For almost the entire show, that gap translates into the fragility of childhood imaginings. It could come in the delicacy of Juliet Margaret Cameron's prints from the 1860s. It could come in Dawoud Bey's intensely introspective Mandy . She takes a single face, more than two feet high and repeated three times, as if to make its beauty finally come true. In answer, it seems tainted by danger.
Chairs loom way too close, and a child cries in disconcerting close-up, as if hit by a thorn.
Hans Soderquist and Sally Mann ask what life can hold for their own children. The first uses family portraits to make one wonder, even before computer invasions , when intimacy begins to mean a loss of privacy. Mann obscures a child in shadow, as a man looms from behind. A playground swing circles her child's head like a noose. The imagined listener These artists explore the connection between the risks of growing up and the gamble of creation.