Nickola Pottinger and Gabriel Smith in the Houghton Gallery, March 25-29

A few days after Nickola Pottinger and Gabriel Smith's untitled exhibition opened I came back to sit in the Houghton Gallery, that one genuinely nice gallery space in the building. Some other students had come, too, six or seven elementary school students being chaperoned by a woman who asked in front of one drawing the simple and important question, "do you know what's happening in this drawing?" I realized that I hadn't even asked myself that question, and that maybe this was because for me the drawing had been lost in a jumble of other hectic drawings. I had looked over the drawing on an earlier visit but it wasn't until the children had moved that I asked myself for the first time, does that drawing really need glitter on it?

The two artists each democratically occupy fifty percent of the wall space—ceding all floor space to the viewer— and with so many drawings placed so closely to one another the show can sometimes feel like more like a show and tell than an exhibition. But a coherent and interesting conversation emerges from the two sides of the room, that face each other from different ends of the aesthetic and emotional universe. Pottinger's drawings dwell in the delicate and the perishable (do those drawing really need to be on newsprint?) and in a quirky sort of sexuality. Most of her forms come in doubles and many resemble testicles. Gabriel's drawings stare back with two terrifying eyeballs at the center of a colorful and energetic storm.

Some questions came up for me in this show. First, and I ask this all the time now, and other people should, too, why aren't these drawings labeled? Not indicating names, titles, or a show title outside the gallery space isn't just sloppy, it makes the viewing more difficult. I also kept wondering what the importance of a coherent message in a show is, and maybe specifically in a "student" show. There are formal and conceptual threads through each set of work, and I think the conversation between those two bodies is interesting, but I keep coming back to that "show and tell" feeling. It sounds like: Okay, here are my drawings, take a look. And I keep reaching the question, "so what?" What are these drawings saying? Smith's drawings are frail, sexual, maybe, sometimes beautiful. Does that mean they are speaking about frailty, about sexuality? They feel too ambiguous. For me, Nikola's drawings feel like they are working through some interesting problems and questions—pulling back from an order into something more emotional, and then wiping away some of that emotion to reveal another kind of order.

Henry Chapman