A glimpse of tomorrow today

Young artists with big passions should be restricted to 6 -by-9 -inch canvases until they learn that art isn't just about emoting -- it's about craft, and honing a vision. ``Boston Young Contemporaries," which showcases the best works of local fine arts graduate students, has more than its share of giant, over -ambitious, bloated abstract paintings . But wade through the sea of operatic pieces , and you'll find a strong contingent of thoughtful, provocative , and sometimes funny work.

Jurors Kiki Smith , Gideon Bok , both artists, and curator Laura Donaldson sifted through works from seven MFA programs to choose the more than 100 works on display at Boston University's 808 Gallery. Their picks prove the adage that if you want to chart what's coming up in contemporary art, go to the art schools.

Gerald Rojek is an abstract painter working on a reasonable scale, and his ``Downtown Touch" is simple but engrossing. A rosy mess of paint, as tactile as icing on a cake and blushing deep at the center, hovers over a careful grid of red dots; it's like a very orderly life being taken over by desire or shame. Speaking of the latter, Derek Sober's ``A Son's Remorse" will hit home with anyone who has avoided a parent's call. It's an old-style dial telephone with a video monitor at the dial's center: Watch as the son sits gloomily listening to his father's plaintive messages.

Cathy Lees makes realist paintings with a nightmare twist. She litters pristine domestic interiors with stick-thin girls, effectively skeletons in the closet, piled like bones in laundry baskets in ``Bedroom Laundry" or tumbling out of the refrigerator onto a floor strewn with shells, yolks , and whites in ``Broken Eggs." Caleb Brown zeroes in on the tangled steel of car crashes, bringing the viewer so close that the bent and crumpled metal turns into muscular gestures on an abstract canvas.

Nathalie Miebach's woven baskets, whose warp and woof serve as the X and Y axes in scientific charts mapped with sticks and balls, are the most conceptually sophisticated and beautifully executed works in the show. Ria Brodell has latched onto the artistic trend, perhaps inspired by cloning and genetic engineering, of morphing species. Her comical ``Birdmen (Installation)" features sparrows and titmice with men's heads. The heads have plastered-on hair and thick eyebrows and look both alarmed and stymied.

Two artists work with bedroom interiors, walking the line between dream and nightmare. Liz Shepherd's ``St. Sebastian" is a small, pink chest of drawers drilled with holes and illuminated from within, seeming to contain the night sky. Disnarda Pinilla's haunting ``During the Night" features a single bed beneath a cascade of drops, strung on invisible nylon thread and growing larger as they near the ground. Pinilla elegantly captures beauty, comfort , and threat in a simple vision.

Tory Fair has played soccer all her life, and as an artist she's parlayed the lines of playing fields into meditations on the rules and boundaries of life. Her sculpture ``Side Line Bloom," at the Artists Foundation, delightfully brings sidelines off the ground and into the viewer's space. They look like inverted goal posts, coming alive as they swivel and rise until ending, at waist height, as white daisies. Amid the seriousness of the World Cup, Fair's work is like a toy gun that ejects a flower when you pull the trigger.

Also at the Artists Foundation, Kurt Gilbert Wahlstrom has a series of sweetly funny videos starring his parents, who not only play themselves but don wigs and play each other. And Susan Halter's lush, large-scale photographs superimpose images of dogs over self-portraits; they're lovely to look at, but the juxtaposition seems forced.

Frederick Hart, the late sculptor who designed the west facade of the Washington National Cathedral, has a show of small sculptures and maquettes at Lanoue Fine Art. His work has all the overblown passion of a Barbara Cartland romance. Hart was a deft craftsman, but his figures are all Barbie beautiful, and his ideas have the substance of soft-swirl ice cream. ``Ex Nihilo," the most prominent feature of the National Cathedral commission, consists of exquisite men and women emerging from Hart's version of the primordial cloud of creation.

Hart was commissioned to create a representational sculpture to stand near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when it went up in 1982, no doubt to assuage the expected outcry at Maya Lin's daring, visionary black wall listing the names of the dead. A model of Hart's piece is up at Lanoue. I had seen the sculpture, but its effect was so puny beside Lin's memorial I'd forgotten it was there.

Today, it's impossible to make a figurative sculpture that is purely heroic. Even our comic book superheroes are littered with neuroses. Hart was a 19th-century artist working in the 20th century, unable to catch the spirit of his time.