'Genesis of the Environmental Awareness' by Jen Toplak, Miami Beach.

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A juried art show rises or falls, not just on the quality of the submissions, but on the taste of the judge.

By that standard, Linda Norden of New York likes art that’s transitioning between forms and colors. She is a curator, writer and historian based in New York, and most recently was director of the James Gallery at City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Norden sifted through 1,398 submissions by 474 artists to come up with the 93 pieces in the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s 59th annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition.

One of the show’s prize winners is Noelle Mason’s Nothing Much Happened Today: For Eric and Dylan, a frame from a surveillance video showing Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris slaughtering people at the Columbine school cafeteria. The image has been re-created on cotton weave and mounted in a frame – just the sort of thing to brighten up the family room.

The addition of nubby texture to the familiar image doesn’t actually add much in the way of meaning; it’s creativity in the service of … what exactly?

Mason’s statement accompanying the work says: "I am primarily interested in the artificial means by which we extend our ability to see and the mediating object’s affect on the transmission of images to affirm social and political hierarchies."

Not much help to be had there.

There are more conventional images sufficiently well-executed that they’re not compromised by their conventionality. Jen Toplak of Miami Beach offers a painting of a newborn baby enfolded by flowers and butterflies. It’s like one of Anne Geddes’ photographs — immediately legible, too cute for its own good, undeniably effective. Armando Dominguez of Miami offers a well-executed realist portrait titled My Father.

On the other end of the spectrum is a photo by Stacy Creech of West Palm Beach of a rainswept night landscape. If the photographs in the Boca Raton show are any indication, photography’s increasing ubiquitousness seems to be shifting the form toward color and away from black and white.

There aren’t too many straight black and white images in the show, but I like Alan Feinberg’s Aspen Sky, as well as Anthony Scime’s color portrait of a Buddhist monk staring at what seems to be a sparrow a foot away. (Florida’s natural sensuality, i.e. the ever present heat, seems to inspire a commendable pantheistic subtext to much of the work on display.) Both subjects are in perfect profile. I’d love to know whether some fancy digital footwork was involved; certainly, the lighting is Rembrandt-perfect.

The show has splashes of exuberance. Roberta Schofield of Tampa has a work called Running, a photo from a small-format camera blown up to 57 x 82½. inches. The colors collide in ways that nature tends to avoid – pink becomes green, purple becomes orange. It’s arresting, to say the least.

Jami Nix Rahn of Weston contributes a well-designed piece that’s part photograph – the center image – and part painting – everything else. The image itself is nothing special – a group of hospital workers doing tai chi – but the craft is, at first glance, nearly seamless. The painting also points up how much of contemporary art is about texture and altered media rather than ideas or emotions.

So what we have here are photographs that look like paintings, paintings that look like photographs, alteration everywhere and colors that bleed together to form different colors.

Let it bleed.

If you go

The Boca Raton Museum of Art, Mizner Park, 501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton (561-392-2500 )

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Juried exhibition runs through Aug. 8.