Ongoing: Tom Sliter at Multiple Exposures Gallery

Rarely does a photographer’s choice of using sepia toning rather than standard black and white make as much of a difference as it does with Tom Sliter’s exhibit, Chiseled by Time: Sculptures of the Mojave Desert. For the project, Sliter parked himself in California’s desolate Mojave Desert, capturing a mix of landscapes and close-ups of boulders and desert flora. In the desert’s overwhelmingly beige environment, Sliter’s sepia palette works better than either color or black and white could. Sliter’s fine-grained digital images pay off the closer the viewer gets to the photograph, revealing mottled, dimpled, and crevassed rock surfaces and the delicate spikes of yucca fronds. One image gainfully pairs rough rock surfaces with an angular, starburst-shaped portrayal of the sun; other photographs portray smoothly weathered boulders as if they were fleshy skin pics. The shade of sky varies from image to image, alternating between wispy cirrus clouds and inky black vacuums. Sliter’s standout image is “Joshua Tree Boulders,” a sharply horizontal landscape that combines gently undulating layers of sky, mountains, boulders, and shrubbery and offers enough detail to somehow show every individual clod of earth. Chiseled by Time: Sculptures of the Mojave Desert runs through March 9 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson