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.