Winners of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships take deadlines seriously. Given $25,000 each and a year in which to incubate their new projects, the four grant winners kept spinning their creative wheels until minutes before last Friday's opening reception for their show at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Even by the standards of contemporary art, this is an unusually hermetic show. There does appear to be a good deal of earnest effort buttressing sincere attempts to communicate whatever opaque notions the artists are nursing. But with the exception of McKnight winner Andréa Stanislav -- whose installation is both accessible and intellectually yeasty -- this exhibition is a real head-scratcher.

ANDRÉA STANISLAV

Stanislav's installation of a cascade of filaments studded with rhinestones is intended to be a poetic evocation of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, in Dubai. Previously, she metaphorically explored the American notion of manifest destiny, i.e. the national obsession with riches, power and endless opportunity, through installations featuring, for example, videos of Las Vegas glitz. Her new focus on Dubai extends those themes into fresh political territory. Flanking her rhinestoned tribute to the Burj are two videos she made during recent trips to Dubai. One documents an astonishing skyscraper city that was built in "Half a Generation," as she titles the installation. The other is a sketchy account of the city's squalid immigrant labor camps. Stanislav tips her own political hand by punctuating her videos with spray-painted phrases such as "Cine-Marx," "FreuDemocracy." Obviously intended as a commentary on economic, environmental and human exploitation, her videos and installation are fascinating accounts of a world that, however real, almost defies comprehension.

CAMERON KEITH GAINER

Best known locally as the sculptor of "Minnie," a playful metal monster that lurks in Minneapolis lakes during the summer, Gainer used his grant to try his hand at filmmaking. What might be dubbed his "plot" reads like a shaggy dog story. Intrigued by bioluminescence, he found a bay full of endangered bioluminescent organisms near an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Then he hired a swimmer to agitate the water in lyrical patterns while he filmed her movements and the light they triggered. The result is a moody 18-minute film that suggests fading fireworks or distant galaxies exploding. Called "Luna del Mar," after the swimmer, it has a spacey soundtrack by Alex Waterman and the overall feel of a self-consciously arty vacation flick.

MATTHEW BAKKOM & AARON SPANGLER

Bakkom and Spangler are more conventional, though no less ambitious. A language lover, Bakkom fashioned a crisp, billboard-sized, graphic design featuring two neatly stacked words: "Hustling," atop "Sunlight." Rearrange the letters and you see the anagram. He also offers an inky seascape. While Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha, among others, have made rich careers out of visual wordplay, Bakkom's entry into the field is, as yet, too minimal to parse.

Spangler's aspirations are also big and pointlessly mystifying. He apparently carves bas reliefs in wood, places them under huge sheets of raw linen, and transfers designs from the carvings onto the linen buy rubbing crayons over the fabric. Roughly 10 feet tall and 18 feet wide, his featured piece may read as a shadowy sci-fi apocalypse with body parts rolled over by tractor treads, monster towers or undulating seas. Or maybe it's just a big faded linen shroud. Either way, his labored images come across as wan and jumbled.