Galileo served as this painter's muse

Mary Parisi's "Food" solo at Gallery 1401 features a San Francisco-area artist active in both sculpture and fine arts photography. She's lately turned to her kitchen for her large color close-ups of various edibles, each seen in an active stage of preparation. Some images may be a bit mystifying, as when one seeming abstraction turns out to be Tomato Splatter. The most compelling image of the seven here? Boiled Chicken, awesomely detailed in its glorious nakedness. There's an allure to Parisi's images, even in that homey poultry close-up.

At the Sol Mednick Gallery, Nick Kline is the undeniable heavyweight. This New Yorker, a UArts alum (class of '90) who teaches photography at Rutgers/Newark, in his 17-piece traveling show "Din of Murmurs, Mold" focuses not on moldy objects, but on rubber silicone objects used in a sculptural casting process.

For this show, which has traveled widely, he's made photos taken from castings of various kinds, including objects from now-closed St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, which was a major treatment center for AIDS-related illnesses at a time when fatalities in New York from HIV/AIDS were sickenly high.

Kline uses photography for deep social engagement in response to various traumas, including problems with hate crimes. And he often works on this with art students and survivors - the "din" of his show's title is meant to advocate compassion and openmindedness.

It's now being said of Kline that by embracing an idea, his photos update the history of mid-20th-century abstraction. His photography refers to abstraction, all right, as we can readily see in many of his images of molds, but he goes further and offers social commentary.

It's a welcome homecoming for Kline in the Sol Mednick Gallery, still the only endowed gallery in Philadelphia dedicated to exhibiting photography exclusively.

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