The New York City art culture was alive at Cornell University on Tuesday night. New Works on Paper is an art exhibit of Mollie Miller ’10 and Sarah Carpenter ’10, students in the College of Art, Architecture and Planning (Carpenter writes for The Sun). The exhibit opened Tuesday night and will remain so until this Friday at the Olive Tjaden Gallery.

Although the show took up only a single room, the reception began in the hallway. A table adorned with miniature cupcakes, bottles of M&M’s and cheese with crackers attracted guests to talk about the art work inside, the inspiration of each artist and other parties in general.

“Can you imagine if this was an opening for a frat?” pondered one patron. Never has a fraternity been that classy.

Inside, the gallery space is set up like a New York City loft. Besides the paintings, the walls are a stark white with a wood paneling floor, a set-up that magnifies the works. The room is set up as a split space with Miller taking the left and Carpenter on the right.

Pynchon in a Picture: Elaine Oh ’11, fine arts, takes in “Oedipa Maas (‘A Revelation Also Trembled’) #1, #2 and #3” by Sarah Carpenter ’10.While the space is separated, there is cohesiveness to the work. Both artists based their works on literature, with Carpenter finding inspiration in The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon ’59 and Miller using Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The pair has been working on the pieces the last couple of weeks in addition to their classwork, but the concept for the sketches and the show have been in the works since last year.

Miller’s pieces, in her words, are more “narrative, appeal[ing] to the illogical … thought process and the material as part of the language.” The scene in Hamlet that inspired her work comes when Ophelia goes mad. The exact quote that is hung next to the pieces reads, “Pray you, let’s have no words of this, but when they ask you what it means, say this: [Sings.].” As the viewer walks by each piece, they are able to see the narrative of the “procession” of the story that Miller is telling about that scene. Each line is drawn to represent a “simple and childish” style that adds to its simplicity. This child-like presentation adds to the “aesthetic of the mind frame of everyday objects, not necessarily how 3D or accurate it is.” At the end of Miller’s collection, there is a three minute animated narrative. The video was made with sketches that, according to Miller, was not only “more demanding in time,” but adds to the theme of “trauma and loss” in the collection by adding another dimension to the story she tells.

According to Carpenter, her paintings have a style much more related to “translation.” Instead of taking a piece of literature and describing a narrative through her collection, she expresses her views through multiple interpretations. For example, there is one piece titled “Ten Vessels” — if you continue down the wall, you will run into the “Three Vessels.” While the untrained eye would see this as a repitition of the same painting, the second is just as original as the first, seen in another light through alternative color usage and creating a new mood for the piece.

The reaction of the first visitors to see the exhibit was overwhelmingly positive. “[The pieces are] simple, but I can appreciate their work. It’s very vivid,” stated Nino Yosinao ’11. Within the first 15 minutes of opening, many who had clustered around the exhibit expressed similar views. Both artists have done a spectacular job at integrating both literature and visual art.

Carpenter states in a card hanging next to her collection that people act as a “vessel, an envelope or a container whose sole purpose is to tote around its parts.” Both Miller and Carpenter would be the “envelopes” that she speaks of, as it is simple to see how seamlessly they were able to pull parts of literature and part of their own artistic expressions to combine them into something more than what each form of art would have been on its own.