Rojorshi Ghosh and Ray Klimek bring landscapes and locales to Roy this month. Klimek’s Carbon photograph series seems to depict vast fields of stars or galaxies. It turns out these cosmic vistas are illusions, and the photos are really close-ups of coal mine waste. Coal is often called “buried sunshine” and such metaphorical re-examination of the earthbound is central to Klimek’s work. At the meeting of coal fields and star fields there is space to consider the histories involved in the production of carbon-based life forms and in the production of the energy we use every day.

Other Klimek photos mimic the jagged panoramas of NASA photos, or show what appear to be the barren terrains of distant planets. This series is called Analogs, referring to the simulation of conditions on other planets. These illusions allow the mind to wander between locations, between the miniscule and the massive, the mundane and the exotic. It allows us to look inward and simultaneously outward.

Also concerned with re-examination of space, Rojorshi Ghosh’s work features video projections and light box photographs. Much of Ghosh’s work transports the viewer to the local realities of India’s recent history, but it’s simultaneous specificity and abstraction of image make for an unsettling experience. One projection is a view of an old elevator going up and down, forming shifting black and white patterns as it goes. But this elevator doesn’t exist, because the projection is pieced together video. Thus, to experience this video is to be many places at once.

In the other projection, the black silhouettes of birds wheel over Delhi to a soundtrack of horns, sirens, song, and voices that wanders between music and cacophony. The birds (kites) are considered to be djinn, or spirits, from the city’s past.

Layering of abstraction and representation of location can also be seen in Ghosh’s light boxes. One shows an image of a propaganda poster, torn in half to disfigure the face on it. The images work to situate viewers in recent politics while the abstraction works to distance them.

Shifting location and a multilayered present can be seen in both halves of the show, as the artists re-imagine familiar landscapes as sites for fantasy and play.

By Chris Greathouse