"Best of Pittsburgh 2007," the Three Rivers Arts Festival visual-arts exhibition, projects a contagious vitality and is reflective of its times in range of media and subject.

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette photos Sue Abramson's "Twelve months AK," a site-specific photographic installation, frames a doorway in the PPG Wintergarden, inviting passage. Click photo for larger image. Related articles Festival full of blues at TRAF this weekend Music Preview: Circuits of Steel forges new sound at Arts Festival Three Rivers Arts Festival schedule Stage Reviews: Political satire flows through 4th River See an interactive map for the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

That it was pulled off at all is an achievement, considering the tumultuous year the festival has had and -- while not detracting from PPG's generosity -- that the Wintergarden is a poor environment for most two-dimensional art.

Sue Abramson's dignified photography installation "Twelve months AK," for example, is perfectly suited to its site. The dozen square black-and-white images of winter-stark trees and brush frame the door they surround, blending into the architecture's formal order.

The location also complements the work's subject, which derives from Abramson's grief over her husband's death. The viewer passes through a portal formed by the images, into a revolving door symbolic of the cyclic aspects of recovering from loss, and into a chapel-like space with vaulted ceiling.

"I think so many people don't deal with death," Abramson says. "They don't deal with grieving people, and I just want to put it out there."

Unfortunately Abramson has had to twice print and thrice hang her photographs due to excess heat and humidity. And again, though mounted on board, they've begun to puff, an indication of carelessness that a professional like Abramson is loathe to accept.

Detail of an untitled mixed-media sculpture by Nick Bubash in the "Best of Pittsburgh 2007" exhibition at the Arts Festival. Click photo for larger image.

Fabrizio Gerbino, another of our most accomplished artists, shows the elegant diptych "Untitled: # 1-2," for which a wall had to be built for proper display.

Similarly, Josh Tonies constructed a hexagonal structure with entry, "The Vestibule," upon which hang a variety of evocative, sometimes poignant in their sparsity, mixed-media paintings and drawings to greater or lesser degrees reflective of natural disasters. Tonies is also interested in the contemporary theoretical notion of a "non-place" -- airport, leisure park -- to which one may ascribe personal meaning.

Constructing meaning, identity, even order, seems a lingering muse in the minds of contemporary artists, in the aftermath of the deconstruction exercises of postmodernism. And it's somewhat surprising -- and inspiring -- to see young artists, such as Tonies, challenging what are generally glibly accepted as social or technological advances.

	The figure in Paul Bowden's "Red Alert" laments a spilled can of red paint. Click photo for larger image.

Adam Shreckhise's "storyteller" -- traditionally the keeper of a group's history -- is an appealing concoction of hardware and Plexiglas that rotates and emits a changing assortment of electronic chatter (sounds generated from the voltage kicked out by a 9-volt battery), periodically opening a gaping eye/mouth to reveal a mysterious image within.

Michael Johnsen questions the advances credited to technology in "Passive Telephone Modulator Network," three mid-century model black phones that, when activated simultaneously, obscure rather than facilitate communication. "In many ways I think we have a really irresponsible use of our electronic environment."

John Pena and Ally Reeves have formed a "Pedal Postal Express" that invites visitors to sit at a desk, write a note to someone in town, address an envelope, tuck the note in, stamp the envelope with a pedal postal sticker and drop it into a built mailbox. Pena and Reeves will then deliver the letter by bike.

Adam Welch and Christopher Kardambikis take on nothing less than the collision of intellect and intuition in "The War of Ethos: The Battle of Stability," an installation of mythological scale and reach comprising abstract paintings with subtitles such as "The Conflict of Altruism" and "The Birth of Lust." An accompanying brochure explains some of the symbology employed by the artists, figures that are reminiscent of hieroglyphics, animation and the periodic table of chemical elements.

"Bug or Slug," a video sculpture by Gordon Nelson. Click photo for larger image.

More directly political is Paul Bowden's "Red Alert," a small, non-idealized nude male figure, powder white and bald, holding a paint brush and leaning over a tipped can of red paint that spills across the floor.

Also noteworthy are Nick Bubash's untitled sculpture that calls to mind a reliquary, contemporized and centered with a found object owl, and Rise Nagin's sculpture installation "gizmos," a little Miro, a little Calder, and much of Nagin's painterly sensitivity usually expressed through fiber.

But there are few misses in this show of hits by 40 artists in a diversity of expression.

The exhibition extends beyond the Wintergarden proper, most notably across Fourth Avenue, where several artists have joined forces to transform empty windows into a sophisticated presentation.

Gavin Benjamin's "Peeping Toms" is an amazing feat of photography in which the artist "painted" sitter Harris Ferris, executive director of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, in front of an open shutter with light applied by flashlights during extended portrait sessions. The resultant debonair images are ambiguously assured and troubled, reflections of internal or external personas.

Tucked subtly within Benjamin's imagery are peek holes for viewing videos by Andrew Johnson, Andres Tapia-Urzua, and Carolina Loyola-Garcia, those for the latter having been covered over when I last walked by.

Exhibitors Robin Hewlett and Jennifer Gooch are performance artists, not otherwise represented in the exhibition, who will present "Cell Phone Meet Up" from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. today and "Market Square Dance" from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Friday. Both performances will be given in the pedestrian passageway between Market Square and PPG Plaza.

While contemporary artists and curators tend toward not wanting to overexplain their works, a small catalog with titles and artists' statements would have enhanced the visitor's experience. That of course would require both a financial and staff commitment by the festival. In any event, curator Katherine Talcott and the participating artists are deserving of praise for bringing this stimulating opportunity to the broadly based festival audiences.

"Best" continues through June 17 and is open noon to 8 p.m. daily.