Last Chance

Catch It or Regret It

by Lydia Navatsyk

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Carlos Garaicoa's "Campus or the Babel of Knowledge," a three-dimensional model of school grounds in a utopian society, is a vision of Orwellian constraint. The work exemplifies his conflicted attitude toward modern utopias: curious but skeptical. For this exhibit, Garaicoa photographs abandoned buildings in his native Cuba, constructs a chess board with miniature edifices as game pieces and fills a room with glowing lanterns that hang like structures without foundation (pictured).

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (no, not a group of politicians) is dedicated to bringing the absurd to Philadelphia. This month, director Tina Brock has resurrected Eugene Ionesco's Victims of Duty. Choubert, the quintessential everyman, finds himself wrenched from a pleasant evening with his wife when a police detective barges into their flat seeking the former tenant. By innocently cooperating, Choubert descends into a search for his own identity, an ever unwelcome and murky affair.

The artists at Nexus prove that a penchant for experimentation and diversity need not hinder uniform motion. Their "Newton's First Law" exhibit represents works from the entire membership, in media ranging from flattened car fenders to recycled paper pulp. With titles like "The Lives and Traumas of Stuffed Animals," the works have a provocative way of addressing modern perplexities.