Galleries: Two artists, friends, whose work has a kinship

The days of believing it necessary to make a clear distinction between the works of two individual artists in a two-person show may finally be over. They certainly are if the show's curator and the two artists are on the same page, and the artists in question want to present their works together without boundaries. It's sort of like being "an artist team" without the commitment.

"Sweet Meat," an exhibition at the Print Center that pairs the like-minded color (and occasionally black-and-white) photographs of two Rhode Island School of Design graduates and friends, Jesse Burke and Nils Ericson, is a perfect example of the separate-but-collaborative spirit. Unless you obsessively consult the labels identifying individual contributions to the various walls pairing clusters of Burke's and Ericson's photographs, it's difficult to tell their work apart. (I recommend carrying the checklist around with you.) Not only do both move among landscape, portraiture, and still life, they appear in each other's photographs.

Shades of difference do eventually make themselves known.

In Burke's photographs, isolated male and female figures are often surrounded by darkness, looking vulnerable or fragile. Men frequently are shown bare-chested, wearing hoods or hats. A self-portrait depicts a fully clothed Burke standing in front of a looming woodpile, cradling an infant. His still lifes, such as an image of a dead deer, seem to be similarly fraught with meaning. You look at these pictures and think of biblical parables and 19th-century New England as seen through a contemporary lens.

Ericson's photographs portray an athletic male who can survive on his own in the wild, which appears to be the wilds of Rhode Island. They show a man running naked through the woods; a self-portrait in which the hair from his freshly shaved head is sitting in small clumps on his bare shoulders; a man in a T-shirt and jeans with the nearly naked body of a lifeless-looking woman slung over his shoulder. Allegorical paintings and Coen brothers films come to mind.

The overlaps in Burke's and Ericson's sensibilities and styles are exaggerated by their photographs' close proximity in this exhibition, and that's clearly the point: They go so well together.