Tom Landowski Gallery, 403 Cedar St, 448-0284.

Through Aug 14.

The other night, Miranda July told me that she does the same thing over and over again, which on reflection doesn't surprise me at all. I was not par- ticularly startled, recently, to pick up the newest edition of The Paris Review (a stodgy old literary publication, if ever there was one) and find in it a short story by her. Staying with one theme, as she has done, allows a kind of freedom of movement that one never discovers in dilettantish jumping around.

What is it that she keeps doing? It's hard to say. Part of what has made me such a big fan of Miranda July's films and CDs (I've read a lot about her performances, but I've never seen one) is that they're not reducible. They won't submit to any label so pat as "the human condition," although the human condition is everywhere in them. I had never heard of her until someone took me to see her short films at the Little Theatre three years ago. In these films--The Amateurist, Atlanta, Nest of Tens--July's instinct for the uncomfortable situation is highly developed and idiosyncratic: In Nest of Tens, a boy gives a baby a ritualistic bath that is so fraught with the possibility of wrongdoing that you start picking at your cuticles.

And yet, there is something precisely correct about it, as with much of what happens in July's bizarre world (an inarticulate black man lectures to a mostly white audience; a researcher "with a background in numbers" watches a bored woman on a surveillance tape; a young champion swimmer sees visions of a dancing woman, perhaps her mother, doing the swim in a baby-doll nightie). All of these films dwell in the separation of action from logic, the nonsense of jargon and business talk, the absurdity of applying systems to human situations. They are very good indeed, especially on repeated viewing.

July's new work, in a show called Go You Good Thing (she has a gift for titles), is notable not least for being her first exhibition in a commercial gallery--this for someone who came up through the punk-rock scene in Portland, fell in with filmmakers, and was recently shown in the Whitney Biennial. Go You is made up of found photographs, both personal and not, to which July has applied orange sticker dots and then enlarged. This is not an exercise in trickery or clever digital manipulation, but are clearly homegrown. The dots that intersect with hands and feet and bodies are not very neatly cut, and some dots seem to have trapped dust motes and vagrant hairs beneath them.

The purpose of the orange dots varies. In some cases, they tenderly protect the main action of the image from the eyes of outsiders. We automatically assume that we're privy to whatever photographs have to offer, but of course we're not; in my favorite image, an androgynous-looking child (July herself?) gestures toward outside the frame, while another girl does something private, covered by orange dots, off to the side. The first child may be commanding the image, but the orange dots tell us where the real action is.

In other images, the dots communicate a previously unseen energy, a visual trope that appeared in Nest of Tens and is also a large part of a new video, Haysha Royko, which is also on exhibit. In Haysha Royko, three people sit nonchalantly in airport chairs, while their different-colored auras, or something much like auras, shape shift, overlap, and compete. (When a little boy leaves the frame, dragging his long, hot-pink aura after him, I laughed out loud. It reminded me of the way women of baby-bearing age stare longingly after children.) In a photograph called Act Natural, the orange dots stalk a group of hikers from the side of the frame; in The Channel, orange-dot energy showers an orchestra conductor in a vintage photo, and is dispersed to the empty seats below, where the dots take on the anonymity of audience heads.

The pull between what has been assigned by the artist and what belongs to the photograph--what may actually be radiating out of it--is what keeps this work from the province of the punch line. Sometimes it takes an orange dot to show us where the human condition is.