When the visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Cetner show their work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the community gets an exhilarating peek at what’s afoot at the studios down the street — and in the larger art world. The international mix of young artists who are in Provincetown as fellows come armed with talent, ambition, and a deep knowledge of contemporary art culture.

This winter’s exhibition, which features seven artists, is marked by a spirit of exploration with an emphasis on process and materiality. Rather than grand, bombastic visual statements, the works are decidedly lo-fi and earthy.

Covering the rear wall of the gallery is an installation of abstract images by Elena Kovylyaeva. The artist, based in Leipzig, Germany, used newsprint — a cheap, throwaway material — made from the master pages of a Risograph digital duplicator. (A Risograph is similar to the photocopiers common in offices and schools but works more like a screen printer, using spot colors in a process akin to offset printing.) In neat grids, Kovylyaeva captures what seems like the detritus of this utilitarian technology. The images are blotchy and glitchy; abstracted and overlapping; some forms are geometric, others biomorphic; the colors range from black and white to bruised purples and blues.

Her installation cheekily reimagines abstract painting, dethroning it from its usually lofty place. These images seem to be made by accident, without an artist’s hand, yet Kovylyaeva’s arrangement of the newsprint is precise and considered. In her piece, the accidental and the intentional coalesce, offering a vision of an artist not as a singular genius but rather as one who rearranges and reanimates the scraps of culture, reimagining our understanding of art history.

Across the gallery, Dani Levine’s large-scale paintings also contend with the history of abstract painting. Her works are labor-intensive explorations of material and form, undergirded with conceptual and political concerns (her work, more than any other in the show, gestures toward grandiosity).

In Levine’s Menace, a large swirling purple form commands the center of the composition. Like Kovylyaeva, Levine is not a purist when it comes to abstract painting. She incorporates feminist and lesbian symbols, along with popular graphic styles and floral imagery. A close viewing of the painting reveals these details, along with Levine’s athletic use of materials, many of which she makes herself. The purple form is rendered with brushy, painterly excess, while the beige background is matte. A glittering silver line travels through the composition. Levine’s materials articulate the forms within the paintings, but they also exist a priori.

Edd Ravn shares Levine’s fascination with materiality. In a series of three watercolors, the constructed image is almost beside the point. Rather, the works exist more as a record of his experiments with materials like raw pigment, New York City rainwater, and nori paste, which he uses as a binder in different ratios to create effects like the washy blue passages in one painting and an impasto nipple-like form in another.

Ravn’s family has a farm in Yorkshire — his work shows a concern for natural processes. In a scattered floor installation, Ravn displays items like pheasant feathers from back home, bones, and reeds found in Provincetown. He also incorporates rubbery disk-like forms he has created through a process that involves growing microbiomes from his body. Together, the elements suggest a vision that erases boundaries between artificial and natural, scientific and spiritual. Ravn plans to change his display throughout the run of the exhibition. Like his art, the installation will embody themes of decay, growth, change, and instability.

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, an artist from Iran, is a second-year FAWC fellow. In her lithograph prints, she uses calligraphic marks and symmetry that recall Persian art, but it seems that the Provincetown landscape has seeped into her imagination. In Manushka, an eye hovers ominously in the sky above what appear to be waves. In another image, two dome-like forms echo each other across a space that is dominated by the water, the sky, and a horizon line.

Marnani has two cubes in the exhibition that require the viewer to crouch down and peer through small holes to view an image. In Adam and Eve, the viewer’s eye is reflected and doubled on two angled mirrors. A crude painting of water on the cube’s base is also reflected in the mirrors, creating an illusion of a swirling, watery space over which the viewer’s eye hovers. It’s a clever three-dimensional representation of her two-dimensional prints, and its funhouse amateur quality adds a touch of humor.

The photo and video artists in the exhibition also forgo slick aesthetics for something that feels more homespun. Carlos Zerpa displays his video UN/SAFE on a Toshiba TV/VCR covered with wire fencing and thorns. He directed the seven-minute film, collaborating with animators and poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. The story unfolds with surprising visual and narrative twists. It addresses race, immigration, and American mythology through images that incorporate hand-drawn elements with archival footage.

Ian Page’s photographs are the most confounding works in the exhibition. In a pair of images from a project titled Election Day Wienerschnitzel, obscured dark objects foreground banal settings. In one picture shot from a car, the main subject is a bit of blue sky framed by a palm tree and the edge of a building. In the other, houseplants and a clear plastic tarp take center stage. The images evoke the placelessness of contemporary life and feel like the peripheral spaces one might get a glimpse of on a Zoom call.

Page’s other work is a sculpture. Since 03 is made from another type of detritus: wallpaper print rollers. Page arranged the rolls, which are covered with patterns of tiny pins, into a grid. Its rigid, imposing form and spiky surfaces put the sculpture in an adversarial relationship to the viewer.

Cherrie Yu’s video piece Daily Diversions encapsulates the exhibition’s spirit of improvisation. Like Zerpa’s short film, it’s a work in progress. The video features pairs and trios of women dancing in nondescript gymnasiums alongside table-tennis players engaged in games (Yu draws from her experience as a choreographer and player of table tennis in this work). The dancers’ movements are synchronized, and in some of the scenes they move while positioning and repositioning wooden boards. Their actions become a sort of living sculpture, while the table-tennis players become a metaphor for the creative process: one that’s disciplined but also responsive, dynamic, and playful.

Down to Earth

The event: The FAWC visual arts fellows’ group exhibition
The time: Through March 23
The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
The cost: General admission: $15