Light boxes and light tubes glow like nightlights in other dark rooms. Spencer Finch's works illuminate pure geometric patterns but the colors really leap out of darkness. Barney Kulok depicts actual photographed scenes. In one clever shot, his shutter grabs an image of a sports field in a park that is starkly illuminated by white lights. Kulok's shining light box breathes new life into his patterns and scenery.

The theme of the lonely city at night was pervasive. Some artists focused on scenery and areas of the city that humans abandon during nightfall. Juliane Eirich photographs chairs that remain on the beach's sand after everyone's gone home for the night. A long city block with mostly closed stores, a vacant sidewalk, and an empty street is the subject of one of Stan Douglas's photographs. Nights of social isolation hit hard. Social blunders aside, this experience of walking down the street alone is the consequence of car culture and the kinds of cities Americans build to accommodate their vehicles. Single zoning creates vast areas that evening abandons, shelters spaced far apart, and streets that get little traffic at night.

Vija Clemins, Strata, 1982, one color mezzotint, courtesy McKee Gallery, New York.

But many cities in the world were built before the car and experience night dramatically differently. Rome built or inspired the compact cores of most European cities. Broadly speaking, cities that grew during the Middle Ages and Renaissance expanded according this Roman pattern of mixed-use buildings and narrow streets. It's nearly impossible to feel alone at night in London as the streets crawl with drunkards, the pubs swell with laughing chatter, and most of the city subsequently endures a long walk home after the metro closes. It was unusual that this more social experience of night imbedded within the old Roman-style of urban living was so conspicuously absent.

Most of the works that engage with evening sexuality were jaded rather than jubilant. Gregory Crewdson shows a maternal figure discovering an awkward girl standing outdoors in her undergarments. There was nothing erotic or tender about Kohei Yoshiyuki's images of people spying on others performing sex acts in public places. Marc Swanson and Neil Gust's video indicted the nightclub as hollow and damaging rather than entertaining or cathartic. A deeply Victorian sexual hunger tortures those whose desire lingers in this show; feelings of joy or perhaps the possibility of getting lucky are absent.

Episodes of isolation or twisted sexual encounters may be just a thin slice of nocturnal experience. But during these darkest moments of the night, there is a gothic intensity that day rarely achieves. Many of these works tap into the horrors that only night can deliver. Likewise, others work revel and bask in the starry wonder and glowing light that we never see under bright sunshine. Both the beauty and terror of the night is on full view.