"FAMILY": Text comments on image's emotional content. "The singer gets all the glory": One of two black and white tripychs in St. John-Vincent's new show in which the juxtaposition of noirish images creates unanswerable questions.

Few photographers, local or otherwise, have an eye and a vision as poetic as that of Cleveland's Karen St. John-Vincent. Her work doesn't just capture a moment; it captures moments that contain entire narratives, offering the viewer the chance to ferret out these oblique stories from the sets of provocative cues she provides.

It's probably technically incorrect to refer to St. John-Vincent as a "photographer" these days. She's moved from highly conceptualized set-ups which she captures on film to photo-based works that are drawn on, painted over and bolted to painted backgrounds that incorporate words, either in the picture itself or as adjoining text. The photo has become merely the starting point for a flight of imagination. Once her works merely presented mysterious circumstances without comment; now the mysteries are deepened by being obscured or commented upon.

Her latest show, Telling Tales Out of School, is subtitled "recent works by Karen St. John-Vincent," yet those who've followed her work will recognize many of the underlying images from her previous shows. She has, however, transformed them by using them as raw material for new visions, digging out whole other worlds of meaning. She says the genesis of this new work was time spent travelling on her husband's boat, with limited space to work. She made copies of some of her favorite photos and began to draw on them with various easily transportable media. The chunks of prose poetry inspired by the photos required no special resources either. Some of the drawing is primitive: child-like birds or butterflies, crudely painted swaths of background that appear finger-painted, odd little black-pen squiggles, outlines or color auras around figures. This work is layered and textured, a physical depiction of the layered and textured visions her work has always presented. In many the paint overruns the original image like kudzu.

A film noir sensibility still underlies her images. There's a sense of darkness, that the moment pictured could take a turn for the tragic, the heartbreaking. These are indeed decisive moments, but what decision is being made is entirely unclear. Though all of her work features people, their faces are usually blurred or obscured or their expressions are blank. Emotions are conveyed in the spaces between the people, in their stances, in the words and in the pictures' composition. From there, things become even more inexplicable; this is not work you will enjoy if you like answers to your questions.

One of the most photographically straightforward works is a triptych titled, indeed, "The Question," comprising three black-and-white photos. On the left, a gorgeous young blonde woman in thick eyeliner and a sparkly scarf gazes pensively from a dark background toward the middle photo, a full-figure shot of a young man emerging from similar darkness. The third photo shows a couple, off-center so that most of the shot is black, apparently about to kiss. The man faces the camera, partly obscured by the woman's back. It's a different couple, however. So what's photographically straightforward becomes a veritable secret - and it's anyone's guess what the question is.

The bulk of the show breaks down into two sets of photos. In one, heavily embellished 8-by-10-inch color images are set next to blocks of text, many labeled "An Observation," that comment on the emotions underlying the depicted scenario more than illuminate it. The other, her most recent, are large-scale pictures in which the original images are bolted or grommetted onto a painted picture field, the photo itself painted over, its background textured, crosshatched, smeared. Most incorporate text painted onto the image itself.

Typical of the former is "I Want to Be a Cowboy," which, like most of this series, deals with the fleeting nature of relationships, whether romantic or familial, including the evanescence of childhood. In the photo, a woman sits in the background watching a small boy in the foreground playing with a toy horse. A misshapen heart is crudely drawn on her shirt, emitting black lines that connect to the boy. Over his head the artist has drawn a couple of small horses and connected them to his head with similar black lines. His hair is daubed with gold and his head outlined with yellow, idealizing him and giving him an otherworldly aura. Above the woman's head is a blob of pink with black squiggles, like a weird hat. The accompanying text reflects the woman's fleeting, flitting, stream-of-consciousness thoughts on everything from the boy growing up to distant lawnmowers to where she left her cell phone.

In "Woman with a Fruit Bowl," a seemingly faded photo of a woman occupies a small portion of the frame at the upper right, like a ghostly presence, while the bulk of the image features a primitively drawn table with a fruit bowl, jug and wine glass, as if a child were copying an image out of a book. Underneath, a series of color blocks reads like some kind of art-class exercise. With all the doodling, the photo looks almost incidental and the text reflects the woman's position as an uneasy object of ephemeral attention.

As engaging as these photos are, the larger photos which make heavy use of textured paint and hardware are the most gorgeous and powerful in the show. In "It's So Hard to be a Saint," which features those words painted across the top of its alley with a city skyline at its mouth, the photo is mere framework for an image dominated by paint. Its violent colors and squirming brush (or finger?) strokes accent the canyon of buildings, while the distant skyline sports a tiny, pale American flag and a burst of gold, red, lavender and orange like a sunset over the skyscraper spires. In contrast, beneath the feet of the dominant, silhouetted foreground figure, curvaceous green snakes slither, accented by nuts and bolts. The photo itself is merely the jumping-off point for a sizzling, squirming painting that exudes menace and malevolence.

Two other images in this series stand out. "Hard" and "Butterfly Girl" both coalesce around a black-and-white photo of a beautiful young girl, superimposed on a picture field that's dense with heavily applied, even blobbed, black paint on a pebbled paper, creating a subtle textural interplay. Sparing touches of silver and white paint and silver and gold nuts, bolts and grommets accent the image's darkness and, in "Butterfly Girl," there's a gold butterfly drawn at the upper-right-hand corner in a window of white that pierces the dark background that surrounds the same child, this time white-gowned, clutching a string of pearls. These paintings are less overtly threatening than many of the others, yet the hulking blackness enveloping the placid child could be a metaphor for loss of innocence - or not. St. John-Vincent will never tell, nor will her images.

Telling Tales out of School: Recent works by Karen St. John-Vincent: Through April 28 at Brecksville Center for the Arts, 8997 Highland Dr., Brecksville, 440.526.6232.