Experience is taking them places

SMFA Traveling Scholars
At: Museum of Fine Arts,
through April 12.
617-267-9300,
www.smfa.edu

We look to art colleges such as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to show us what's new. Young artists plug into fresh, surprising ideas, and if they have the technical mastery to make art about those ideas, their work can startle. Each year, the Museum School taps a handful of alumni artists and students participating in the post-baccalaureate Fifth Year Certificate program for the Traveling Scholarship Award. The 2004 recipients, who received travel grants to enrich their work, have an exhibition up at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Unfortunately, not enough of it startles.

The three alumni recipients -- all in their late 30s and early 40s -- stand head and shoulders above the fifth-year students a decade or more younger. Hannah Barrett, Helen_Kim, and Rachel Perry Welty offer up succinct, clever, well-thought-out work that is more finely honed than that of their juniors.

Barrett, a painter who traveled to Rome to see Renaissance paintings, continues to work along a theme she's been developing for a few years, morphing the physical features of married couples into singular characters. She started out doing this with her parents, in a delightfully charged examination of their union that was also, in some ways, a comical self-portrait. Her works here take off from another married couple, both scientists at the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston. Barrett puts her characters to work in a lab, a wryly perfect setting for her own painterly version of genetic manipulation. The androgynous sum of these male and female parts verges on grotesque, but the paintings are sweet and funny.

Kim traveled to Korea, armed with her mother's handwritten jottings of family history. She found no correlation between her mother's memory and present-day life, and her assemblage of text and snapshots from her journey poignantly captures the gap between memory and reality.

Perry spent time in New Mexico. In her hands, the detritus of everyday life gets spun into art. It can be as visually straightforward as ''Column B," a lovely, shimmering pillar of silver twist ties, gossamer beside its twin, one of the gallery's structural supports. Or it can be more conceptual, as in the pithy ''Karaoke Wrong Number," a video in which the artist lip-synchs errant messages left on her answering machine.

Either way, the clarity of thinking behind the work of the alumni doesn't show up in pieces by the fifth-year students. Lori A. Paradise, in an effort to prove how untidy life is, has created a very untidy installation featuring painting, video, soft sculpture, and too much more. Life's messiness shouldn't be used as an excuse for an artist's messiness.

Cliff Evans errs in the same direction, although his video collage, projected over three screens, gets points for sheer impact. ''The Road to Mount Weather" is technically dazzling -- and dizzying. Still images dash across the screens, juxtaposing smiling businessmen and buxom nudes with landscapes of disaster. The dissonance between the two can't be missed, but Evans hammers it home without any clear rhythm, nuance, or breathing space. Life isn't quite so black and white. Naoko Matsumoto's ceramic sculptures of objects trapped within cages are simpler, but her imagery isn't strong enough to fully embody her stated theme of confinement.

It's best to withhold judgment on Bryce Kauffman, a performance artist who was not performing when I saw the exhibition (he's there on Saturday afternoons). His installation of a forest of large-scale origami trees shows promise: It's delicate and cartoonish, and evokes the innocence of a childhood pastime and the focus of an ancient art. When he's there, he destroys the trees; torn paper litters the ground around the installation. Here's hoping his performance is as interesting as his origami.