Karly Wildenhaus, Untitled (Woman), 2008, digital GIF.

Downstairs, Charles Benton's Opposing Photographers presents a more conceptual bend from the rest of Young Curators. With two back-to-back slide projectors cued to trade slides of photographers, the work catches the viewer in a crossfire of sorts -- an interactive, if less inspired, update on Janice Guy's seedier works. This dialogue with early conceptual photography is also at play in Amy Stein's artists, who wear their influences on their sleeves (and in their notes: Cindy Sherman, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Gregory Crewsdon are all payed homage). Dining on the stock gestures of film and TV, the photographs on display aren't nearly as engaging as they are attractive -- they bear far fewer contentions (politically or otherwise) than their predecessors -- and there's a lack of spark because of it.

While Brian Bress' big, slack pictures of thrift store riffraff come off as a bit staid, his theatrical Oh! Hi! -- an otherwise normal photograph of a front yard despite its impishly obscured human subject -- makes a charmingly ribald attack on pictorial space. Bress' flattened planes find a digital counterpart in Laurel Ptak's sprawling, live wire Graphics Interchange Format. With an open-ended premise (Ptak asked 26 artists to deliver a digital GIF image in three days, advocating the use of photographic material) the end results are wildly disparate. While some used it as a vehicle for stop-motion animation and others a chance for more abstract, 8-bit visuals, the best works hatched upon the terse mysticism and flat effect that the GIF is capable of. M. River's bouncy two-tone works, Rodo-Vankuelen's blinking totems or Petra Cortright's mercurial mash-ups of Google Maps and grey windows (of the Operating System variety) affect a near-sublime digital stupor, caught between inspired lyricism, cheap visuals and the GIF's epileptic pace. (Karly Wildenhaus, Asha Schechter, Robert Overweg and Ilia Ovechkin all deliver hypnotic works that are well worth sitting through the entire loop to see). At a gasping 67 works total, "Graphics Interchange Format" finds the GIF at both ends: a medium both saccharine and expansive, going down well in tiny gulps while also offering the possibility of more extensive, starched explorations.