Chilean artist Maria Elena Naveillan plays with words -- literally. In shallow sculptural wall works, her layering of cut-out cardboard vowels in monochromatic black or white prove a conceptual one-liner. More interesting is a wall of 13 vertical canvases hung alongside one another like red earth tablets. From afar, they look as if they're made from striated rock. Up close, those striations turn out to be the silk-screened names of newspapers from around the world. As a group, the canvases signal an enduring desire to communicate. Yet given their elongated, almost funerary, shape, they also portend the printed newspaper's demise.

By Jessica Dawson

The Washington Post