A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

It’s a tired cliché, but it holds truth. The harshest realities can become more palatable and understandable when captured and contextualized with lighter airs. Humor, comedy, satire and irony can illuminate and add power to situations in ways that sober documentation cannot. Two artists currently on display at Linda Warren Gallery in the West Loop sit comfortably within this tradition.

“You Can’t Fall Off the Floor,” the third solo exhibition at Linda Warren by Lora Fosberg, and “Apocalypse,” Chris Cosnowski’s project space assemblage, confront head-on man’s most self-destructive tendencies. Everything from environmental concerns, war and advertising manipulations to insecurity and lost loves fall under their knives. But they’re skewered with scalpel-sharp winks rather than blatant, rusty pitchforks.

Fosberg’s work is grand and epic. Large, site-specific installations and paintings of all sizes chart man’s folly, be it through thoughtless deforestation, succumbing to the relentless influence of advertising or the mindless hoarding of useless goods.

Prints "Right Before No More,” “The Big Dig Deep,” and other works find Fosberg in the woods, literally, where little cartoon men use tractors and saws to rid the landscape of its tall, generations-old trees, essentially stripping the earth of its history. Such actions have consequences, of course, as evidenced by the occasional presence of smirking devils and roughly sketched skull-piles and the engulfing tornado full of windswept debris and frightened people that occupies a full wall.

Fosberg does venture into urbanity; it’s not a happy place. Paintings "Memorize the Rules” and “Too Lazy to Change” look down on city skylines where hundreds of phrases and slogans — “Will I Learn?,” “No Subject? No Problem,” “You Will Know When You Know”— burst from rooftops. The words are funny, but also personal and inquisitive. Their colorful presentations recall advertising typefaces, giving the paintings both a self-reflexive and satirical edge. The continuation of this sloganeering in the massive, approximately 22-by-36 foot piece, “You Can’t Fall Off the Floor,” and in the wonderful painting/photo collaborations with Liza Berkoff reinforce the warning.

Chris Cosnowski’s paintings are an abrupt about-face from Fosberg’s work stylistically, but it shares her sense of humor and irony. A photo-realist, Cosnowski creates near perfect representations of his subjects, but frames them anew. Context is key, and it’s here where he shines, isolating everyday ephemera of youth to allow them to speak beyond their seeming innocence.

The oversized toy police car in “Prowler” becomes both a statement on the protective power of law enforcement and a menacing warning of police abuses.

“P.O.W. II (Tragicomedy)” blows-up model toy soldiers still attached to plastic molding to create a powerful damnation of warfare waged at the expense of troops.

“Global Warming (Would Someone Please Take This Problem Seriously)” floats a humongous inflated Whoopee Cushion over a cow, an obvious but funny comment on the bovine’s ozone-destroying flatulence.

And “American Shiva” beautifully turns a spotlight on our country’s fetishization of sports and the culture of winning by enlarging the top-piece of a teenage cheerleading award, creating a strange approximation of a Hindu idol out of glistening, metallic gold girls with entangled, pom-pom arms. It’s stunning.