With several D.C. galleries downsizing, threatening to close, or closing outright, it is a relief to see a few budding entrepreneurs take the leap into opening a gallery storefront. Nestled among the antiques shops and cafés of north Georgetown, Margaret Heiner’s recently opened Heiner Contemporary is an inviting trio of galleries (if you include the front window) with chairs in the back room for contemplation. The gallery’s opening exhibition, Elizabeth Huey’s “Polychromatic Projection,” comprises works culled from Huey’s year spent as an artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian. Hers are colorful paintings that touch on outdated technologies, bizarre medicine, paranormalism, and titans of psychotherapy Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Huey’s exhibit also offers a local touch in “Glen Echo” (pictured), a depiction of a younger Clara Barton on the property the Red Cross founder occupied for the last 15 years of her life. When the property changed hands, the new land manager constructed a roller coaster to pressure Barton to move. But how many know the park was also a hotspot for traveling palm readers and séances? This and other obscurities are pulled together in Technicolor patches of paint that, like much of the exhibit, suggest truth can be stranger than fiction.

The exhibit is on view 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday at Heiner Contemporary, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Free. (202) 338-0072.