series of etchings and one digital drawing of a building on Swan Street.

“Natural Pleasures”

Through July 29 in Nina Freudenheim Gallery, 140 North St.; 882-5777 or www.ninafreudenheimgallery.com

Local gallerist Nina Freudenheim is cleaning out the closets at her gallery inside the Lenox Hotel on North Street with a group show, and rarely have the contents of anyone’s closet looked quite so tempting. The show features a smattering of work new and old by a variety of artists, from the vibrant watercolor abstractions of Charles Clough to some mid-’80s images by pre-eminent Buffalo photographer John Pfahl.

Upon entering the gallery, the eye immediately turns to work by accomplished local painter Peter Stephens, whose 2007 exhibition at the gallery signaled a shift toward abstraction in the artist’s work. To that end, two paintings based on the surface of Mars practically pop off the walls with three-dimensionality, especially the writhing Martian landscape of “Quantum Jitters.” These are juxtaposed against Stephens’ somewhat earlier work, such as the large-scale “Blood and Sapwood,” an otherworldly painting of ink, shellac and oil paint that presents a woodland scene as if viewed through the striated lines of a poorly tuned television set. These are joined, in the first room, by three pleasing impressionistic oil paintings of various scenes in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, by Joseph DiGeorgio.

Four exquisitely composed photographs from John Pfahl’s “Somestack” series occupy the far east wall of the gallery, across from which hangs a piece from the artist’s recent series of stretched alien landscapes. Where Pfahl points his camera, beauty can’t help but emerge.

There’s also a curious watercolor of a pair of swans by William Garby that wouldn’t look terribly out of place on the wall of a dentist office; this shares a room with several small, brightly hued watercolor abstractions by Clough, a key figure in Buffalo’s ’70s avant-garde scene and the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery.

Tucked into some corner spaces are murky landscapes by Kathryn Lynch, another favorite of Freudenheim’s (and mine), whose lovely work has much to do with peering through a scrim — be it constructed of foggy weather or of one’s own perceptions.

It’s a show without a great deal of connective tissue, though as the title implies, nature makes itself somehow evident in most every work.