Raw Stuff

Digital photography exhibit "ROHSTOFF (Raw Material)" has a secret weapon. The contributors are all instructors at this great little photographic resource center/school/lab, and each one presents dynamic, saturated prints -- the title is a play on words about a filetype photo techs use to shoehorn more color into an image. Brent Bowers', Mike Mages', and Michele Sieglitz' photos are definitely worth a look; if you like what you see, you can take a class from the artists. But the secret weapon is Liz Hickok, digital photographer laureate of San Francisco as far as we're concerned. After making little apartment house-, Exploratorium-, or Transamerica Pyramid-shaped molds, she mixes up custom-colored Jell-O, chills it for two hours, and transforms the resulting tiny jellies into landscapes lit from below. She keeps them alive by pouring dry ice mist over them while they're on display, but the real finished product is the photographs she makes of those fever-jewel dioramas. Up close, the glowing blocks are about the right scale to look like you could be walking up the street, if you were a gummy bear.
Feb. 28-March 31, 2008