Recycled Student Art

The Triptych Student Gallery opened its first show of the year shortly before Thanksgiving break and aptly called it a Themeless Show. The show was also timeless--it could easily have been a recycled version of last year's exhibits.

The works displayed in Themeless Show were not, of course, the exact same ones displayed last year, but the Triptych in its latest exhibit did not make a radical departure from the past or take bold artistic risks. The most recent display included photography, printmaking and painting, and it consisted largely of works arranged in series. The majority of pieces, though, were photographs distorted in various ways. The different techniques were intriguing but Triptych organizers, given free rein, allowed black-and-white images to dominate the show. Although a fair number of the images were quite admirable, even the most stellar works could not redeem the general mediocrity of the rest of the show.

The untitled five-piece series by Matthew Butterick was inarguably the most successful of the photo works. All the pieces in the series shared the base image of a woman reproduced by a computer, but the details Butterick used to vary the image, rather than the image of the woman itself, became the subject of the works. Details such as the rhythmic boxes which produced the shading around the mouth and cheek of the second and fourth pieces of the series were noteworthy highlights of the wealth of innovations offered by the computer medium. The resulting series was compelling both in the artist's chosen techniques and in the unity of the whole.

The other photographic works were not as interesting as Butterick's. Richard Robbins' "Five Pieces from Paris Series 1990," for example, was dull and trite. All the images were slightly blurred, presumably to add a certain softness or ambiguity to the works. They did not. And the abrupt frames which lopped off heads and feet created a jarring view of the scene. These frames were unoriginally employed--ever since Toulouse-Lautrec, the arbitrary, non-classical frame has been employed to make audience members re-evaluate their perspective, but here that re-evaluation seemed pointless. To say the least, the frames have been more successfully employed in the past.

The rest of the photography ranged from middling to poor and was only occasionally interrupted by another medium. Most notable among the other pieces exhibited were the paintings by David Gammons. The series of three oil paintings titled "Haywire" was bold in its colors and forms. The striking neon backgrounds, particularly in the second and third pieces, were a welcome contrast to the ubiquitous black and white. Gammons' backgrounds also enlivened the paintings themselves by creating dramatic tension between their alarming hues and the solid lines of the free floating forms. "Haywire" was commendable and the most inspired work Gammons has displayed in the Triptych gallery in a year.

The untitled series of three roughly-drawn portraitures by Owi S. Ruivivar could not claim the same distinction. This series represented the only prints in the exhibit, and it was uninspired. The artist did not realize much of the potential of the medium, and the depth of line and color was uniform in the two prints displayed. The bland centerpiece of the series, the plate itself, was diverting only in that it presented this commonplace image inverted. Ruivivar attempted to distinguish one print from its twin by printing it over a pale yellow box previously printed on the paper, but this did not enrich or even qualitatively distinguish the work.

Ruivivar's series, then, was not unlike the gallery itself. In the past year, the Triptych gallery has been unable to qualitatatively distinguish one show from another. The Triptych has in the past tended towards photography, and this show was no different. The limited range of media displayed was probably due to the cramped gallery space, but the works exhibited in Themeless Show were overwhelmingly the products of artists whom the gallery has exhibited earlier. Given the large number of student artists on campus, it is lamentable that only a few monopolize Harvard's only student gallery.