Saturday I finally got to the Henry Art Gallery to see the exhibition of the UW MFA grads—the only graduate students in art in Seattle. (Whether you think grad school in art is essential or ridiculous this is still the only program around. My opinion is that having a quick yea or nay on whether grad school is good is missing the wild diversity of types of grad schools, artists, and students out there. Sermon over.)

I have mixed feelings about reviewing student shows. First of all, they're student shows. Students are supposed to experiment and learn. Failure is success if it gets them somewhere. What if a bunch of critics encourage one part of what an artist is doing when she graduates, and then she feels pressured to stick on that spot just to please? This is how stagnation is made.

Second of all, the show at the Henry has in recent years been giving the awkward impression that pleasing critics or dealers is pretty much what these student artists are trying to do already—which is bad. Most of the art is are overly polished and painfully derivative. The combination is deadly.

Last year, writing a review made me feel like I was saying, here, pay attention to these artists who are not yet ready for public consumption. Look, but look away quickly. It wasn't a good feeling.

This year's MFA show hardly struck me as more lively. It's...okay.

Large-scale representational painting is back in a big way, in works by Anne Petty and Hugo Shi. Large-scale sculpture is here, too, in an elaborate clay mariachi band by George Rodriguez. At right is a view of the band (you stand in the circle, and they "play" to you) and a couple of Petty paintings. (Photo by Richard Nicol.)

Photography student Laurel Schultz made a series of clear-eyed photographs of Weyerhaeuser's bonsai collection.

Bo Choi created three psychologically constraining garments out of white shirts, then made a video of a performer activating them. Ben Waterman, clearly influenced by Kim Jones, made an installation of piles of burnt stuff in shallow containers, with excerpts from war texts by writers including Tim O'Brien on the wall. There also are drawings and sculptures narrating allegories of furniture—a cardboard table on its knees, a painted screaming dresser, a painted sliced bed—by Marie Claire Bozant (at top). Painter Robert Gardner's small oils are Morandi-esque. Alice Case's abstractions are in candy colors. Haley Farthing's paintings on wood are chiaroscuro studies in the basic classical sense. Arun Sharma's two sculptures are a dusty-skinned man with a baby attached to him by an umbilical cord coming out of his penis, life-size; and a glowing orange plexi coffin with an ant farm in its walls. Erin Elyse Burns makes two videos of herself, hapless, in a rowboat, tethered to the shore by a rope.

I'm starting to wonder what's going on—or not going on—at UW's art department. Things seem pickled, like the mysterious stuff in the giant jars painted by Hugo Shi, hovering menacingly over the shoulders of these poor mariachis.