August 19-25, 2004

artpicks

Strangely Familiar

by Andrew Parks

art

Strands of her hair, blonde and tangled like a broken brick of ramen noodles. The peeling paint of the nightstand mom said to never throw away. Pallid pictures of potty training and the time you cried, screamed, and subsequently kicked Santa in the shin. Only it's not you, at least not how you remembered you. That kid's ugly, uglier than you ever were, even in the midst of that horrid growth spurt right? Right?

Who knows anymore. Given the right context, the ordinary can appear extraordinary. And the further a person is removed from the familiar, the more foreign it seems. ADM Gallery's "Familiar" exhibition explores that very notion. Sure, the signifiers-and-symbols concept sounds hazy. But that's exactly how the ADM Gallery likes it.

"Our themes tend to be vague to give people a lot of room to interpret as they wish," says photo curator Lisa Haun, whose own work has appeared in SPIN and NME. "Which is part of the fun, sort of like, "Oh, that's what he thought of this!"'

Fourteen photographers, painters and mixed-medium maestros tackled just what "this" may entail: watercolors of stoplights and forgotten theaters (Philip Carroll); meticulously shot photos of a percolator (pictured), iron and the letter "H" from a rickety old typewriter (Stephen Coan); hypnotic, you-are-getting-sleepy gelatin prints of a cherry, a lemon and a horseshoe (Jackie Fugere); vivid landscape portraits of Valley Forge (Kate Kern Mundie) — and, well, is this sounding familiar yet?

"Familiar," through Sept. 7, ADM Gallery, 314 Brown St., 215-925-6040, www.admgallery.com.