In the galleries: Sarah Hood Salomon's "Urban Forestry" - Washington Post Art Review by Mark Jenkins

Urban Cathedral ©Sarah Hood Salomon

Sarah Hood Salomon

Trees punctuate, but definitely don’t dominate, the landscapes of “Urban Forestry,” Sarah Hood Salomon’s show at Multiple Exposures Gallery. A small, bare tree is dwarfed by man-made arches in “Urban Cathedral”; a larger one stands amid architectural mayhem in “Demolition”; and an even bigger tree is framed by a huge water or chemical tank in “Borrowed Scenery,” a title taken from a feature of Japanese gardens. There’s also a glum yet seasonally appropriate image: a dead tree, surely a casualty of a Christmas past, dumped upside-down over a metal fence.

Salomon, whose pictures are in deadpan black-and-white, has previously shown photos of dense forests, sometimes clicked with the camera in motion to create a ghostly sense of flux. “Urban Forestry” is less eerie, but sometimes witty. Human intervention pushes trees to the back in “Progress,” whose foreground holds a banner for a banal new development, and in “Shadows and Silhouettes,” where a tree’s crown appears to top the shadow of a trunk on a blank barrier that blocks the actual tree’s trunk from view.

The show includes a 3-D collage, “Former Trees,” in which photos of wooden utility poles are rolled into tubular forms. Debased with posters and signs, the posts nonetheless retain something of their sylvan essence.