Galleries: Photo collages with shifting patterns of rhythmic motion

Since his last Philadelphia exhibition, at the Gershman Y's Borowsky Gallery, David Slovic has stripped all references to the real world and to contemporary art from his work. His photographic collages from the last two years, which make up his first show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, are completely abstract, shimmering evocations of rhythmic movement.

The process behind Slovic's shifting patterns is not as complex as it might appear to be, mainly involving photography and the assembling of photographs. Each work is made up of hundreds of color photographs of one or two images, and each image, if once recognizable as something, has been made abstract through a separation from its original context. Slovic's arranging of his multiple chromogenic prints into patterns is akin to putting brushstrokes of paint to a canvas - the part that involves his hand, his eye, and his aesthetic choices.

His placements determine the pattern that eventually emerges.

Photography now also seems a less important aspect of Slovic's art than it previously did. An entirely new development, accumulations of bits of tape on cardboard, expresses a different sense of motion than his photographic collages do - a sense of moving forward toward the viewer - and makes me think he will be investigating other tactile found materials with more physical heft than photographs in the future.

Generally speaking, older churches do not lend themselves to exhibitions. Their walls are dominated by windows, the floor space is spoken for, the light can be crepuscular. This might have been true of the Philadelphia Cathedral, too, 20-some years ago, but a remodeling in the 1990s emptied it of its pews, among other things.

Now, apart from the altar, the ambo, the baptismal font, and a scattering of chairs, it's a vast open space that is unexpectedly conducive to modestly scaled work that can be squeezed between its outer walls' windows. (It's the domed ceiling that soars in this interior; the walls are relatively low.) The light along these walls is too dim to make for great exhibition space, but Anne Minich's small paintings manage to stand out.

Even from a distance - and there is nothing but distance here - Minich's oil-on-wood paintings exert a magnetic pull. Up close, her pared-down seascapes and landscapes are reminiscent of such early-20th-century American painters as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, while her additions of painted bas-relief elements, and her habit of neatly carving her name and a work's title at the bottom of each piece, give her paintings the look of folk art.

There is a strong sense of spirituality about Minich's paintings. The light in the sky, which could be dawn or dusk, suggests beginnings and ends; clouds hover like angels; horizons seem to stretch into infinity, and the shape of the cross appears here and there.

A stark white wall in a gallery would be the ideal venue for this work, of course, but it acquires an unearthly, beaconlike presence in the shadowy peripheries of the cathedral.

Just when the juried exhibitions at the Woodmere Art Museum were starting to look sophisticated and informed by a particular outside curator's taste, the default mode kicked in. The Woodmere's "Contemporary Voices: 70th Annual Juried Exhibition" could pass for a student show - all over the place, with many negligible inclusions, and none of the usual suspects. It's a strange gathering of 111 artists, even given the nightmarish onslaught of art that such exhibitions provoke.

Maybe the Woodmere's outgoing director, Michael Schantz, who juried this show - was there not enough money to pay an outside curator, as is usually done? - was ticked, tired, or both. Or maybe the young Turks have learned that the Woodmere is back to its fuddy-duddy ways and bypassed this show. I frankly took offense at a work from 1982 - Linette Good's still-life painting Spirits - in a show designated for contemporary art.

There are a few good works here, though none remotely cutting-edge. Rachel Constantine's painting Aloft, of a woman in profile, hair flowing in the wind, is an accomplished, painterly realist painting in the Bo Bartlett mold, though without a narrative.

Jeff Gola's gouache painting Morning on Cherry Hill Lane, of a street of slightly run-down houses, is beautifully rendered, a perfect example of the sublime in the ordinary. Anne Saint Peter's photographic prints of Philadelphia bridges and other architecture superimposed on one another are exquisite and reminiscent of Thomas Eakins' photographs. Al Wachlin's gelatin-silver photographic prints of rural scenes on old, crinkled, seemingly found paper are so good and so formal you wonder why he hasn't abandoned the informal "Al" for his original moniker.