Eric Hancock reviews the exhibition Staring at the Sun, curated by Craig Drennen, at Saltworks, Atlanta, on view through June 14, 2014. The show features works by Eleanor Aldrich, Jane Fox Hipple, Bonnie Maygarden, and Lauren Silva.

Hancock writes: "The exhibition’s comparison of painterly abstraction’s tenuous historical progress and the sun’s eventual destruction of the human species is a very loose analogy, but a telling one, nonetheless. The show’s brilliant associative viewpoint asserts a positive status for painting and, interpreted liberally, ultimately conjures questions about art’s identity crisis as a cultural phenomenon; what are its true epistemological limitations, and how can it function as a good for the individual or, to borrow the press release’s long view, for society? Stylistic resemblances amongst the works tap into these questions and more directly address the relationship contemporary image makers have with digital technology."