Gallery r is RIT's off-site teaching gallery, where students in a gallery-management course learn real-life skills while pitching in to exhibit art from RIT and beyond. That it's a student-run space both excuses and makes more serious any fumbles found by viewers. That said, the gallery presents many interesting exhibits that often showcase the school's focus on technology, such as the annual "ArtTech" exhibit, on display now through June 28.

"ArtTech" provides viewers with an opportunity to learn a bit about the current tools and techniques being used in digital art creation, as well as view a sampling of works by regional students and professionals. The exhibition's categories are graphic design, photography, digital illustration, collages/montages, printmaking, animation, digital video, interactive art, and 3D illustrations.

A bit disappointingly - and surprising for a techie show from a techie school - the latter three groups can be viewed only at rochesterarttech.com, because of formatting and compatibility issues at the gallery. To add more frustration, the web manager did not specify which works made it into the show (all who entered are present online). The online gallery presents many impressive works, but I wish the tags told more about the students and professional artists, including their level (high school, college, and professional artists were represented), and where in the region they work.

At the physical Gallery r space, "Wrong Way" is all about simulated perspective; a digital photo altered in Photoshop CS2 by an artist who goes by the name lemonlighting, and who uses the "tilt-shift" method. A bird's eye image is manipulated to resemble a miniature model, realistically replicating a train set or doll house. Here, the effect is achieved with a corner curb and cracked pavement blurred just-so, and paired with crisply detailed Do Not Enter and One Way signs.

A wall of tiny works presented in salon style features digital photography as well as combinations of media and techniques, including the diminutive digital collages by Katrina Butkas. In her statement, the artist says that she seeks to create a "harmonious intersection of technology, nature, and spirituality" by using the digital camera to "capture transient relationships between natural elements" that move her spirit, and then using software to distill that feeling and make it "more potent for viewers." "Lakshmi" is the Hindu goddess embodiment of beauty, purity, abundance, and fertility, and here appears like a shimmering Rorschach butterfly made of a pattern of light on water. Butkas' other images include a cathedral-like space of light and patterns receding in space named after the chakra "Svadhisthana," "Shiva-Shakti," a mandala pattern of wood shards on snow, and more ethereal pieces.

Impressive scenes composed entirely on the computer includes Shin Wakabayashi's "Rice Field Dream," which was composed on Adobe Illustrator, and features a sleeping bearded and barefoot man drifting passively on his back among an expertly rendered school of jellyfish, high above the hints of green patchwork fields. In contrast, the same artist's "Crawling" is a dystopian scene of a metal-plated man struggling under the burden of a large gear, with the backdrop of a vivid red sky and silhouettes of factory smokestacks, and a Nine Inch Nails logo curiously riveted over the eyes of his mask.

Brooke Vandever contributed two disturbing-intriguing photos of a man in a squalid, softly lit, detritus-filled environment. "This piece is about consumption and how people deal with fear," she says of "He Used to be Such a Nice Boy," in which animal skins hang above a seated nude man who holds a rope-secured mask of meat before his eyes. The work is a quiet and effective commentary on how we use our own tendencies toward consumption to blind ourselves to the desolate lives we've created. The elegant arc of his arm above his head and the other leading down his body keep the eye moving about the picture, and Vandever's technical skill with lighting and exposure wrenches up the sense of uneasiness.

Josh Marrah's digital photo series focuses on the intersection of "where man meets nature and how he interacts with it," he says in a provided statement. We often forget we are of the earth, not just on it, and our self-importance informed by the illusion of this otherness has caused detrimental detachment. Marrah brings us back down to earth with two untitled and subtle reminders: an ocean-side, sun-bleached cluster of wood with a human arm reaching out like another branch in the bunch; a man in night-woods feeding, or poking at, a hungry inferno twice his own height. His absorbed expression nods to our ongoing fascination with fire, and our need for and fear of it.

Most haunting, though, is Marrah's depiction of the endlessly alluded to, tragic archetype "Ophelia," who here appears as a lady in white lying prone in a low stream. The sunny day filters through thick, lush greenery, but since the image was shot from the middle of the stream, and no branches hover directly above, a sense of an open, lofty sylvan room results. The image feels like a lonely, lovely crime scene, and balanced by the large boulder in the foreground, the smallness - the insignificance - of the model's figure in the space is emphasized. The scene is one of quiet despair and general environmental nonchalance, reminding me of Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Ophelia too is framed within an indifferent space, which will eventually consume her as the world moves onward.

"ArtTech"

Through June 26

Gallery r, 775 Park Ave.

242-9470, galleryr.org

Thur-Fri 2-6 p.m., Sat-Sun 1-5 p.m.