Joseph Lupo's screenprints of his fastidiously drawn copies of credit-card-machine receipts and Gary Kachadourian's huge xerographic prints made from scale drawings come the closest to facsimiles in this exhibition, allowing viewers a glimpse of the artists' everyday surroundings and travels. The views of a begonia in Roy McMakin's photographs suggest human physical and emotional states through the plant's "postures." Talia Greene's prints of ants on inch-wide strips of fabric are sneaky and wonderful, and a reminder that "to scale" can be tiny and still be extremely effective.
The show's sculptures veer between a Pee-wee's Playhouse aesthetic and conceptual and process art. Common houseplants with recognizable forms - the cactus, the jade plant, the half-dead plant - are transformed into their cartoon avatars in Taylor McKimen's charming ink-jet prints mounted on corresponding cut-wood shapes. Jenn Figg's Deadfall is a remarkable forest scene constructed from cardboard covered with vinyl and printed with photographic images of tree trunks, leaves, and mushrooms. At the cooler end of the spectrum are Nicola Kinch's suspended fiberglass ladder to nowhere and Shelley Spector's poetic oil-can evocations constructed of layers of paper rubbed with wax and oil.
Kay Healy, the only artist to work directly on the wall, asks friends to recall objects from childhood, and she makes screenprints of them loosely based on images she finds on the Internet. Wheatpasted to the gallery's walls, her prints of vintage refrigerators, radios, and lamps are reminiscent of those children's books whose illustrations featured removable adhesive images that allowed children to move objects and people according to whim. (Healy also sells her prints individually, so that grown-ups can do their own mix-and-matching.)
