Galleries: Pale photographs that could easily pass for paintings

The dog days of August haven't brought Philadelphia galleries to a grinding halt the way they used to. Indeed, more than a few have taken an optimistic approach to what has traditionally been the slowest month of the year, even opening new shows over the past two weeks.

The Slingluff Gallery in Fishtown has a recent series of works by Mark Havens, an artist whose large color photographs of vintage motor oil decals were recently shown by JAGR: Projects in the Rittenhouse Hotel. But these photographs on wood panels are as faint and reflective in mood as his c-prints of decals were graphic and bold.

The intimate photographic views of domestic interiors and everyday outdoor scenes that make up So This Is Goodbye could easily pass for paintings or color pencil drawings at first glance. And it's not just Havens' wood panels and meditative subjects that call painting to mind. The textures in the wood surfaces on which he prints his images give them a slightly off-register, hand-rendered look.

Havens' faint photographs are clearly intended to evoke the passage of time, but his affection for vintage objects occasionally overrules his eye, allowing his images to become too obviously nostalgic. His best pictures are the open-ended ones that invite several possible narratives, such as Untitled (Plants), which shows a section of a plant stand in a window as seen from beneath a table, or Untitled (Turtle Gut), of a room in a beach house with a door open that just happens to reveal an ocean view.

Of the two current two-person shows at Jolie Laide, one, "Memories Last a Lifetime," is a collaboration between two Pennsylvania-based artists who got to know each other as students at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art. The other, "Heavy Metal Sunburn," juxtaposes the works of two painters who graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, now live in Brooklyn, and maintain separate studio practices.

The installation Jacob Feige and William Earl Kofmehl III titled "Memories Last a Lifetime" is a topsy-turvy, seemingly Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test-inspired compilation of images from a trip they took together across Pennsylvania in a 1975 Triumph Spitfire - a trip culminating with their arrival at the gallery in August. Two video projections show episodes from these contemporary Merry Pranksters' trip and friendship, while various props, including the car and a basketball hoop, muse on male friendship, marital relationships, and loneliness.

The sense of déjà vu continues in the gallery's back room, where the paintings of Japeth Mennes and Jeffrey Mathews evoke, but also navigate among, visions of early experiments in photography, Process Art, and abstract painting of the 1980s.

Mennes' whimsical painted photograms on linen recall the history of the photogram but also works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Pat Steir, and David Reed (sometimes several of the four at once).

Mathews' use of molten bismuth in his paintings recalls the flung-lead pieces of Richard Serra and the lead puddles of Lynda Benglis, but the paintings' striped backgrounds make me think of early Frank Stella and Stephen Westfall.

Organized for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' Alumni Gallery by art historian Pat Stewart and painter Bill Scott, "Environmental Perspectives: A Landscape Show" gathers the works of 12 PAFA alumni who might not otherwise have discovered their common ground.

Sunny Ra (at the academy from 2001-05) and Paul Metrinko (2007-11), for instance. Except for a light from an unknown source that illuminates a figure beneath it, Ra's painting of an urban nightscape, Sliver, is so dark you can barely make out anything else, but you can feel the hush of the night. Likewise, Metrinko's almost all-brown composition, Dumpster, outlines the grimy backsides of prewar buildings, but leaves them in that familiar indeterminate gloom.

The soft, wide Matissean brushstrokes of green and grays that make up two abstracted landscapes by Ben Pines (1997-2002) echo the arrangements of brushstrokes and stencils in Moon Over Garden by Julie Zahn (1985-90). Pines' paintings recall Matisse at his most somber; Zahn's recall him at his most exuberant.

There is an anomaly in this show, a graceful, exquisitely made desk by Alton Bowman (1997-2002), but its marquetry floral decorations, depicting the wildflowers of Texas, enlarge on this show's theme in an unexpected and delightful way.