Jennifer Delilah, Claudia Hart, John Wellington

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.