DaytonDailyNews.com

Come in out of the cold this winter and warm up with images of flowers dappled with sunshine. The last stop of the traveling exhibit, "In The Garden: Photographic Images by Ohio Artists," is on view at the Dayton Visual Arts Center. The exhibit was organized by The Massillon Museum and funded by the Ohio Arts Council.

The exhibit features myriad ways to interpret a garden's beauty: archival injet prints, dry plate tintypes, color prints, collages, photo monoprints, chromogenic color prints, and even X-ray prints.

Two large-scale archival inkjet prints by Tony Mendoza greet visitors just inside the door. Get a very unusual, bug's eye view of a field of yellow flowers. It's a new perspective with little surprises, like a ladybug resting on one of the petals. Mendoza is a professor of photography at The Ohio State University.

"Gardens appeal to a wide variety of audiences, and gardens tend to evoke memories for all who enjoy them," said Massillon Museum of Art exhibit organizer/curator Christine Fowler Shearer. "In the same way, each artist who focuses on the garden as a theme will approach it in a new way."

Four artists in the exhibit reside locally, and are current DVAC members:

Paula Willmot Kraus is showing color prints that showcase one aspect of a plant through focus and lighting. "Japanese Fern" brings out the minute details of a curled leaf, while softening the backdrop.

"They begin as blades of grass, flowers and seed pods, but when translated through the lens, they become a palette offering up shades and shapes and colors," said Kraus, a fine art photographer and educator at The Ohio Institute of Photography and Technology. "At times the intimate magnification causes the slightest adjustment in focus to alter everything. The flora become abstract, soothing, Zen-like."

Benjamin Montag is presenting five small dry plate tintypes of insects in dark frames. His perspective makes the bugs seem fragile and vulnerable.

"There is a hidden beauty within the delicate skeleton of a cicada shell," said Montag, an assistant professor at Wright State University teaching photography and art education.

Andy Snow has been working as a photographer and digital artist for 35 years, and his expertise is apparent. For "Empress's Garden, Beijing" a delicate tree becomes the vertical filter that beautifies and transforms human-made horizontal elements. In another image, thick fog lends a mysterious mood. The color digital print of "Orchid 1530" changes the blooms to symmetrical designs of light and shadow.

"Serendipity manifests nonverbal beauty in the play of color and light. Content blooms in the face of infinite non-narrative perception," Snow says.

Like Mendoza, Sean Wilkinson's perspective for the exhibit was from below looking up. His images focused on the beauty of fallen leaves on an abandoned greenhouse in Yellow Springs. In the Transparency series, a single leaf seems to float on separate panes of glass. He is a Universitiy of Dayton faculty member.

Other artists in the show include David Bergholz, Judith McMillan, Ardine Nelson, P.J. Rogers, David Stichweh, and Tennyson Williams.

HOW TO GO

What: "In the Garden: Photographic Images by Ohio Artists"

Where: Dayton Visual Arts Center, 118 N. Jefferson St.

When: Through Feb. 19

Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday (until 9 p.m. Thursday)

More info: (937) 224-3822 or www.daytonvisualarts.org