Artful images of abandonment

'Philadelphia." Could anything be more direct than the title of Jeffrey Stockbridge's photo show at Delaware Center for Contemporary Art?

Look again.

Instead of a city overview, the exhibition is a roomful of pictures of abandoned Philadelphia properties - such properties said by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2008 to number a staggering 60,000. From that chilly inventory, Stockbridge carefully chose examples that somehow retained a regional flavor, distilled with the help of titles (mostly identifying the nearest cross streets). This show is about one artist trying to make sense of the world through explorations of sites with vacant buildings and the occasional people still living there, precariously, amid the rubble.

This young Maryland native was formally trained at Drexel, lives in Philadelphia, and has found his voice with this knockout show. Among its many strengths is the fact that there's nothing repetitious about his mostly indoor shots. He manages to infuse everything he does with a sense of intimacy - the forgotten interiors with their traces of elaborate decor, the floral bouquet on the crumbling step, the young woman surviving in desperate circumstances beside a wrecked doorway.

In his archival pigment prints, Stockbridge shows himself capable of bold forays and genuine originality. These works matter: They stimulate reflection beyond what's presented rather than being self-referential, and attempt to mold awareness of social reality into artistic form.

Arden Bendler Browning, another soloist at DCCA, is a Philadelphia painter whose deep personal feelings about abstraction are effectively expressed in her show "Splinters." Her mural-size paintings in gouache on Tyvek suggest the flow and rhythm of urban life as she navigates with the click of a mouse to obtain the multiple perspectives she favors, using Google Maps to go forward and back and around to paint the ambiguous shapes, overlapping forms and blotches of color we see here. Browning has architecture and urban planning in mind; her kind of abstraction suggests the rough-hewn outdoor city, roadways, cavernous areas resembling big parking garages.

From the swinging vitality of curved highways and luminous flat vacancies on into green areas and the deep color of wine, Browning displays imagination and able temperament in the blustery vigor of these cyber-inspired "splintered cityscapes."

Texture and surface draw as much attention as subject in Christine Lafuente's many small oils in her latest show, "Forget Me Not," at Somerville Manning Gallery in Greenville, Del. Featured are floral paintings, other still lifes and a few landscapes. This Brooklyn painter's local ties have included a six-year residency at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. She's at her best with the paintings of peonies and roses for which she's well known. Often her finest works have the brevity of a sketch.

Lafuente above all brings us the pleasure of painting, with no hint of the hard work involved in creating her color-rich images. It takes real bravery for a bright and caring artist to speak up on behalf of the pure joy of process.

Jim Cobb's show "Reflections: Bottles & Other Things" at Twenty-Two Gallery reveals a painting language and painterly choices in portraying mostly still life of two kinds. One is a modest and sincere effort to break new ground; the other is a closeness that this prominent Main Line artist feels for the handsome, unpretentious works of the modern-day Italian master Giorgio Morandi.

Cobb continues languidly to emulate Morandi's work - and often delivers with considerable flair.