©Tom Sliter, “Time’s Up”
Ongoing: “Seen Better Times” at Multiple Exposures Gallery
Don’t waste my time with ruin porn, writes Michael Borek in his juror statement for the
exhibition Seen Better Times at Multiple Exposures Gallery. Photographing peeling walls and
decay eventually becomes “a bit boring, because there is nothing more behind the surface,”
Borek writes. Nonetheless, some of the images Borek selected do dabble in tumbledown scenery,
including Eric Johnson’s photograph of the exterior of a run-down theater, Sarah Hood
Salomon’s image of a building being gutted, Sandy LeBrun–Evans’ Cuban streetscape
featuring a broken-down jalopy and a young child, and Matt Leedham’s photograph of a broken
TV deposited by an elevator in a run-down apartment building. A few other contributors take the
riskier approach of applying the theme of decline to people, including a Maureen Minehan
image of two men standing on opposite corners of an urban intersection and Fred Zafran’s
photograph of two men of a certain age conversing street-side. But the exhibit’s most notable
works are those that veer in a different direction. Two contributors succeed through abstraction:
Alan Sislen with a door that has devolved into multiple layers of fading paint and Francine B.
Livaditis with a constructivist assemblage of boldly hued pieces of metal in a boneyard.
Meanwhile, an image by Zafran offers a tableau worthy of Gregory Crewdson, in which a man
in an old-timey diner wipes his mouth as a waitress behind the counter stares into the unseen
distance. A thematic counterpoint, though, is Soomin Ham’s understated black-and-white image
of a ladder leaning against a wall and rising into a tree-ringed sky. If the rest of the exhibit dwells
on deterioration, Ham’s photograph seems to offer a literal escape. Seen Better Times runs
through April 7 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union
St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson