Playing games is common in dating.

And online dating is a whole other playing field.

Lauren Greenwald, a student in the group art show “Fun and Games” said online dating sites give people an opportunity to play themselves up. And she wanted to capture those games in photographs. There are also photographs of balloons, horses and intimacy, and an interactive video demonstration.

See for yourself in the John Sommers Gallery. The opening reception is on Friday at 6.

“It’s like the guy who gives his list of his favorite books and says he’s read all this and really he’s taken it from a list of whatever books he can find online,” she said. “It’s like bloggers … Once they’re behind their computer screen they seem like such fascinating people. Then you meet them in person and they’re absolutely nothing like they described.”

Other students in the show are Roger Boulay, Carolyn Marsden, Freja Mitchell, Teresa Buscemi, Kate Hawkes, Tamara Zibners and Xuan Chen.

Greenwald, a second-year photography graduate student, said she took the “games” part of the title and ran with it.

“In thinking about all of that, I had had another idea I had wanted to play with for a while having to do with Internet dating and the culture of Internet dating and how strange it is,” Greenwald said.

After moving to Albuquerque to start her Master’s degree, Greenwald said some friends encouraged her to sign up on some dating sites.

“In receiving winks or messages or whatever they do on these sites, I started thinking about how we play games in dating and how we construct these personas and personalities online for all of these things,” she said. “I was drawing on that and a desire to do something a little more lighthearted.”

Greenwald read headlines people used to describe themselves from online dating sites and wrote the most silly and sad ones on the back, chest and arm of her friend.

“I came up with the idea of these anonymous male forms with all of these taglines and how (men on dating sites are) expressing themselves,” Greenwald said. “These guys are picking a sentence to express themselves … I took all of the people who contacted me on these sites (and) I looked at what they wrote about themselves and copied down these little headlines.”

*“Fun and Games”

Feb. 1-12

John Sommers Gallery

Opening Reception

Friday, Feb. 5

6 – 8 p.m.*