Santa Monica

In her straightforward, soberly impassioned installation, “After the Fact . . . Some Women,” Connie Hatch alludes in part to the double-sided aspect of photography--its appearance of solid truth and the elusive medium of light that creates it--in stating her case about the status of women in society.

Rows of plastic-shielded black-and-white positive transparencies are angled against the wall and lit from below, leaving large slanted shadows between them. As you walk past each one, your body blots out the shadow. In one grouping, the images are of women who disappeared or died under strange circumstances (detailed in sober “case study” sheets). Some, like Anne Frank and Christa McAuliffe, are famous; others, like a Mrs. Van Zile--who died of lung cancer after years of washing the clothes of her asbestos factory-worker husband--are not. By stepping across their shadows, the viewer mimics the casual eradication of uncomfortably accusatory information in tidy history books and airbrushed official accounts.

Another similarly engineered grouping of images consists of vintage photographs of houses where Hatch lived. On a separate sheet of plastic under the title “Homes I Will Never See Again,” she offers a list of addresses with chronological dates. But this arrangement seems too flat; the homes don’t have the immediate, personal impact of the faces.

Other elements of the piece include a variety of found texts that disparage women’s abilities, insult their sense of self-worth or invade their privacy. Each passage is mounted within a distorting plastic cube that evokes the writer’s bias.

Risking charges of flat-footedness and lack of subtlety, the installation nonetheless has a plainness and single-minded integrity that quietly demands a hearing. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to Sept. 2.)