One-hundred works grace the walls of this year's "Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition," representing 49 artists from Buffalo to Utica, and Oswego to Binghamton. Though it's overall a strong show with many talented, thoughtful artists, some of the jurors' selections had me scratching my head. For example, Stephanie Davidson of Buffalo was given a huge wall for her blind-contour ink figure drawings, which left me baffled. These are rendering exercises art majors do in Drawing I, not finished works for a show.

Though there are many diverse artists and interests represented in each edition of this biennial regional show, a common theme usually emerges among many of them; some issue weighing heavily on our collective consciousness. This year I found a thread concerning different natures: our impressions of nature, and our own natures, our projected understanding of the wild and our own barely understood wildness. This is seen in the primal-spiritual "portal" works of Paul Brandwein, as well as in Nancy Topolski's "and then there were none" collages about honeybee colony collapse disorder. But everything is represented, from nature's offerings of beauty and sacrifice, to our examinations of our own natures, to what we continue to do to nature without much forethought and despite warning signs.

Rochester artist Matthias Boettrich's grid of photos, "Offerings," depicts dead birds, rodents, and rabbits in vivid color, seemingly a set of gifts from a feline companion. The works evoke that strange combination of pity for the limp and curled little forms and a fascination of being important enough to another species to be the recipient of the spoils of the hunt.

Fran Noonan of Buffalo was drawn to the wide range of temperature in her oil-on-panel, winter-gloaming scenes. In "The Depth Untold," dusky trees stand silently under blankety clouds shot through with fiery light. All three of Noonan's works offer that rare feeling of beholding a landscape that is both incredibly soothing and intriguing.

You might recognize Joy Adams' name from her epic "Mad Sally" series, but in this show, the Trumansburg artist offers works on paper from her "English Fields and Flora" series, which serves as an homage to her birthplace. These works in charcoal and paint on paper are not the single, tidy studies of specimens you might find in a naturalist's field guide, but works of garden minutiae packed with chaotic life, a full view of the wild, crawling world. In "Geranium and the Underworld," the center of the picture springs to colorful detail from a sketch, rife with life: caterpillars, mushrooms, beetles, and worms are also rendered below ground in sketchy root system.

On to human nature: disorienteer HT Coogan of Honeoye Falls contributed "ht coogan's spinning educational turntable of shifting attractions and inconsistent direction," a work in which horseshoe magnets set on a spinning turn table affect loads of stacked compasses surrounding it. The orchestrated chaos is the perfect metaphor for modern life and the presence of too much "helpful" technology. Also see "ht coogan's collection of scanned and bound sketch book pages," the colorful miscellany filled with important irreverence and the stark honesty of personal epiphanies.

Brockport artist Jennifer Hecker's two contributions elicited a "we got Lady Gaga over here" from my date. Evening gown-esque "Martyr Dress No. 3" is made of glass shards and caulk over metal armature, while "Martyr Dress No. 2" resembles a wedding dress made of eggshells, corset, tulle, and glue over foam-covered metal. In her statement, the artist drew parallels to the hair shirts worn by ascetics, and here the ideas of fertility (eggshells) and material wealth (glass shards) are the physical burdens of psychological dealings regarding a woman's worth. That the dresses are empty of a wearer is appropriate - a woman who bases her entire identity around either thing is an empty creature when the ideal cannot be actualized.

Though it's a good idea in theory, I find myself increasingly annoyed by the cell-phone tour system, as not every patron gets decent reception in the gallery, and only a couple of transcription booklets are available. In effect, many patrons miss out on the artist statements, which at times are very helpful in contextualizing the works. A perfect example of the need for posted artist statements is the well-thought-out premise behind the striking work of Manlius artist Kim Waale. In three collage pieces, including a triptych, Waale has pasted the innocent imagery of Disney characters Thumper and Bambi amid massive, drippy strokes of brown paint in otherwise white space. "Increasingly, nature is an idea, a cultural construction, and a commodity," says the artist in her statement. "We are attempting to generate a natural world that we can control and therefore enjoy easily."

This is what we've always done, but now we stand at the pinnacle of our disastrous achievement. Waale's work forces "an interaction between two familiar visual representations of nature," being the happy commodified nature represented by the Disney characters, and the "I am nature" comment made by Jack-the-dripper Pollock in an interview, regarding his "gestural and scatological swaths, drips, and globs of paint," replicated here in Waale's work.

Rochester artist Victor Pacheco's work deals with environmental disaster. "Extraction Site" is a sculptural work jutting from the wall at sight height, a polystyrene "iceberg" with a tiny, steel oil derrick pumping away. Nearby, "Encased" is a giant polystyrene, fiberglass, and metal leaping frog, covered in rivets and suspended at eye level from the ceiling. Inspired by a documentary on the effects of pesticides on frogs living in water sources near farmland, Pacheco created an amphibian whose skin is not water permeable: "in this piece, a fluid movement in time becomes a still form in space. A jump of faith becomes paralyzed by absorption of toxins."

I want to assume the jurors chose the work of Rush artist Jeff Kell so we could have this discussion about the racism we've been tricked into upholding. Though I agree with the artist's premise that we need to examine our ever-hungry materialism, the gorgeously crafted ceramic work "Bling" came off to me as blaming the least of the problem-causers. The big, black vessel is covered in dollar signs, graffiti-style words "excess," "waste," "greed," "envy," and "idolatry," and a hummer with "bling" as a vanity plate. The reverse side depicts a presumably black MC presenting his chain and crown pendent, and the work is topped with a massive diamond ring. While it's true that the commercialized side of hip-hop culture promotes greed and excess, I would advise viewers to look at the white CEOs behind the music-industry curtain with their puppet strings and their yachts.

"63rd Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition"

Through September 25

Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave.

Wed-Sun 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thu until 9 p.m. | $5-$12 | 276-8900, mag.rochester.edu