'Learning to See': A layered view of landscape photography

'Learning to See," Nancy Hellebrand's photo exhibition at the James A. Michener Art Museum, sets forth changing assumptions about American landscape photography - not for her just another traditional view of the natural world.

To accomplish her impressive aim - learning a new way of seeing and presenting landscape simply, in a series of large-scale color photos - is perhaps beyond anyone's ability. Yet taken as a kind of shorthand, the display by this Philadelphia-born photographer, who has been exhibiting internationally since 1973 and working in color digital photography since the 1990s, is both instructive and pleasurable.

Her recent work involves complicated layering of translucent images of tree branches (many photographed in Philadelphia and environs) seen against sky, rocks, and water. Besides superimposing digital files into a single combined image, she places several combined images side by side, connecting them by form, line, and color, either obviously or not so obviously - or, perhaps, not at all. Collage-like, these branches seem to be composed entirely of a fragile, piecemeal surface that denies the volume suggested by the contours, until we begin noticing the layered surfaces beneath.

For me, the enlightening lesson was realizing Hellebrand intends these images to complicate experience, not simplify it - the work of a true visual poet. Her outstanding achievement here is in helping to restore through her complex digital imagery the "mysterious otherness" of the world, doing so with an especially masterly touch, even as she extends landscape photography's range.

The show is dedicated to the memory of her mother, the distinguished gallerist and art collector Janet Fleisher, who died in 2010.

Prince Twins Seven-Seven (1944-2011), a prominent Nigerian folk artist and musician (and, yes, prince) who spent much of the last 15 years of his life in Philadelphia, is featured in a memorial solo show at Indigo Arts Gallery. It emphasizes his background as one of the original artists, and a star, of the Oshogbo School workshops' art movement, which arose in newly independent Nigeria in the early '60s. The artist - his parents' only surviving child of their seven sets of twins - developed a strikingly beautiful and meticulous folk-art style to portray village scenes, creatures (especially birds and fish), and deities such as the goddess Oshun. This show is a fitting salute to one of the most accomplished and widely exhibited Nigerian artists of his generation.

Also on view are contemporaries, notably Asiku Olatunde (1922-1995) with a hammered-aluminum relief, Eden, and younger Nigerian painters inspired by Seven-Seven.

Sharing a painting twin bill at Rodger LaPelle Galleries are Jeanine Leclaire, whose figure subjects in "Otherwise Unseen" are visually exciting because they tell us so much, and Sandra Hoffman's imaginary landscapes, entitled "Textures of Nature," which seem barely tinted with romantic overtones, as if she had remembered them in a state of wistful reverie.

Though Leclaire's figure subjects aren't message paintings, they do have something to say. A subtle message, even an elusive one, it never interferes yet is always there, a combination of tenderness, sadness, and real life as lived by young adults indoors in West Philadelphia. Leclaire is as good a figure painter as you're likely to see. And she's reporting day-to-day reality as she sees it, enjoying herself and taking us along - to a casual meal, into a kitchen, bathroom, or dark interior. She doesn't belabor things, has empathy for her subjects and abundant production - all of which makes her art absorbing. My only quibble: Why nearly always the deep, dark interior, with bright light coming only from afar?

Sandra Hoffman of Jenkintown, a protégé of the late Marty Jackson, caresses the canvas with paint in wide-open landscapes, often at a shoreline or river and drenched in light, sometimes with strong, ominous clouds hovering at close range. In mood, these paintings are elemental if not actually earthy, a bit related to magic. Everything conspires to produce a mood of mystery, even her signature clumps of white birch trees - a hint of ancient idols?