Photography's a much wider medium than what most of us with cameras think. Given the proper philosophic bent, it can bend the way we all see and experience the world around us. Take the new "Landscape2 Photography" exhibit opening at SUNY-Ulster's Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery next Thursday evening, January 28 and running through February 26. In keeping with recent shows there and elsewhere around the region, the new exhibit focuses on two artists whose similarities draw magical points from the work on view, but also widen one's sense of theme and photographic possibilities far beyond all that's seen on the actual gallery walls.

Jared Handelsman of Catskill has long explored ways of getting beyond the separating element of the photographic lens, by experimenting with landscape photograms illuminated by the moon, car headlights and flashlights and, more recently, by utilizing video technology to investigate the play of light and shadow in interior spaces: the reflection of reality that thoughtful folks have been investigating since Plato's cave.

Phil Underdown of Gardiner's large-scale "Grassland" series photographs explore varieties of meaning in a single 500-acre expanse of Ulster County wetlands that served as a military airstrip in the last century and are now a National Wildlife Refuge. The results draw into play the banal and the lyrical in what the artist speaks of, in terms of the roles that policy plays on how we see. Both men are enterprising artists with singular visions and rising portfolios, seen and experienced via their keen insistence on playing visual ideas off philosophic theory.

An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 28 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery in Vanderlyn Hall on the Stone Ridge campus. The Gallery is open Mondays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and by appointment. It is closed on college holidays. For more information, call (845) 687-5113 or visit www.sunyulster.edu.