A few days before her exhibit was set to open officially at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Canadian artist Jana Sterbak gave a brief lecture to a thin, early-evening crowd on the northernmost corner of the museum's squat and surprisingly somber Gold Coast campus. From late start to concluding applause, the entire hurried affair was only a half hour in length if it was 20 minutes and, at $10 a ticket, represented one of the more cultured variations on highway robbery to which I've been subjected. In all fairness, it should be noted that Sterbak was fighting a terrible cold—her face flushed various shades of white and yellow as she spoke; her words seemed as if they had been individually packaged in thick gauze—and this lecture was but the first item of business for her on that night's agenda. Many hours later, she and a dozen or so volunteers would still be hunkered over bloody slabs of fresh flank steak in a mad rush to sew them together for the subsequent morning's press preview. That done, she would have to negotiate this perishable upholstery onto an armchair (Chair Apollinaire, 1996) and thoroughly salt it so the corpulent fabric would cure over the course of the exhibition. Not having worked in raw meat, I can only assume that there's an advantage to finishing your project before it completely thaws. And when compounded by an inopportune ailment for which bed rest is required, nothing as paltry as a scheduled speaking engagement should keep one from the pleasures of the flesh, as it were, and a hot bath shortly thereafter.

So perhaps it was with room service on her mind that Sterbak raced through a series of slides portraying works not included in this particular exhibition—a transparent blouse with dark ringlets of chest hair affixed to its front, another with arms fused at their ends to prevent the wearer from using her hands, a smart little cocktail dress fashioned, like the armchair, from marbled cuts of beef—and prematurely announced that she was ready to take questions. Whatever the reason, if not for an unassuming gentleman near the front (fortyish and refreshingly dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a white oxford shirt), I would have quit the auditorium ill-prepared for the ornery assemblages that were, even then, whirring, chirping, humming and glowing in a kind of inorganic tumult. "I teach at a junior high school," this man suddenly shouted. "And with no disrespect intended, I think you should know that my students would find much of your work silly, if not downright hilarious." Sterbak slumped deeper into the heavy wooden lectern against which she was already precariously propped and I half-expected her to drop dead under the tiresome weight of maybe the oldest gripe against contemporary art. But Sterbak accepted the challenge gracefully. "Good," she replied in a clipped accent that was part Czech, part French Canadian. "I wish they could retain their innocence indefinitely. Finding my work silly and fun is an appropriate and acceptable response."

If you have yet to visit the warped world of Jana (pronounced Ya-na) Sterbak, I would encourage you to do so, but only in the spirit she herself prescribed. It's not that her compositions are gimmicky or reliant on that juvenile side of us which delights in seeing stigmatized objects among the pristine halls of a gallery space, although some choose to encounter them this way. On the contrary, these pieces are mature and complex in that each of their elements, from title to caption to shape to material, invokes its own specific set of associations without negating its contribution to the whole. In the aforementioned Chair Apollinaire, for instance (the most popular of Sterbak's creations, and the one most in need of Heinz 57 and a side of potatoes), there's enough going on to satisfy even the confirmed exegete. Long before a viewer learns that in French the term "chair" connotes flesh rather than furniture, he or she has already derived some of the more obvious metaphors from this haphazardly jerked La-Z-Boy: the relationship between sex and domesticity, death and carnality, stagnancy and decay, the slow but unavoidable passage of time, etc. Sterbak's reference to French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, however, is a bit trickier and begins to separate those who chuckle from the few who truly comprehend. And yet, as Sterbak indicated, either response is acceptable. As far as she's concerned, it's okay to take such pieces at face value, even to laugh at them, so long as we become involved.

It's fitting, then, that Sterbak chose to begin her exhibition with Sisyphus Sport (1997). Where many of her works are mechanical marvels or feats of scientific ingenuity (for Olfactory Portrait, 1995, she had the laboratories of Unilever in Kent create a perfume which would approximate the smell of her lover's sweat), Sisyphus sits quietly in a corner unguarded by glass or rope. A large rock equipped with shoulder straps, it seems to function only as a punchline for its title (in the Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity). But because this piece rests casually on the ground like a forgotten briefcase, it's experienced authentically instead of with intellectual haughtiness. In other words, you don't agonize over it like you would a dense philosophical text, but discover it in the wide-eyed manner of a child. ("That stone looks far too heavy for anyone to lift; why on earth would it have shoulder straps?") You want to touch it, lift it, hoist it onto your back, do all of the things that are impermissible in a museum and then walk away happily. It's the reaction on which almost all of Sterbak's work depends.

Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, Sterbak moved to Canada when she was 13 (just after the Soviet invasion) and eventually received a fine arts degree from Montreal's Concordia University. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, seems to relish this biographicl contrast between having been oppressed beneath a communist regime and acquiring freedom outside the context of America's rampant capitalism. They would have you believe that Sterbak's chief preoccupation is one that balances our devotion to the idea of unrestrained liberty with an inherent, universal need for limitations. Hence the contradictions of a structure like Sisyphus Sport: its leather harness would facilitate the object's removal if sheer heft didn't demand that it stay right where it lay. The same could be said of this work's closest cousin, Sisyphus (1991), an aluminum, cage-like bowl within which performers are free to rock back and forth to their heart's content provided they accept that they're getting nowhere. When curator Amanda Cruz led a tour of the exhibit the day after Sterbak's lecture, she focused on this theme. So does her corresponding catalogue essay which, while mentioning Sterbak's morose sense of humor, opts for a rather dry and theoretical seriousness. Such solemnity isn't unusual today when art is discussed, contemporary or otherwise. But it feels out of place in conjunction with an artist who is utterly and uniquely emotional, almost sentimental, and in relation to objects that encourage the most intuitive sort of participation.

For how else but in passionate earnest are we to encounter a woman who so enjoys the musical whistling of crickets that she constructed a carrying case for them out of a mammoth tusk (Combat Cricket Compartment, 1993-1997)? What are we to conclude from Sterbak's fascination with articles of heat-conducting clothing that glow a dangerous orange when their invisible barriers are breached (Hot Crown, 1998; I Want You To Feel the Way I Do..., 1984-1985), other than to say which they foster and then subvert the adolescent playfulness which compels us to open doors marked "Employees Only" or dance triumphantly before a sign that reads "Keep off the Grass?" If contemporary art is about anything, it's about the reinvention of art and, in turn, a harkening back to innocence for those who observe it. And thus it was an absolute pleasure to attend a major semi-retrospective that, far from dissuading primitive, uninitiated reactions, counted on them to round out its impact and importance. In a decade that has seen precious few neophytes darkening the corridors of contemporary art museums, here, finally, is a show that even adults will find accessibly silly, if not downright hilarious.