Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Nadia Stadnycki

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For this group show, nine artists celebrate the fluffy stuff in the sky with photographs, paintings, videos, textile works and woodcuts. In Harry Kalish's black-and-white photos, thin sheets of cumulus clouds look like bodies of water rippled by strong winds. Taking the opposite approach, Yukie Kobayashi paints playful little creatures into a tangle of black-and-gray swirls, noticeable only if you look closely.

The Scion Installation Art Show Tour travels to nine U.S. cities exhibiting work to raise money for art-related charities. For the show's fourth year, artists interpret the theme "It's a Beautiful World." NYC-based painter Ron English's Yang Moon Rising shows a planet whose surface is a neon green mess of nude figures, tanks, skulls, toys and Captain America. Our favorite: J. Shea's sculpture, in which the clay head of an old man rests inside a wooden drawer, his flowing white beard being danced upon by small clay tigers, dolphins, birds, clothespins and fish.

Trudy Kraft's watercolor paintings (pictured) focus on "terma," the Tibetan word for "hidden treasures." According to Buddhist teaching, spiritual masters can conceal nature's treasures so that we have to exert extra effort to find them. Kraft crowds plenty of terma (tiny plants and flowers, butterflies and stars) in among squiggly lines and shapes that make the pieces resemble patchwork quilts, forcing us to hunt for the little objects by inspecting each painting.