"Reading Between The Lines" April 14th, 2008 By Ana Finel Honigman www. Style.com

  The Chameleon's Mirror, 22" x 22", Lightjet C-print, 2008

Most tourists plan to see the sights and locations that create a place's reputation. But San Francisco-based photographer Airyka Rockefeller has a different way of familiarizing herself with a new locale. Instead of looking at the major monuments or the more esoteric local haunts, she seeks out overlooked and neglected sites and objects for her personal artistic investigations. In "Crooked Meadow," her first solo show at San Francisco's Jack Fischer Gallery, she presents a series of photographs—the lonely rooms of derelict houses, an empty Communist-era stadium—taken in a small Czech town that she visited during an artist-in-residency program organized by Milkwood International. "My artistic material derives from my belief that what is to be found, between the infamous and the forgotten, between intention and chance, is more mysterious, more significant, than any gesture I could propose, any individual I could imagine, or any place I could premeditate," she explains.