Surprising beauty Greenhouses from around the world focus of Bar Harbor show

Esther Pullman wants you to see greenhouses in a whole new light. “Green Spaces, Green Places,” her exhibit of panoramic photographs on view at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, invites you to contemplate these man-made environments for capturing sunshine and cultivating plant life from another angle.

And then another. And then another.

“Stalking greenhouses” is one way Pullman describes what she does. Trained as a graphic designer, the Cambridge, Mass.-based artist has been using a camera with a wide-angle lens to track what might be called the secret life of greenhouses since 1999.

Her work in this exhibit wraps around you in panel after panel of framed translucence and function, focusing and refocusing the greenhouse as a space of anticipation, utility, sanctuary and seasonal rhythms.

Where to enter?

Pullman’s repetition of doors in these panoramas draws the eye again and again to where these luminous, climate-controlled chambers become thresholds to the world outside – one, she knows, in which the “greenhouse effect” looms less enticingly and the camera allows “minute examination of all the details” present and at stake.

“Surprising beauty,” Pullman calls it. She finds these surprises in “the utilitarian, the mundane, and in often empty and overlooked spaces,” as well as in the lush vibrancy and spill of green things growing.

That blue ladder leaning against the grapery wall in a tangle of shadows at Rodmarton Manor Greenhouse in England, its rungs scuffed with dirt, has a story to tell.

So does the quartet of cracked wooden urns standing in an abandoned estate greenhouse in Wellesley, Mass., and the pruning shears holding their place in a juxtaposition of spring and winter vistas that remind us that greenhouses, too, can go dormant.

Apricot lilies and grow lights, cool pools of hydrophytes and the technology of fans, even a topiary jockey on a leafy horse leaping from a pot in Tuscany – all of these appear in the green spaces waiting under the museum skylights. “Pictures within pictures” is what the greenhouse grid of glass, privacy and earth has led this phototropic photographer to reveal. Step into her world of windows and reflect.

See how many ways a greenhouse can catch the light.

“Green Spaces, Green Places” is on view through Aug. 5 at the Blum Gallery at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Admission is free. Gallery hours are: 10a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.