Grading students' handiwork

Viewers will have to sort the wheat from the chaff at the 2007 Boston Young Contemporaries Exhibition, the second annual student-run juried show of artists in New England MFA and post-baccalaureate programs. But oh, the wheat is fine stuff.

The show sprawls throughout the cavernous 808 Gallery at Boston University. The jurors -- artists Chie Fueki and Sheila Gallagher and curator and dealer Bruce Brown -- tapped 92 artists from 11 schools. Nothing downright stinks, but there are a number of painters who are still struggling to master their craft and artists whose ideas don't have much meat.

My pick for best in show goes to video artist Tim Geers , whose incisive, powerfully disturbing "Eleanor" critiques US policy in the Middle East. In it, cuss-ugly crickets get caught in a puddle of oil. They dumbly struggle to free themselves and end up drowning. Geers shot the scenes tightly; each bug gets a close - up, and so becomes a character. Despite the horror -- I actually had to look away -- "Eleanor" is magnetic and captivating.

There isn't a lot of socially conscious work in the show, but Geers has a companion in Seth Gadsden , whose fierce mixed-media collage "WE'VE BUILT OUR REPUTATION REBUILDING" covers a wall with newspaper pages filled with stock reports, classified ads, weather charts, and TV listings. Amid this gray murmur pop up small, steely paintings in vivid colors of flag-draped coffins, explosions, conference tables, and miked podiums -- the stuff of war.

Conceptual artist William Whited stands out for his poignant, expertly crafted "The Monument Project ( after N.A.S.A.)," modeled on the launches of the two Voyager spacecrafts into deep space 30 years ago. They carried evidence of humanity's existence in a likely futile effort to reach out to life in the great beyond. Whited recorded an evening of his life and attached it to a battery-powered model boat; he intends to launch it into the Atlantic, hoping to show someone, somewhere something about himself.

Some painters have hit their stride. Lindsey Warren uses lurid colors and a surprising range of textures to evoke a world shimmering on the edge of dissolution, from the woodsy, dappled "Power Outage" to the crisp, sun-stroked "405 Sunset." Painter/ printmaker Michael Finnegan calls his works "oil-on-canvas monotypes." He uses paint, not ink, and prints on canvas to create, in his "September Wedding" series, elusive and deliciously textured scenes.

Gregory Kitterle's engrossing, smudgy drawings in pencil, gold leaf, and Venetian plaster, such as "Discovered Landscape," cleverly contrive space. Justin Life's ink drawings are so intricate you get lost in the tiny marks, then in a flash they coalesce into ghostly, comical giants. Alex DeMaria's drawings use animated film cels as source material; single gestures from the cels echo over the page, expanding into an organic, muscular abstraction.

Sculptor Mackenzie Klump's "Suburban Sprawl" shows a futuristic black city and its environs in wood, plastic, and metal. On the floor, it wouldn't add up to much, but Klump mounts it on the wall. With buildings rudely protruding like weapons, this sprawl impinges on the viewer's space in unorthodox ways.

Photographer Cathleen Faubert makes images of a young woman in midair; floating, flying, and especially falling photography is trendy now. She offers two shots from the bright, deadpan "It's Out There, It's Not in Me" series. Daniel Phillips's photos are chemistry experiments: He prints burnt film to make lovely, crackly, glowing abstractions.

There are many other works worth seeing in "Boston Young Contemporaries." Although the show is unwieldy and often enough mediocre, it's fun to root through its contents; around any corner could lurk something surprisingly good.

Tory Fair played soccer in college and views life through the lens of the playing field. Two of her sculpture installations, each titled "Ready, Set, Bloom," at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, are the most ambitious work I've seen of Fair's.

In each, she starts from the layout of a soccer field: center circle, corner kick lines, goal lines, and field boundaries. They crawl and swivel over the floor in lively, colorful networks. The linear vocabulary of the field is there, but in each piece it moves around like a swift-growing vine, and flowers spring up from junctures and end points. In "Ready, Set, Bloom I," these are knee-high daisies, some bowing to the floor like dancers.

"Ready, Set, Bloom II" works on a much larger scale. There are fewer twists and turns and fewer flowers (although more varieties of them). They start low to the ground, pink at one end; the sculpture grows and ultimately rises triumphantly into bendy red goal posts, each sprouting blooms more than 6 feet high. This piece has the dramatic narrative of a good game. Even the goal posts, which don't quite stand up straight, convey the sense of an underdog taking the win due to an unlikely slip in the mud.

Fair will install public art at Harvard Street Park in Cambridge later this summer. I hope it is as sweetly inventive as these pieces.