The group exhibit "Eye of the Beholder" at the Meeting House Gallery calls your attention to how these artists see the world around them. It's a suitably eye-catching strategy for a gallery exhibit done in conjunction with the Columbia Festival of the Arts.
An artist who particularly benefits from such a close look is Rebecca Rothey, whose black-and-white photographs often depict people in all their wrinkled detail. In the tightly cropped "Old Mocassins," a seated and presumably elderly figure is largely defined by hands that are as weathered as the shoes referenced in the photo's title.
Rothey's "Comfy in their Skin" pulls back just a bit from its subjects: a mature man and woman who are both reading newspapers while sitting in chairs that barely rise above an inviting beach. They're frankly not going to win a beauty contest, but that's precisely the point for two people are are, yes, comfortable in their own skin.
A couple of other photographers work with color in variously, er, colorful ways.
At the selective end of the spectrum is Lorenzo Wilkins, who often goes for punchy bits of color in otherwise subdued compositions. His "Girl and the Blue Vase, Havana, Cuba," calls your attention to a girl standing on the balcony of a house whose walls are so abraded that they seem to be peeling away. The festively garbed girl and a blue vase sitting in a nearby window are spots of color in an otherwise nearly monochromatic picture.
In "Red Door, Santa Fe, New Mexico," Wilkins features a very red front door framed by lushly green bushes in a composition that otherwise consists of the house's rather neutral facade.
Wilkins brightens up the whole picture, if you will, in "Morning on the Bay, Eastern Shore, Maryland." A rocking chair sits unoccupied on a wood porch and the Chesapeake Bay glistens in the distance. Sensitive to the interplay of light and shadow, this photo relies on gentle shades of green, blue and yellow.
Another photographer working in color, Ira Dwoskin, opts for vivid images celebrating the natural world. "Egyptian Geese" and "Hosta" are examples of close-up shots featuring birds and plants, while the somewhat wider view in "Bird House" gives a firm sense of how it's sited on a domestic lawn.
Working in a totally different medium, Diana Ulman has acrylic paintings in which her abstract strategies emphasize how the act of painting consists of putting one layer atop another.
In "Underlay 3," broad white brushstrokes nearly conceal an underlayer of purple, yellow, red and other bright colors that only peek through in spots. Other paintings in the "Underlay" series and related series rely on thick layers of white paint interacting with underlayers that are nearly obscured.
Ulman adopts a somewhat different approach in "Positive and Negative," whose broad strokes of black and white paint seem like a more primal exercise in what happens when such completely opposed colors encounter each other.
And yet another medium is represented by Greg Holmes, who has stoneware vessels that are tall, narrow and sometimes triangular in shape. Clustered together within two vitrines, these earth-tond ceramic vessels would benefit from a display thatgave them a little more breathing room.
Holmes sometimes has more than just surface decoration in mind when he makes incisions into the lanky sides of these vessels. His exhibited work includes a series of vessels whose sides are incised with lines of haiku. His strategy amounts to visual poetry.
"Eye of the Beholder" runs through Aug. 8 at the Meeting House Gallery, in the Oakland Mills Interfaith Center at 5885 Robert Oliver Place in Columbia. Call 410-730-4090 or go to http://www.themeetinghousegallery.org.