BEVERLY RAYNER CALLS her artworks in "Toying with Human Nature" the "Genetic Series," and walking through the gallery is a little like being in a scientific laboratory ... circa 1950. Several of the works use antique-looking vials and test tubes as frames for photographs of people wearing old-fashioned clothing and hairstyles. It's not clear who is related to whom in the pictures, or whether they are members of Rayner's own family, but the feeling that comes across is an interesting combination of distant kinship and archaic science. Rayner always cuts the figures out of the photographs, removing any context that might have explained where the people were and what they were doing. Looking at them makes us think about why they seem old, the various visual tip-offs that signify old-fashionedness or farawayness, and the ways in which we remember (or don't remember) our own family histories. Rayner further emphasizes the sense of distance by submerging each photograph under a thin layer of beeswax. The semiopaque wax gives material expression to the abstract idea of "foggy" or "hazy" memory; we literally have to squint to see the people's faces. The beeswax also serves as a kind of shroud, enveloping the figures in a shiny veneer that simultaneously protects them and marks them as relics of the past. Given her minute attention to clothes, hairstyles, and body language, Rayner's sculptures seem to presuppose a stereotypically feminine viewer – perhaps a grandmotherly type who has also devoted much thought to matters of family and genealogy. Such a grandmother would probably also appreciate the artist's use of white fence pickets and velvet wedding-ring boxes as art materials. Such things these days are fraught with irony, of course, but in Rayner's work they point with genuine fondness to a time when they had no such connotations. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 430 Clementina, S.F. (415) 278-9850. (Lindsey Westbrook)