David Stein's solo exhibition at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Improbable/Unlikely, is made up of two independent projects, Semesterville and The Unlikely Library. Each is a conceptual take on education and its attendant systems, in which facts and impressions become commingled in an absurd utopia.

Semesterville is a large cardboard sculpture made up of small architectural models, the remains of undergraduate projects assigned in the Architecture department at California College of the Arts (from which David, gallerist Eleanor Harwood and this reviewer all graduated). Some are elegant, others ramshackle. Together they form a miniature city that is at once ambitious and abject. This landscape represents renewed life for these discarded objects, preserving that joyous moment before the post-academic hangover, when graduates begin to trade in dreams for jobs, sets in. The suspended mass of cardboard becomes a doll house where the idealism of college life lives on.

The Unlikely Library is a reading room filled with books that may not exist. Dust jackets created by the artist grace books drawn from library sales and used book drops. The titles reflect literary and academic clichés, such as exceptionally narrow areas of debate (Phillips Head vs. Flat Head), the current scholarly obsession with inane popular culture (Federline on Federline), inscrutable theory (Modernist Unicorn), and comforting if meaningless self-help platitudes (Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Tow-Away Zone). Especially appealing titles include Rappers Discuss Andy Goldsworthy and Men's Guide to Women who Believe that Astrology Bullshit. The texts within occasionally correlate to the jackets, as Stein has found and interspersed some genuine titles with his creations. Usually the texts are unrelated, although equally as obscure or simply incomprehensible as the made-up titles they bear. The comedy of Stein's installation gives way to a frustration that is all too familiar to the overeducated and overstimulated graduate.

Perhaps the timing of this exhibition at the end of the spring semester contributes to the overall feeling of a jailbreak from academic confines. Maybe the fact that the artist shares his name with a famous forger of Picassos explains the intellectual trompe l'oeil at work here. Or, possibly, we simply work too hard and think too much and never ask why, or to what end. Stein's installation prompts that reflection, reminding us that we can never take for granted the truth of what we see or hear.