A summer group show generally packs a lot of artwork into a gallery, but a few of the most striking pieces in the otherwise crowded "Summer '08" at the C. Grimaldis Gallery ironically are about empty spaces.

Sofia Silva has two color photographs of a parking garage that literally place it in a different light. In "parking garage -- outside," it's seen in a hazy daylight that makes the gray-white garage's top deck nearly seem to merge with the white sky above it. There are no people or even cars to humanize a space whose barren appearance makes it seem sadly empty and even a tad ominous. Four rooftop light poles provide very little visual relief from all that barren concrete, just as the bare tree branches glimpsed in the distance only hint at the natural world.

Silva's second, similarly sized and composed photo, "parking garage -- night," depicts the garage's top deck barely illuminated by those four light poles. The sky above is a deep black, and the light falling on the parking spaces below is a phosphorescent green suitable for a sci-fi movie.

Another photographer in the show, Dimitra Lazaridou, shares Silva's interest in curiously unpopulated urban places. One of her untitled color photos depicts a nondescript commercial building in such a way that it becomes a geometric study in horizontal rows of windows in the background and a street light pole casting a long shadow against the, yes, empty street in the foreground. Lazaridou's other photo is an equally quiet composition in which a staircase casts its shadow against a boring building's graffiti-marred concrete wall.

For a spare introduction to humanity, Neil Meyerhoff's color photo "Boy Walking to School" depicts a single uniform-clad kid going down an otherwise vacant street in Cuba. There's an almost painterly quality to the shadows cast against a streetscape that can be thought of in terms of boldly simple blocks of color.

Lest you think humanity is absent in this show, Meyerhoff has another color photo, "Festival Morning at Ghat, Varanasi, India," that features such a colorfully garbed crowd gathered at a river's edge that it seems like a prayer for elbow room is warranted.

Among sculptors in the show, one of the most distinctive pieces is Jonathan Silver's bronze "Small Venus." Most of this slender upright sculpture's surface has a pockmarked appearance that doesn't necessarily evoke a human form, but the upper section definitely does have feminine curves. Of course, this statue has no arms, legs or head, so it's even less individualized than the Venus de Milo.

Jon Isherwood has two champlain marble sculptures, "Aletheia" and "Truth," that remain completely abstract and yet allow your imagination to make figurative associations. The curves and indentations in these gray-white sculptures aren't representational, but there is an upward-stretching quality that may prompt thoughts about the human form.

Other artists making an impression include Karl Connolly, who has six small oil paintings in each of which is a single car burning on the road. The paint application is blurry, so there is a dreamy quality. Also affecting our perception is that each already-small painting also has a painting-within-the-painting, specifically, a tiny landscape painting that's in effect inserted just above the burning car. There is a jolting contrast between the anxiety-inducing car fire that comprises the main image and the inserted pastoral scenery.

Several other landscape painters in this exhibit tend to focus on a single landscape, regardless of whether their approach is realistic, expressionistic, abstract or some combination of the above. Although Connolly does some stylistic mixing of his own in terms of paint application, he's most concerned with the juxtaposition of upsetting and peaceful landscapes.

The other painters, photographers, sculptors and mixed-media artists in the show include Grace Hartigan, Eugene Leake, Raoul Middleman, Annette Sauermann, John Van Alstine, John Ferry, Hidenori Ishii, Rene Trevino, Chul-Hyun Ahn, Beverly McIver, Henry Coe, David Brewster, Christopher Myers, Don Cook and Rex Stevens.

"Summer '08" runs through Aug. 23 at C. Grimaldis Gallery, at 523 N. Charles St., in Baltimore. Call 410-539-1080 or go to www.cgrimaldisgallery.com.

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