“Young Curators, New Ideas II”

Despite its title, this assembly of seven bite-sized exhibitions underwhelms in terms of innovative or even distinct curatorial voices, blending together into a single, conventional summer group show. Fortunately, there’s intriguing art throughout, and interestingly, the most compelling works share an unseasonably haunted quality.

Bryan Zanisnik’s photograph Mom and Dad in Outer Space, for instance, shows his parents in their living room as familiarly domestic aliens, rather abjectly peering from cutout eyeholes in the lamp shades they wear over their heads. The installation Lost Gloves, by an artist team called Las Hermanas Iglesias, pairs 62 gloves and mittens found last winter with mates made from painted paper, a memorial to forgotten objects and absent owners. Jaret Vadera’s video 1973 (When You Grow Up…) transforms a vintage children’s film about adult careers into apparitional blurs and a robotic voiceover that sounds like Stephen Hawking.

Best of all, Taylor Baldwin’s sculptural ensemble I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts includes a spectral chain-saw cast in translucent acrylic, sitting atop a schematic tree stump made of wood scraps papered with images of foliage; a hand-drawn copy of a 1908 San Francisco Chronicle with front-page stories about a devastating fire in a sequoia forest and an invasion of hoboes on a train; a trilobite fossil; and sawed-up police barricades, among other items. The quirky mash-up of environmental loss, vanished vagabonds, ancient relics and state power suggests a mind freely zinging between current events and the remembrance of things past. —Joseph R. Wolin