We climb mountains to be dazzled at the summit. Pay over $40 to get to the top of the Empire State Building. File lawsuits over a neighbor’s third story obstructing the view from our deck. Pay less for obstructed view concert tickets because we’re watching the show from behind a pole or stack of speakers. Get a class 1 misdemeanor, reckless driving ticket for too-large fuzzy dice dangling from our rearview.

Views are important. Humans treasure them. And obstacles to our views are often not tolerated. In one sense, Main Project’s current show, “Obstructed View,” takes the idea of a view literally. In most of the works, it’s apparent that the view is the artist’s, the flowers they’ve chosen to paint, the scene they’ve chosen to depict. The obstruction, though, can be a bit harder to perceive.

In Cait Porter’s paintings, the obstruction becomes what the artist has chosen not to paint. In Sarah Schlesinger’s landscapes, the view is double-obstructed by the color choices and perhaps your own expectations of what a painting should be (clear, representative). In Georgia-May Travers Cook’s and Cat Pasquerelli’s work, the obstacles reveal themselves to be unanswered questions — their work feels a bit like a cliffhanger. Slippery notions of what is allowed to be perceived and who’s doing the looking and why, permeate the works like an uncanny undertaste. (The word undertaste has a particular uncanny association for me because that’s how Rosemary describes the drugged, Satanic mousse she eats in “Rosemary’s Baby.”)

In the center of the space are three Cate Pasquarelli sculptures, each enclosed in a glass cloche. Protected in each are scenes of miniature white buildings sitting on hills that could be on isolated farmland or parcels in McMansion subdivisions. “The Ice House” (2025) depicts a miniature ice house atop a hill of dried grass. High above it, a green kite hangs, it’s black string which is really a wire, leads to an unseen kite flyer on the building’s top-floor. In “Neighbors” (2025), seven stark, identical buildings surround a tiny grey folding chair. The buildings are too close together and too near the chair. The scene feels like a visual representation of claustrophobia. The buildings feel like interrogators, but the interrogation is either over or hasn’t begun because the chair is empty. Cloches are usually used to protect plants but here they feel like bell jars—a vacuum sealed world devoid of air, where life can’t exist. Each curious scene begs so many unanswered questions, starting with where is everyone?

Sarah Schlesinger presents a series of four landscape paintings, two titled “Garden (2025)” and two titled “Two Trees (2025).” They are muted oils in autumnal colors — deep green, dull yellow — and that subjects are tall shadowy hedgerows and topiary right before night falls. It takes time to decipher what you’re looking at. Eventually, you make out two rectangular boxwood hedges meeting at an angle, an arborvitae trimmed into a haystack sitting in front of it or is it behind it? I eventually settled on both in a Schrodinger’s cat sort of way. These paintings are as mysterious as Pasquarelli’s work but for completely different reasons. Still devoid of people but alive with things people crave: privacy, borders, walls, order, delineation. The view here is obviously obstructed by the lack of light, the hour of the day, and shadows, but also reflects back to us our obscured motivations behind secrecy.

Cait Porter gives us four photo-realistic paintings of interior domestic views all cropped in ways that make us question where in the house these scenes might come from. “Tulip Bouquet (2025)” shows us the top right quarter of a bouquet of store-bought tulips. They’re still in their cellophane wrapper and propped against a wall of shiny tile. The edge of a black-and-white object appears in the bottom right corner — what it might be is hard to know. Each painting is like this with a corner, a curve, an outline of some unknown object. What we get in exquisite detail is only parts of things. Part of a pothos against part of a wall with part of a curtain in the background in “Pothos at Night (2025).” Everything is so fragmented, so obstructed by the subject’s framing, it’s like when someone tells you they have a story you just have got to hear, but walks away before they can tell it. You’re left curious (a good place to be).

If Porter’s paintings are like stories that don’t quite get started Georgia-May Travers Cook’s paintings are stories that end right before the denouement. “Foreplay (n.d.)” is a realistically painted dish of maraschino cherries each sitting in a smear of its own juice. On the edge of the dish, a forgotten cigarette has been placed just so, the filter ringed with cherry-colored lipstick. It looks like evidence, something left behind after something significant happened. A bit of paranoia enters the scene. Why didn’t they finish the cherries? Why didn’t they stub out the cigarette? What happened? In “Yellow Bow (n.d.)” a shiny, light-yellow bow hounds most of the frame. It’s tied into the brown hair of a figure whose back is to us. Our close-up view implies we are near, that they’ve just turned away from us or maybe we are just about to tap them on the shoulder. Porter’s paintings eschew closure, the obstacle here might be your own desire for resolution.

Seeing these four artists together, and with the show’s title floating through my head, I wondered why views are so enticing, sought, and hoarded. Experiencing how each artist problematized their view, whether visually like Schlesinger’s obfuscated hedges or narratively like Travers Cook’s partially-told stories, added another convolution to my definition of what art can do. It must present a view — the thing you’re looking at — but must it also obstruct it? Can any artwork be an unobstructed view?

Maybe this idea has been there all along in the words artists so often use like frame, crop, perspective. Maybe all views always are obstructed in some way, even those unmediated by a painter or sculptor. A few weeks ago, I had a drink at the bar on top of the Quirk Hotel. I could see nearly a 360-degree view of the city and beyond. Of course, there were clouds and cranes in the way of things, buildings blocking my view of the river; from time to time, I was probably standing in front of someone else’s view, but also now a part of it.

“Obstructed View” runs through Oct. 8 at Main Projects located at 1625 W. Main St. Visit Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m or on the weekend by appointment.