Places in the art

Dudik presents place in the classic sense of feet-on-the-ground hereness in “Betty, Oregon Road.’’ Background smoke frames a woman as she stands - no, she’s planted - in a landscape of dormant grass and largely leafless trees. There’s no such indication of rootedness for the residents of the Hungarian housing facility for runaways and at-risk teens that Monika Merva photographs in “The City of Children.’’ Instead there’s a sense of fragile community born of age and circumstance even more than location.

Matar’s series “A Girl and Her Room’’ offers place as a location defined by emotion as well as space. Whether the girl is a Jamaica Plain goth or a 16-year-old Palestinian on the West Bank, it’s the same desire for a room, or sanctuary, of one’s own. It’s also there, even more poignantly, in Mary Beth Meehan’s “El Salvador - Central Falls, R.I.,’’ from her “Undocumented’’ series. This, too, is a bedroom, belonging to two children. The presence of stuffed animals suggests they’re younger than Matar’s sitters. We don’t see the children, though, since the subjects of Meehan’s project are all illegal immigrants. Here the idea of sense of place takes on a weight of meaning beyond anything found elsewhere in “Exposure.’’

The photographs in Litovsky’s “Untag This Photo’’ manage to appear both hectic and empty. “This project,’’ she writes, “is my exploration of how public behavior and personal representation have been influenced by the accessibility of electronic media, specifically digital cameras, iPhones, and networking sites.’’ The images are unframed, as if to underscore the unmoored quality of the lives Litovsky lets us glimpse. The blank stare of the woman off to one side in “Untitled #3’’ would be unnerving under any circumstances. Juxtaposed with the hey-look-at-this hilarity of the trio of revelers beside her, it seems almost penal.