Provocative worlds of wonder

What Tomczak constructs are dreamscapes that are very pretty, if vaguely damp. These large-format color Polaroid images are part Joseph Cornell, part Laura Ashley. They're distant, lesser kin to Olivia Parker's "Composites."

At their best, Tomczak's images suggest Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosities that collectors in early modern Europe delighted in: jumbles of art objects, geological specimens, antiquities, and natural history oddities. Motifs that Tomczak favors include flowers, birds, insects, eggs, and appropriated images. Tomczak's husband owns an antique and architectural-salvage business, Florida Victorian, and she gets many items she photographs from the store's wares.

At their not best, Tomczak's 39 images suggest what one imagines ads for Florida Victorian might look like. Frame and matte not only enclose a world; they keep out the world, too. This creates a hothouse quality many may find beguiling. To less lavish sensibilities, that quality flirts with kitsch and embraces preciosity.

The few smaller photographs here, such as "Equus, Protea" and "Tribute, the Archivist," suggest that scale does Tomczak a disservice. They have an intriguing delicacy absent from their larger brethren. Quantity ill serves her, too. With the Davis and Cass shows, the cumulative effect of multiple images enhances each. Tomczak might be better off with half as many photographs, or fewer. Her work, a feast of sherbets, reminds us even the finest ices cloy when more than just a few are served.

There's nothing Victorian about Cass's "Pins." Rather, the 20 color photographs recall Eliot's phrase in "Prufrock," "formulated, sprawling on a pin" - or pins. Having torn pictures from magazines and arranged them on cardboard, he sticks map pins (the kind with round colored heads) in the arrangement and photographs the result.