Though comprised of varied pieces, the new exhibit at the Johnson is held together by representations of the human, and American, identity.

Julie Mehretu's work, currently on display at the Johnson, explores themes of entropy and chaos, but ultimately leave the content up to the interpretation of the viewer.

This month, the Johnson Museum opened it's new exhibit, Tarjama/Translation. Co-curated by Cornell interim Chair of the Department of Art, Iftikhar Dadi, Leeza Ahmadi and assistant curator Reem Fadda, the exhibit features a variety of artists from the Middle East, each dealing with issues of translation, culture and displacement.

The exhibition Topography in Translation — on display at the Johnson museum until March 24 — considers how Chinese artists, working both within China and abroad, have explored topography in the modern and post-modern eras. The exhibition was curated by Cornell students Katherine Finerty ’11, Grace Gemmel grad, Rebecca Hazell ’10, Maureen Kelly ’10, Claudia Mattos ’11 and Meris Mee Sook Sanzotta grad, all of whom took the seminar course History of Art 4818 this past Fall semester with professor Any-yi Pan.

While the word topography generally implies maps or charts, the student curators have interpreted the concept as much vaguer and more flexible. This has made Topography in Translation a much more varied exhibition than one might expect. Though small, the exhibition displays works in a range of media: painting, collage and calligraphy are just several examples.

The history of photography is the history of a technology: the photographic muse is forever embracing, exploiting, or casting off the mimetic availabilities of the mechanical eye. Photographs not only tell us about the images they portray, but also — more invisibly — the relationship between its technology and the creators and consumers who use that technology. Photography as an art form is written both with and against its commercial, documentary, and popular counterparts. “As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer,” Susan Sontag remarks, “so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.” If the photograph poses as an eternalized crystal of time, the instant it captures has been broken off from a process that is still evaporating and crystallizing, a mode of production subject to rapid historical change.

Status-seekers vie for popularity and power; political marriages complicate family trees, loyalties change with the seasons and mistresses are a dime a dozen. All things Italian are totally en vogue, there’s a war on and, by the way, no one’s taken a bath yet this year.

College students have the advantage of being able to make resolutions several times a year. If you fail to resolve things at the beginning of the school year, you always have New Year’s; if you fail after New Year’s, you’ll have the beginning of the next semester, then summer. So it goes. I myself resolved to break habits on New Year’s that I have already returned to.

As guitarists became iconic, so too did their guitars (take for example Jimi Hendrix’s Fender Stratocaster). While this idolatry of guitarists began mid-twentieth century, idolatry of guitars began considerably later.

If your winter break at all resembled mine, it likely included hours upon hours spent vegetating in front of the TV, flipping through SportsCenter reruns and History Channel documentaries (can they give this Nostradamus crap a rest already?) before settling on MTV’s latest reality show, Jersey Shore, which proves once again what suckers we all are for rubbernecking.

So this is what Dorian Gray must have felt like. At least, that was the impression I got from forever is never, a silent video projection showing at the Johnson Art Museum Jan. 16-March 28. Just six minutes long, the continuously looped video is an animated series of hundreds of portraits drawn from historical and contemporary sources and seamlessly fused into a single figure.