Caleb Duarte's cuartitos (small rooms) are small, wall-hung sculptures of environments or habitats that resemble fragments of the temporary housing of low-wage maquiladora workers in Mexican border towns. These artworks, with their open, unfinished construction —wood framing, cement, sheetrock and paint, with scrawled notations— serve as metaphors for the provisional and makeshift lives of their inhabitants, buffeted by the socioeconomic "realities of globalization, militarization, materialism, fear, emptiness, and the constant expanding space between those who have and those who have not."

While that sounds austere, the works themselves are forthright and handsome — rough but refined. The subdued monochromatic palette —buff, gray, white— and the dry, unfinished surfaces radiate a kind of astringent clarity, almost a classical discipline. Surfaces meet at right angles, solidly assembled, and there's a visual reticence about the miniature habitats or stage sets that contrasts well with the figures that the artists depicts on their walls. They're pictured at emblematic moments of their lives, as if the houses contained dramatic memory traces of the lives contained inside. In Charco, a boy leaps a puddle; in Mujeres, women mourn or exult; in Rincon, a despondent young man covers his face, his emotion echoed by slashes of paper torn from the gypsum substrate. Duarte's fluent drawing has been justly compared to such past masters as Kathe Kollwitz and Charles White, and his empathy with his subjects is powerfully communicated.

In the Cuadritos, as in his installation work (one large untitled piece is featured here as well), Duarte melds contemporary art concerns and an updated social realism into a new and compelling synthesis that is simultaneously passionate and sober, and both timely and timeless. In an era governed by jingoist fantasy and the exploitation of social and economic division, he reinserts politics —without rancor or false theatricality— into art and reasserts our common humanity.