Most of the landscapes in the Howard Community College group exhibit titled "Landscape" basically exist in the imagination as much as in the actual world. Curated by Kini Collins, this show emphasizes mixed-medium artworks that are creative interpretations rather than literal depictions of the great outdoors.

Even the most conventional artist in the exhibit, Jo Brown, has oil paintings that are slightly abstract meditations on locations on both Cape Cod and our own Chesapeake Bay.

"Salt Marsh, High Tide" and "Chesapeake Summer" are typical in their reliance on simplified seashore compositions that are flat, open and calm. The artist is also sensitive to changes in weather and season, as in the dark clouds gathering in "Turning" and the moody, whited-out atmosphere nearly obscuring a dark shore in "February."

If Brown presents the kind of paintings you expect to see in a landscape exhibit, the other artists here rely on more unconventional materials and methods.

Lyndie Vantine does rely on canvas, but it's often shaped to form mini-landscapes of a sort; she also incorporates real branches in her art-meets-nature assemblages.

In "Patterns," the top half of the canvas is a small, representational painting depicting bare trees while the bottom half of the canvas is a corresponding line-up of actual twigs. Some of those twigs are seen in a natural state, while others are themselves painted. The interplay of natural forms and artistic intervention is an ongoing thing here.

In another work by Vantine, "Fields -- Late Winter," a small piece of canvas has been painted a nature-evocative shade of pale green, and this landscape-evocative canvas is folded over on itself and supported by a framework of woven sticks. This gracefully simple piece is her finest exhibited work, whereas some of the others seem rougher in conception and execution.

Martha Simons' digitally enhanced photographs are shot from her car as she drives around Baltimore. Urban congestion is conveyed by such works as "Commute," with its dense presentation of traffic and garages, and "Lines," with the equally crowded sense of buildings and telephone lines. Simons favors repeated images -- with some of them printed upside down -- to achieve mirroring effects.

In contrast to that photographic density, Laura Vernon Russell is quite spare with the photographic X-rays that she enhances with pencil drawing. "Waiting for the Angel Fall" and the rest of her doctored X-rays all feature the darkly outlined bodies of wounded birds. You can recognize that they're birds, but it's a bit of a conceptual stretch to think of their ghostly outlines as constituting landscapes.

Moving on to an altogether different medium, Penny Bamford has mixed fiber wall hangings inspired by Google Earth maps. "Utah Landscape -- Spring Mountains," "Ganges Delta," "Gulf Coast Delta" and other works rely on curving bands of fiber that resemble landscapes and river deltas as seen from a great height. This sort of abstracted geography is at the heart of this particular exhibit.

Similarly abstract but using yet another medium, Cinder Hypki suggests landscapes in such ceramic tile mosaics as "Patterson Park II: Toward the Pagoda." She relies mostly on nothing more than simply arranged black, white and gray tiles to give a sense of tree trunks and branches. Your eyes -- and your imagination -- transform these tiles into a landscape.

"Landscape" runs through Nov. 15 at Howard Community College in Columbia. Call 410-772-4189 or go to www.howardcc.edu.

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