TO MAKE THE photographic transparencies in "Photographic Light Panels," Tokihiro Sato employs a darkening filter on an 8-by-10 camera and exposures lasting for as long as two hours. During those intervals he steps within the picture frame, moving slowly but constantly in order to remain invisible in the final image, and intermittently uses a mirror to reflect light back into the camera lens. The results are crisp black-and-white pictures of landscapes and cityscapes speckled with bright white spots, which look almost like holes punctured in the images – or perhaps even in the texture of reality – when they are mounted on light boxes and backlit. Sato's pictures are riddled with finitude. The scenes he depicts become stages on which the playful life of his reflected light enters and passes away. Rather than decisive moments, he captures the softer and quieter disclosures of the world, which seem to take place independently of people or, in the case of his cityscapes, before and behind (i.e., as a condition of) human activity. The dancing lights in Sato's images are magical, like fairies playing around the base of an enormous tree, a dilapidated shack, or a field of fog-covered rocks reaching out to sea. His pictures evoke an animistic view of the world as inhabited by spirits and express nostalgia for a time before experience descended into the brute material objectivity of modern science. However, the images also present the work of the artist in its ineluctable, material finitude. Sato never directly appears in the photos, though his motion can be seen throughout the pictures, working to create and sustain his poetic illusions. Despite their dreamlike quality, Sato's images betray the wishes that inform them and make manifest his limitations as an artist to infuse the world with life and poetic significance. The beauty of his pictures ultimately lies in the tension between the illusions they conjure and the sad, inevitable disillusionment they simultaneously admit. Tues.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m., 49 Geary, Suite 540, S.F. (415) 397-8114. (Clark Buckner)