(Information provided by Les Christensen, director of Bradbury Gallery)

The Bradbury Gallery in the Fowler Center on the campus of Arkansas State University in Jonesboro is presenting the exhibition Photo Album, now through Feb. 23. (Opening reception is Thursday, Jan. 23 at 5 p.m.)

Working in a broad range of contemporary photo-based media, the seven featured artists -- Jason Almand, Kim Beck, Gary Cawood, Nic Nicosia, Orit Raff, Martina Shenal and Bill Viola -- scratch beneath the surface of things, causing us to reconsider familiar subjects and everyday preoccupations.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the first American photographers headed west to explore and record a new country’s outer reaches. Today little of that vastness remains untouched. Many contemporary photographers turn their gaze closer to home, conducting explorations of a more psychological kind. Their investigations provide fresh insights into the world right before our eyes, offering an alternative to the family photo album.

Borrowing a format from the turn of the 19th century, Kim Beck of Memphis comments wryly on the current status of the American dream with her stereoscopic look at suburbia. Instead of natural wonders, her subject is the omnipresent housing development and the resultant denuding of the very countryside celebrated by her precursors.

Jason Almand, from Irving, Texas, addresses similar issues with Landscape, a diptych that at first appears to be a hillside barrio, but upon closer inspection reveals a tightly packed collage of contemporary suburban homes with a perfect, cloudless sky above.

With his mesmerizing black and white photographs, Little Rock artist Gary Cawood lets us see through his eyes into a strangely serene world where nothing is very different from where we normally live, but then again nothing is quite the same.

As seen in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, we drive around and around a suburban neighborhood in Nic Nicosia’s black and white video Middletown, where we again find ourselves in a familiar yet peculiar place. Amid clean streets and tidy lawns odd occurrences unfold. Are we merely voyeurs on an endless merry-go-round ride, or should we (can we) get off and lend a hand?

Revealing surprising visual delight in the most mundane of places is New York artist Orit Raff’s gift to the viewer. Dirty pots and stained pans become treasure troves of random pattern and color. With her seductively beautiful photograph of a freezer, she provides the ultimate excuse for not defrosting the icebox.

For those unwilling to totally abandon their belief in fairy tales and happy endings despite all evidence to the contrary, Memphis based Martina Shenal’s sensuous photographs recover that long lost moment when magic was real and our shoes really could glow red.

Internationally known artist Bill Viola offers evidence of one man’s reconnection with the natural world in The Reflecting Pool, suggesting that spiritual transformation is still possible in an artificial and highly stressful world.

Support for this exhibition was provided in part by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2 to 5 p.m. on Sunday. The exhibition (and opening reception) are free and open to the public. For additional information please contact the Bradbury Gallery at 870-910-8115.

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