The paintings of John Wellington and Jennifer Delilah and the new media paintings and sculptures of Claudia Hart do indeed go Baroque...just as quickly as they depart from it. Each circles back to this pivotal period of art history to examine more deeply the predicaments of our own cultural moment.

If you enjoy paintings of passion, anxiety and obsession, masterfully and provocatively time-warped, this is the show for you. Experience curious historical leaps back and forth across the centuries, as tidy categories of period style, medium and subject come unraveled.

Power once expressed itself in the theatrically ennobled grandeur of Baroque painting, sculpture and architecture. Each of the works in this show painstakingly evokes the gorgeous pretenses of the style—only to then drag them through our very contemporary anxieties to create puzzling time twists that both charm and alarm us.

When the great empires of Europe fell, so too did their gods. Now, ideas of erotic rapture and superhuman heroism have gone into retreat, hanging on in our unconscious realm of dreams and fantasy, popping up in gaudy pulp schmaltz and delusional conceits. Here, in this show, they appear to reign; but in this contemporary context—where modern society aspires to impart dignity to all humanity, including the disempowered—the ruse quickly falls away. This is our world in our time, under the ominous weight of the past, and new institutions of power that refuse to surrender.

JOHN WELLINGTON
How did those Japanese schoolgirls from the Internet get into John Wellington's grandiose paintings? He seduces us with luscious layers of phenomenal old-master oil technique, showing us stormily Romantic landscapes and authoritarian monuments in ruin—sites seemingly abandoned...except for the schoolgirls, very much preoccupied with themselves, innocent and oblivious, and cute—and only vaguely apprehensive that the ancient gods that might well return. Words in the paintings share their thoughts: One fears she is bait.

JENNIFER DELILAH
Delilah offers up a pair of large, light and airy, profusely detailed follies centered on the child king Louis XIV of France (1638–1715). They take place in a grand room in the palace of Versailles, with the floor as an antique map of the world, falling away into the foreground. The architecture supports a massive

framework of images: but Delilah has traded out the original pompously idealizing frescoes for depictions of imperial power as seen from the other side—drawings of slave life in the colonial Caribbean, Civil War and Antebellum-period drawings, Baroque pornography, and Orientalist and Old Master paintings. She depicts the royal lad, front and center, playing on the floor with toy soldiers and oil wells. He is oblivious to the real consequences of his every move. It is all a game, as much for us as for him, as hidden clues and jokes abound. The whole is like a cineplex barrage of eras, that underscores our own lack of historical consciousness.

CLAUDIA HART

Claudia Hart also concerns herself with gender representations of power, as we have inherited them down through the history of art. Her Mortification sculptures of women leaning back as in divine throes of pleasure/pain recall Bernini's famous Baroque sculpture of the Ecstasies of St. Theresa. Their resemblance to carved alabaster is an illusion. These are her 3-D scans of real nudes, digitally mutilated with organic deformations, and fabricated in plastic from a rapid prototype machine. The sensuously expressive facture is a byproduct of cutting-edge modern technique.

Similarly, the vacant death stare of Ophelia, a common subject among the Pre-Raphaelite painters, was laden with necrophiliac overtones. Hart's version, a framed work, styled with seductive sensuosity, looks in many respects like a painting. But it's digital and it moves—like a painting would, if it could, in tune to the slow, rhythmic undulations of the underwater tides in which she drowns. These new media works look at the dubious historical role of the female subject as the locus of connection with the divine—and by extension, the male pornographic fascination. She notes that the new techno-arena in which she works is mainly a male-dominated institution, and that hers is a sort of "Romantic Rebellion against our technocratic and bureaucratic culture." Her strategic mismatch of new media technique and historic content upsets the naturalized order of each.