As ridiculous as it sounds, rocks are existentially interesting. Rock collections are basically constellations of tiny planets you might imagine visiting. Each rock has history, as part of a larger rock that it's broken away from, and now it's its own world, offering evidence of the forces that made it. Rock Show, at James Harris Gallery, is a series of simply constructed sculptures and plain but tricky photographs by Seattle artist Sol Hashemi, the sculptures strewn about on the floor and the images hung at various heights on the walls.
The gallery looks like a sea littered with islands. But Hashemi's vast, tiny landscapes are differing types: pleasure islands where the next morning never comes; cool, remote mountain ranges like the ones in cowboy paintings; beachsides on which to set your can of Cherry Coke while you swim. None of the works in Rock Show are titled; they don't need to be. A barnacle-encrusted rock sliced in half, with a lime-flavored Bud Light wedged between the halves, is its own latter-day Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. Another slab of rock wears on its spotted flat surface a (camouflaged) Band-Aid printed with an image of autumn leaves. It's a nude portrait.
In Hashemi's photographs, you lose your sense of scale, lose your footing. What's going on with the rocks under your feet? One large photograph is a striped rock against a stark white background. The top of the rock is shaped like a mountain, while its horizontal stripes conjure up the foreground, middle ground, and background of a traditional painted landscape. But the top of the rock also casts a mountain-shaped shadow on the white paper, a reminder that this is just a rock lying on a surface. Your mind travels freely between what you see and what you imagine you see, walking the essential desire of landscape.
One work ingeniously combines sculpture and photography. It's a camera flash duct-taped to the open end of an agate, covering it over so it looks like a plain rock. The flash is also rigged for interaction. If you take a flash photograph of the sculpture, the flash part of the sculpture gets tripped, and the agate glows from the inside.
In Woody Allen's movie Love and Death, an old peasant waltzes around with his tiny chunk of grassy land tucked into his shirt, refusing to sell it because one day, he shall build on it. Along with hiking, beachcombing, picnicking, partying, and the general leisure relationship with land, the other backdrop of Rock Show is the comedy and tragedy of real estate. Artists famously can't afford to own houses. Rock Show contains the transporting promise of music, of never settling down. One rock has a tiny Mylar party favor stuck in its surface like a palm tree, and a disco machine casts rhythmic red and green lights on it, like an eternal party, like Ariel meets Dubai. Hashemi—already, in his first gallery solo—is a roadside magician whose lo-fi, credulity-straining style reveals the fact that we want to succumb to the imaginary aspects of real landscapes. 
