Emily Carr Institute graduation exhibition
At Emily Carr Institute until Monday, May 23

Picture This: A Parallel Grad Show
At 24 Water Street until Saturday, May 21, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. or by appointment (604-738-4483)

Reviewing a graduate-student exhibition is almost always a game of cruel futility. The shows are too big, too raw, too various. It's impossible to look critically at every work, and any mention made of a handful of promising young artists within a few column inches will unfairly exclude throngs of other deserving souls. Even the chosen few can command only a line or two each, and reviews end up looking like laundry lists. Year after year, I refuse to undertake the task.

This spring, however, the burden of critically culling the fine-art stream of the Emily Carr Institute grad show was assumed by a parallel exhibition, coordinated by graduating photographer Amelia Butler, juried by a committee of two curators, an art historian, an art dealer, and a professional artist, and installed in a temporary space in Gastown. Although only 47 (out of more than 250) graduates answered the call for submissions, and although Picture This has had a short and circumscribed run, it provides a kind of critical template for viewing the official exhibition at ECI.

In connecting the 11 grads selected with art-world professionals, Picture This poses some interesting questions about curatorial and commercial intervention in the public reception of a work of art. This is not an alternative show in the sense of a guerrilla installation or a Salon des Refusés, but rather has been shaped and sanctioned, quite intentionally, by the mainstream forces that determine an artist's career.

Picture This comprises selected works by Olga Chagaoutdinova, Sarah Hodgkins, Heidi Johansen, James MacLellan, Kristi Malakoff, Heidi Nagtegaal, Karen & Peggy Ngan, Matthew Robertson, Dan Starling, and Justin Wright. Much of the standout art here (and in the larger ECI grad show) is in the areas of painting and photography, although there are also some intriguing excursions into collaborative drawing and conceptual art (the Ngan sisters, Starling); sculpture, assemblage, and altered found objects (Malakoff, Robertson); and extreme fibre art (knitted installations and performance, by Nagtegaal).

Chagaoutdinova's large colour photographs of impoverished-looking domestic interiors in St. Petersburg, Russia, are filled with quaint, banal, and grotty detail and yet remain emotionally neutral in the way they convey information. Equally anthropological are Hodgkins's bleached-out C-prints of tourist stops, religious signage, and curious nature-culture interfaces, apparently taken on a road trip through Florida. Her work, too, is filled with telling detail-and inflected by a dry sense of humour.

In each of his mysterious oil paintings, MacLellan lays down a foundation of traditional landscape and architectural forms, upon which he imposes graffiti-esque text and squiggles, trite decorative motifs, and ambiguous, crudely rendered, amebic-spaceship-like objects. UFOs hover within each scene, too, reiterating the alien floating forms on the picture plane above them. Through his abrupt juxtapositions of art history and popular culture, MacLellan creates a postmodern mood of disjunction and paranoia.

Interesting as all this may be, there are lots of outstanding young artists not tagged by the parallel show, but highly visible in the ECI grad show itself. Eli Bornowski's gouache and graphite drawings of ambiguous forms play on art-school exercises in colour and spatial illusionism. Painters Nam Duc Nguyen, Stephanie Rowe, and Kathryn Dingwall impress with both their accomplishment and their promise. Nguyen's large oils are a vital combination of representational imagery and swirling, gestural abstraction. Rowe's figurative scenes again investigate pop-culture imagery, much detached and degraded by digital manipulation and interference. And Dingwall's big, realistic tableaux, part psychology, part allegory, are delivered with Caravaggio-like effects of chiaroscuro.

Industrial-design students Herman Chan, Jong-Ho Nho, and Michael Strutt have already deservedly attracted much attention with their grad projects. Chan and Nho's Airtorium is an ingenious, expandable, "humanized" lavatory, suitable for midsize passenger planes. Strutt's Urban Binning Design proposes a quiet, practical, collapsible alternative to the noisy shopping carts most often employed by binners. Strutt has worked closely with the binners' cooperative United We Can in developing his prototype. In an ideal world, a design student might come up with an overarching scheme for ending unemployment and destitution. In the meantime, it is gratifying to see a young artist working directly and respectfully with a marginalized population, acknowledging both its needs and its contributions.