16 October 2005 16:31 PM

A gently surreal juxtaposition between human body and environment give a mild, uncanny affect to Meredith Arena’s color photograph, “Canal #1 (leg).” Uncanny because the body is made strange, distorted and fragmented by the camera lens, but mild because the effect is not only funny but familiar: who hasn’t held a finger up in front of their eye, using it to replace a building in the distance? Other pairings of bodies with surroundings provide their own poetic relationships: a sliver of body among slivers of grass in “Donnie,” the mist of domestic mornings in “Kitchen.”

—Lori Waxman