16 October 2005 13:57 PM

Mysterious yet queerly familiar interactions occur between people and places and things in Marina Zamalin’s photo sets, most especially and awkwardly in “Self Series,” a group of highly colorful photos of the artist in a domestic space with an older man and woman one assumes to be her parents. Zamalin addresses the camera from dramatic positions—lying on the floor, sitting in the corner—while her companions remain oblivious to it. Her self-conscious theatricality draws a connection with the viewer, as it does in the series “Run,” black-and-white images that show the artist and an unidentified man in a blurry, desolate landscape from which they may be fleeing. Zamalin, again, seems nonplussed, as if this kind of setting were as run of the mill to her as the cozy confines of her parental unit, just a place she happened to find herself, somehow.

—Lori Waxman