Galleries: Photographs of reflections with a tinge of the surreal

Edward McHugh's second exhibition of photographs at Gallery 339 shows him moving even further away from his minimal, abstract paintings and prints, in which color is mainly absent, or at least subdued (McHugh also makes minimal geometric sculptures in cast bronze). Several of these large photographs of reflections of wilderness landscapes in rivers, lakes, and ponds are so intensely colored and seemingly illusionistic that they suggest hallucinations.

I looked at Hudson Reflection 2 not knowing its title and thought this image of pink and orange autumn leaves floating in front of brilliantly colored trees was a composite of at least two photographs. When I realized that the entire picture was of a reflection in water, I understood why those "floating" leaves had initially seemed to me to be caught in a clear gel of some kind.

McHugh brushes a final coating of wax on the surface of his prints, too, which heightens his subjects' embedded effect.

Some of his quieter photographs, of boulders in a mirror-still lake under a gray sky, or of a river cascading over a succession of rocks, but shot from a distance, are reminiscent of 19th-century French and American landscape paintings. They are undeniably beautiful, but in a soothing, familiar sort of way. By contrast, McHugh's fractured reflection pictures seem revelatory.

Lutz looks

My favorite works: Daniel Petraitis' plaster cast of a white T-shirt on white-painted wood (in an edition of five); Tim Eads' assemblages of plastic shopping bags with lights mounted behind them; Eleanna Anagnos' plaster cast of crumpled paper that seems lit from behind, but isn't (it's painted Pepto Bismol pink on the back), and Jacque Liu's folded-paper construction painted in parallel orange stripes.

Planes, panes, pallets