Dazzling designs Small-scale wonders at RIC BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Where did the prejudice come from? Does function change form? Would an interesting sculpture become any less so by being miniaturized and pinned to a blouse? That jewelry can be art, not merely artful, is in various evidence in "Alternatives: Materials/Means," an exhibition of studio jewelry at the Rhode Island College Bannister Gallery.

The spotlight here is on odd materials and methods, to separate these 14 artists from other makers of art jewelry. Sometimes the ordinary or overlooked material is used, sometimes state-of-the-art technology is employed, and ingenuity is always holding hands with aesthetics.

A specialist in utilizing the oddest of materials is Arthur Hash. Most extreme is his cast plastic bracelet that is clouded translucent by the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. In another of his five bracelets on display, the built-up accumulation of beads from a glue gun is complemented by a facing of tiny metal lichen-like cups the same scale.

That is flat-out conceptual sculpture, and other work here similarly comes with ideas attached, dangling like price tags. What it costs to appreciate the bracelets of Lena Hulsmeier is being mindful of the frailty of the delicate wrist it could wrap around. The thin aluminum sheets are covered with lenticular photographs — like a smile/frown face you might get in a Cracker Jacks box — and a delicate lacey design alternates with an x-ray of bones beneath someone’s skin. Rectangular drop earrings alternate a similar pattern with a photo of the graceful curve of a neck and portion of an ear.

Using an unusual material is a way to attract initial attention, but the design has to be good for the eye to not quickly stray. Sergey Jivetin assembles tiny watch hands into complex assemblages, brooches that charm with pattern as well as form. Rebecca Strzelec makes jewelry from CAD designs on her computer, brooches that are layered in ABS plastic in an additive process (Fused Deposition Modeling, if you’re curious) that allows convoluted shapes which are impossible to mold. They are mounted on medical adhesive patches and can be affixed directly to the skin, these amorphous flying-buttress and calligraphic shapes named "Fib Brooch," "Apology Brooch," "Autopsy Brooch," and so on. Using the same initial computer process to design his jewelry, Joe Wood electroforms silver into graceful amorphous blobs that look like captured quicksilver splatters.

Clearly most of the people represented here are artists first and jewelry-makers incidentally, by choice of medium — and desire to pay the rent — rather than out of limited aesthetic vision. Mary Hallam Pearse displays a half-dozen pieces from her series "Residue." They look like plaster of Paris castings but they are made from liquefied paper (to be lighter) and they present floral or organic shapes floating on the material. One clever V-shaped piece shows a suspended pendant and is to be pinned where a necklace would droop down. The "Closeness" series of brooches by Jennifer Sholtis are quite beautiful. Sweeping curving forms that look carved out of ivory appear to be emerging from the black cloth they are attached to in the gallery display. Underneath a dress or blouse, a ring snaps onto the circular shape.

Photographic transfers are a method with infinite possibilities, as Bettina Speckner demonstrates. She photo-etches on zinc such images as fragments of a formal garden, in one case juxtaposed with barren landscape and a distant house on a horizon. Mostly floral, her subject matter ranges as far as a power-line tower in one instance.

Sometimes artists just wanna have fun. The tip of a tongue — painted with lipstick — sticks out of Sherry Sims’s "Lick My Lips: Raspberry Brooch." The wildly colorful and intricate jewelry of Svenja John could be called costume jewelry — of the highest order. Bound to entertain if worn at a party are the German artist’s clusters of little plastic shapes, typically with tabs going through flat pieces, gathering together like underwater colony animals. Even more visually extreme is the flagella and tentacle jewelry of Nikky Bergman. In the spirit of some one-cell organisms having whip-like extensions to propel them along, perhaps her pieces are designed to clear the way through a crowd — the bracelet on display extends fine filaments a foot and farther.

"Alternatives: Materials/Means" is fascinating. Sondra Sherman, of RIC’s Department of Art, has curated an exhibition that shows how imaginative artists can do small-scale wonders when they are challenged by new tools and techniques.