Sarah Hobbs didn't go to Yale; her work just looks as if she did, rather than the University of Georgia. The large-scale photographs by this emerging Atlanta artist share the intelligence and incisive wit of the theatricalized color images associated with the Yale photography program.

In other words, her stuff's funny, smart and about serious subjects. The seven works in this show deal in an exquisitely beautiful way with psychological topics that could be the subject of heavy-handed picture-making. Instead, Hobbs gives us something like elaborately set up one-liners that linger in the mind because they contain more than simple jokiness.
Perfectionist is the easiest. An old-fashioned desk, a ball point pen next to a neat stack of sheets of paper, and a huge pile of wadded-up balls of the same material convey a crisply humorous allegory of a commonplace condition. The careful placement of these few elements, and the meticulous attention to details of light, makes an arresting and lasting work of art out of an idea that easily could have been a glib cartoon.

The other photos in the series range from amusing to unnerving. Indecisiveness is another formalist joke, a chair set in an alcove in which the walls are completely papered with a rainbow of colors from paint sample books. Obsessiveness is the flip side of that idea, a room in which the walls have been painted with melted chocolate, with the discarded wrappers of hundreds of chocolate bars piled on the dropcloth.

Memory Loss is a little scarier: a bedroom filled with cloudy-looking cotton or wool in which random names and objects are enveloped, barely visible in the engulfing murk. The remaining photographs in the series likewise deal with characteristics ranging from Vanity to Low Self-Esteem with varying degrees of success. All are imaginative and well-composed; some are simply more obvious than others.

Hobbs hasn't completely hit her stride; some of these works seem a bit forced, but the overall effect is spectacularly impressive. This is someone from whom much more will be expected, and one hopes she can keep up the pace without losing the lightness of touch that makes this work successful. It's all too easy to fall prey to ponderousness, but Hobbs seems capable of continuing to deal with potentially distressing themes in a style that makes them palatable.