Culture, Borderline, Layered Time presents new figurative and still-life paintings by Michael Arata. Even though the subject is war and destruction, the works exude the joy of being alive. Arata diagrams human interaction—people thinking, acting, telling each other what they know—and explores how we carry a consciousness larger than the space we occupy. Informed by coming of age in 1960s San Francisco, he holds the optimism and idealism of that era as a working proposition rather than a memory.