What it is: Roses (2011), ink, acrylic, paper, print, 17 by 13 inches

Where it is: SOIL

It's the underdog show of the month: Timothy Cross's small gathering of painted-­on photos and prints in the back area of SOIL called Don't Blink. Roses is a fresh and poignant painted photograph of red roses. It steals under all your radar. The painted and inked parts are smudgy and washy—pretty, in a messy and decadent way. The total mundaneness of the photograph peeks out from beneath the surface treatments; there's even the ugly glare of a camera flash on one patch of leaves. The reason this painting is so diabolically good is because red roses are such diabolically bad subjects for art. They mean nothing except how much we want them to mean something.