Ongoing: Maureen Minehan at Multiple Exposures Gallery

Keep your expectations in check when visiting Maureen Minehan’s exhibit at Multiple Exposures Gallery. Her images include a bevy of lovely landscapes, but don’t expect them to comprise a deep dive into a specific place. At least she’s honest about that: The exhibit’s title, There and Back, refers to what Minehan calls the “familiar terrain” that “escapes notice” as vacationers drive between the Washington area and the Delaware and Maryland shore. To create her works, Minehan takes photographs, then digitally blends them with watercolors she paints, providing a layer of texture. Despite her consistent technique, the images vary in their look, sometimes dramatically. Some images she made at the destination—at the meeting of ocean and sand—look more like pastel-hued paintings than photographs. Others have the rough look of Polaroid transfer prints, including a high-contrast image of railroad tracks alongside a receding line of telephone poles. Others capture an enveloping fog that turns buildings and trees into near apparitions. However, it’s with a series of isolated buildings that Minehan’s modifications prove most memorable. In several images, she captures structures seemingly bathed in sharp sunlight, even as their surroundings exude a gloomy darkness; in one, an asymmetrical, off-white building provides added intrigue from its eccentric geometry. With such images, we may not be lingering very long, but at least we have been presented with a glimpse of something worthwhile. Maureen Minehan’s There and Back runs through May 19 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