Megan Plunkett homes in on the sweet spot between irreverence and earnestness. Her current show at Sweetwater, ‘Leave It’, combines an almost meditative return to past motifs with a cheeky taste for formal and semiotic association. A can of Coca-Cola reappears in a row of small, spartan photographs, all titled Signs and Wonders with a corresponding number. Other works in this series display an inscrutable object, barely perceptible as a shiny shard in darkness. Each photo’s matting is specific, with horizontally cropped images sitting inside of portrait-oriented frames – all metal and either black, silver or red. In one photo, two dogs – one real, the other porcelain – stare off-frame. They rhyme with another big image wherein two dogs appear on the cover of a William Wegman book, one of them hidden beneath a small, vaguely animalistic sculpture (Dreamland 1). The spirit animal of Plunkett’s approach could be John Baldessari, whose work is about playing the associative power of images with maximum lightness. In a similar way, Plunkett stretches the viewer’s mind between the sensing of a logical system and pure play.