The title of Gallery Four’s current show—You & Me Living Today—sounds like a helplessly precious indie film, but nothing in the show itself cloys. Instead, the second volume of the two-part show—the first, held earlier this summer, dealt with portraiture—is focused, if at times obtusely, on landscape, or, as the show’s subtitle reads, “The Land.”

Although the four included artists—two photographers, a painter, and a video artist—do not share much thematically or aesthetically, the show’s tone is nonetheless set by San Francisco photographer John Chiara, who recently completed a one-month residency in the gallery’s new studio space for visiting artists.

Chiara is best known for his “unique photographs,” images produced from a large format camera he made that can be mounted on a flatbed trailer and used to photograph and develop images of the great outdoors in a single step. The first image in the show, “Seventh Street at Laney (Artist Unknown),” is one of several older pieces in an exhibition made up of mostly new work. The photograph depicts a rusted iron modernist sculpture—the type that appears to have been produced assembly-line style for corporate parks and school yards in the 1960s and ’70s—covered with graffiti. The photograph’s small size, just four inches by four inches, and washed-out colors make it appear like it could have been a found object, an assumption that is only further supported by Chiara’s own label of “(Artist Unknown).”

But read another way, Chiara could be using the work’s title to refer to the artist who produced the sculpture, or the graffiti artists who tagged it. By reconsidering the photograph’s status as the objet d’art, Chiara allows his pieces to be viewed as “part photography, part event and part sculpture,” as he describes them on his web site.

Chiara’s second piece, “Echo Lake at Meyers Grade,” one of the largest works in the show, takes this tripartite mission seriously, as Chiara picks the most mundane location—a mishmash of wrecked guardrails, overgrown weeds, and poorly sited houses—for a work that actively rejects the aesthetic traditions of landscape photography. Instead of showing a comfortable view of objects in perspective, the piece challenges viewers to see the very large image as a landscape at all and to look for a reason for any of the objects to be in the photograph.

Another of Chiara’s works, three silver gelatin photographs all taken while Chiara was in Baltimore, shows that even his more traditional photography exposes dead spaces by using objects—such as rusted sculptures—to reveal the invisibility of the landscape in which they sit.