The Rotunda Gallery, 33 Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights, presents What Happened in Lime Mills?, which provides a way of looking at collective tragedy. Organized by writer and guest curator Nelly Reifler the exhibition opens on Thursday, January 17 with an artists' reception. The exhibition will remain on view through March 9. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, Noon - 5 PM and Saturday, 11 AM - 4 PM. Admission is free. Information: 718-875-4047; or www.brooklynX.org/rotunda.

Built around a loose narrative of fictional plagues and places, What Happened in Lime Mills? evokes the universal and particular in human epidemics. The exhibition will recontextualize our notions of illness and deepen our understanding of the historic and contemporary plagues which afflict human beings. What Happened in Lime Mills? will investigate ways to think about and represent sickness without recourse to the culturally specific and politically charged rhetoric that often surrounds disease. What Happened in Lime Mills? takes viewers into an imaginary place afflicted with an imaginary illness. From metaphorical landscapes that contain a vague sense of unease, to works that zero in on smaller, individual perspectives. The human and biological aspects of sickness will spiral into broader images of disappearance and loss.

In recent months, with history erupting and unfolding before our eyes, we, as a nation and a city, find ourselves living with new fears. Vulnerability is in the air. Through evocative, haunting and even beautiful depictions of a threatened community, What Happened in Lime Mills? offers the viewer new ways of thinking about this fear, and provides an environment where unexpected meanings can emerge.

On February 1st, the Gallery will host a literary event featuring Brooklyn writers reading old and new work about real and imagined plagues. Readers will include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.

Artists include:

Elizabeth Albert whose elegant, meticulous paintings are both seductive and full of foreboding. Whisker depicts an enlarged spike rising out of a swamp in a grove of bare trees.

Edward Coppola whose dioramas are reminiscent of 1950s science fiction movies. Using various- sized glass terrariums, low-wattage light bulbs, and pre-fab plastic toys, he creates miniature barren worlds.

Reet Das has created works on paper by soaking paper in ink, then dropping oil on the surface. The oil moved across the paper slowly, over the course of weeks, pushing away the ink in shapes and patterns that Das had no control over.

Josh Dorman will be showing painted imaginary landscapes. In these semi-cultivated worlds, there is evidence of past habitation, but no figures or any other signs of current human life.

Carola Dreidemie's black-and white video loop, Un-rest reveals a field surrounded by gray hills in which a young woman in a white dress runs in circles, panting, stumbling, speeding up, slowing down, as if caught by the camera in an irresistible gravitational force.

In Madelon Galland's piece Biopsy, ceramic forms vaguely resonant of cells and shells spill from a purse.

Katurah Hutcheson creates highly distorted photos by painting the view out of her studio widow on acetate, then exposing photographic paper to the painting. The end results are haunting abstractions that resemble X-rays.

David Lantow draws mutated cellular forms that act like characters. His piece Eight Ball shows two rows of fleshy spheres, each with its own unique receptor in the center. His Fleshapoids look like mutant germs.

Hunju Park's latest paintings use human hair, nails, and rare Japanese block ink and depict amorphous forms floating through a dark space.

Barbara Reiser will create a child's sick room, complete with narrow bed, medicine bottles, toys on the floor. Reiser's childlike drawings will be hanging on the wall or strewn on the bed.

Joan Snyder's landscapes are metaphors for emotions and events in her life, and the tension between the fierce beauty of nature and deep human sadness are always present in them. The human body and what befalls it-AIDS, miscarriage, cancer-have been her subjects over the years.

Maggie Tobin's pieces are made with human ashes and breast milk. The visceral qualities of her materials contrasts with the imagery, peaceful land-and-cloud-scapes.

What Happened in Lime Mills? was selected by the gallery's Artists' Advisory Committee as part of a curatorial initiative program which supports new and emerging curators and provides opportunities for them to realize their vision in a professional arena. Previous exhibitions selected through the curatorial initiative program have included Flurry (2000), David Burke, guest curator, and Lost and Found: Reclaimed Moments (2001) with Mihee Ahn, guest curator.

Nelly Reifler is co-editor with Paul Auster of the anthology I Thought My Father Was God. Her stories have appeared numerous literary journals including Mississippi Mud, Bomb, The Florida Review, and Exquisite Corpse. A collection of her short stories will be published in 2003 by Simon & Schuster. Ms. Reifler began exploring the subject of the current exhibition through a series of short stories that began over ten years ago in response to the AIDS crisis.