Those of you who didn’t make it to Miami but still want to do a little art gazing should head to Friedrich Petzel to check out Dana Hoey’s show “Experiments in Primitive Living.”

Her new exhibition of photographs is a gestalt of frozen limbs, ladybug brimmed bonnets, smoke and canes. The proposed world conjures what remains of life under extreme weather limitations: ash, freeze, thaw, flood and drought. A world where a nest of wriggling salamanders and a fallen woman covered in ash carry equal visual weight. As if to suggest that whoever or whatever is able to survive such radical shifts in atmosphere will be rewarded by a grand equalizing force. All versions of Hoey’s planet are stripped of machines of any kind, with the exception of a lone “game camera” looming dramatically in the forefront of a photo. Is this image the key to her riddle of survival? Perhaps. In the hierarchy of life, when weather always wins, the question hovers….what merit does a camera hold?