Ray Yoshida’s unusual painting style has long made him an important representative of Chicago Imagism. His richly inventive fantasy landscapes are heavily worked over, which gives them their mannered, idiosyncratic, and obsessive quality. In Yoshida’s art, great effort is expended in a desire to describe the indescribable, an urge to contain the elusive. His images are indistinct in narrative and act as studied episodes from some unseen larger text, or as variations on themes so permuted and extrapolated as to be no longer recognizable.

The themes depicted in this exhibition vary a bit, but two

Michael Paha’s installations are true organic theaters, complex and fully staffed ecosystems displaying interdependent links in the chain of life. He presents creatures of the earth, water, and air in continual performance, playing out slow-moving dramas over which the artist has limited control. His projects probe and intertwine the disciplines of science and art; they both instruct and delight.

House Unattended, 1989, a 26-foot-long piece that dominated this exhibition of three installations, is animated by the sight and sound of trickling water. Like some liquid Muzak, this soothes the viewer