Sci-Fi

"Landscapes for Frankenstein" at Sara Meltzer Gallery, through August 1

Though maybe not science fiction per se, this tightly curated grouping still taps into an anxiety regarding a future in which everything, even nature, is mediated (of course, some might argue that day has already arrived). Mary Shelley’s monster is evoked for his sad, lonely wanderings across Europe, and a Romantic thread runs throughout the show. Kim Keever’s dramatic photographs portray sharp peaks and desolate valleys that turn out to have been constructed by hand in aquarium tanks. Peter Rostovsky takes on the photography-versus-painting debate by juxtaposing a miniature sculpture of a man against a painting of a sublime landscape, which the man attempts, in vain, to capture with his minute camera. And Steve Robinson’s superbly detailed and textured paintings deconstruct the famous Ryoanji garden in Kyoto (a Zen rock garden that is itself a meditation on the act of looking at landscape) by reducing tourist photos of the site to masses of pixels and then building an image out of the digital detritus.

At left: Kim Keever, "Turtle Skull Rock" (2001)

Courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery