Treasure trove RISD’s grads strut their stuff BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

A highlight of the recent Providence Gallery Night, which takes place the third Thursday of each month, was a stroll among five shows held mostly in vacant downtown buildings.

On display through June 5, the annual year-end Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Student Group Exhibition ranges from painting to digital media. Noted below are a few of the works on display — not the only ones worthy of attention, by any means, just some that particularly interested me.

The only solo exhibit is the photography of Colby Bird, at 186 Union Street. His large-format prints — most around 30"x40" — employ intentionally out-of-focus images. The Japanese esthetic of bokeh (blurring) has reached vertiginous heights in contemporary American photography, but here is employed to effective purpose. Most of Bird’s compositionally precise images are of outdoor spaces captured at night. In them, the absence of people or their small size in the distance adds doleful calmness, whether to a basketball court or to a parking lot with a street lamp against black sky, hovering like a blank mandala.

The big open space at 232 Westminster Street is filled with works by 17 students in a RISD class largely designed to get painters thinking about digital media opportunities. An interesting result is that many two-dimensional artists chose to work in three dimensions. Jen McChesney’s "Siren’s Memory" combines gauzy tatters with blown-glass globes — thought bubbles, under which or near a photographic image here and there appears. Liluye Jhala’s "Window" projects images onto and through suspended transparent sheets, a short video loop changing whenever someone turns the leaves of a diary to a particular blank page. Memories are as persistent as they are evanescent.

Some of the works in these shows use humor to tweak our attention. At 220 Westminster Street, Annamarie Ho suggests that our prehistoric progenitors were a rough lot, as the objects comprising "Untitled (Sex Toys)" include a cow horn dildo, an antler whip, and chunks of amber crystal rocks on a string for anal beads. Also at that space is Susan Matthews’s "The Museum of Ceramic Armor," exhibiting tongue-in-cheek earthenware objects such as strap-on ankle guards for worrying post-Achilles warriors, porcelain codpieces, and shell-encrusted ceremonial construction hats.

Avoiding the single notes of such punchline pieces, some of these artists keep their work lightly grounded while getting them to reverberate beyond whimsy. At 210 Westminster, Jed Morfit has two figure sculptures that make us smile at first glance, and then think. A ponderous cow-like woman is naked on all fours, breasts and impossibly massive belly dangling; two palanquin poles protrude sideways from shoulders and haunches, for transportation convenience — in a future when McDonald’s super-sizing is back? Next to this life-size, pink fiberglass form is a similarly posed cast iron figure, maybe six inches high. The thinking part of these works involve, at the least, appreciating the voluptuous curvatures of even Jabba the Hutt grotesques. Feel free to also enjoy that these two sculptures have equivalent visual weight.

Next to Morfit’s homunculus is another work that rewards a double take: Christopher Gray’s "then, and, then, and." A six-foot high crumpled sheet of paper is covered with a tumble of red and blue lines that pop into layers when you put on the provided 3-D glasses. The accompanying sound recording wasn’t working when I was there, but it was enough to enjoy the play of depth on depth. I also loved that esthetic use was made of something definitively overlookable: a crumpled piece of scribbled paper. In the same space, an untitled work by Bohyun Yoon comments even more inventively on visual perception. A row of nearly three dozen tiny suspended heads, torsos, and limbs assemble in their collective shadow as complete figures.

Another treasure trove is in RISD’s Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery, at 169 Weybosset Street. Laura Kaufman’s sterling silver mirrors, the size of the palm of a hand, are accompanied by her photographs of their usage: in hands, reflecting out-of-frame geometries. With thin coral and pastel clay slabs, Asya Palatova’s abstract "Courtesan" suggests a gracefully extended tongue and other intimate curves and folds. Just about any small object can be pumped up for impact by making it large, but Meghan Petras’s "Comb" succeeds especially well. Representing the kind of ornate comb used to keep long hair in place, it is both beautiful and menacing, its long, pointed tines dangling like a forbidding portcullis.

Most of these spaces have been made available by the downtown developers Cornish Associates, and by Kim and Liz Chace. On an ongoing basis, Cornish has been providing the Alice Building, at 186 Union Street, free of charge to artists as The Space at Alice. Hours at the cooperative art gallery are customarily Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays from 3 to 8 p.m., though hours for the current exhibits are 3 to 7 p.m.

The RISDGraduate Student Group Exhibition

Through June 5 at five locations in downtown Providence.