As Below, 2007; pigment prints on transparencies, Plexiglas, florescent lights.

Elise Irving's exhibition opens with a cloud-like cluster of unframed Polaroids whose images bear the marks of abuse that such casually taken photos often endure. The occasional rips and stains reinforce the vaguely forlorn feeling the images collectively possess: a broken mirror rests on a neglected wicker chair, a TV antenna faces down a palm tree, and snow quietly encroaches a tangle of leafless twigs. While their distressed materiality and format are a bit cliché, the Polaroids' honesty lends their brooding an unexpected and satisfying weight.

Just past the Polaroids, the lightboxes that give the show its name hang in a slightly darkened rear space. Constructed by sandwiching transparent emulsions between multiple layers of clear acrylic, the softly glowing boxes depict a wide range of subjects. The layered creation of depth recalls scenery flats and produces a glowing diorama-like space that floats between dimensions. Some depict recognizable landscapes. Others are so blurry and abstracted that they almost cease to read as photographs. The strongest depict domestic interiors in which the lightboxes' rectilinear logic resonates with the depicted architectural structures. The ghostly edges of walls, doorframes, and mantles stitch together across multiple depths to produce a tangled yet integrated environment. In its best passages, Irving's work begins to illuminate the shifting complexity of our relationships to the domestic spaces we occupy, from those of our childhood to the ones we inhabit today.

Elise Irving: "Lightboxes" is on view at Marke Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.