Every day, photographer France Scully Osterman deals with a Schrödinger’s cat of sorts: Her art combines contemporary ideas and images with the old-fashioned photographic techniques of the 19th century.

Think the arts at Cornell are becoming obsolete? Think again. As Friday night’s Student Arts Showcase at the Johnson Museum demonstrated, the arts play a vital — though redefined — role on campus.

When I first learned Carolee Schneemann was coming to the Johnson Museum to lecture in conjunction with the exhibition of her most famous work, “Interior Scroll,” I knew I had to be there. When I found out I would be interviewing her, my excitement was only slightly stifled by my increasing nerves.  In her performance pieces, Carolee Schneemann introduced a feminist dimension, using h

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 small exhibit of contemporary portrait photography now showing at the Johnson Museum, In Your Face, contains a bewildering array of attitudes that strike — and strike out — many views toward sex and gender, reflecting and redefining the different and sometimes overlapping waves of feminism and queer theory that have evolved over the past four decades.

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.

Dormitorium: Film Decors by

The Brothers Quay

Jan 25-Feb 5

Fantastical art exhibit and showings of the animated series created by the Quay Brothers. At the John Hartell Gallery in Sibley Dome.

James Siena: From the

Studio

January 16-April 18

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.

In a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum, artwork takes on a very conceptual form. The work, produced by Cornell’s own art faculty, displays a variety of complex ideas and poses questions about the discipline of art itself. The new exhibit confounds the usual practice of many art exhibits, which typically invite the viewer to create a history or explanation based on his or her own unique interpretation and perception of the aesthetic image. Instead, this show asks you to dig deeper to think of the ontological questions that art puts forth.

Starting this past Saturday, Level 2L of the Johnson museum is playing host to an unusual yet thought-provoking film installation. Looking Pretty for God, a documentary by Omer Fast, explores an unlikely relationship: a photo shoot and a funeral home. Fast, an Israeli filmmaker who recently won the 2009 Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, challenges conventional media’s portrayal of reality. Toying with the distinction between audio and visual media in Looking Pretty for God, Fast uses interviews with funeral home employees as a means to narrate footage of a photo shoot of children. At the Johnson until Jan. 24, this pseudo-documentary may not impress you at first, but its provocative motivation gradually becomes a fun puzzle to solve.