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photo by Christman A bit of Reuben Van Til’s ‘Life-Cycle.’

Of course the function of art can’t be nailed down to one thing, but it’s easy to begin to list several. I’ve long thought one of art’s purposes was to suffice for the gaps in our spoken or written language, to compensate for our frequent episodes of muteness.

Calvin’s second B.F.A. exhibit, located in the Spoelhof Art Gallery until April 17, is the kind of exhibition that accomplishes that; unfortunately, it also makes the task of writing about these things that much more dubious. So let me begin with this apology: whatever I find to say, it’s been said better and wordlessly elsewhere.

One of these artists, Mike Richison, contends with such questions of language and codification within his work. For example, his two largest pieces, “Inventory” and “Paragraphs,” use mechanical icons as units of language. In “Inventory,” these units are repeated down the length of the piece and some are labelled with numbers, updating the viewer on the count. In fact, perhaps the most easily legible part of this work is in the numbers rising, accurately, but at strange increments.

In “Paragraphs,” too, we find the numbers, but the icons are in a continuous block, and it is impossible to tell whether the inserted numbers are meant to show the break into a new paragraph or whether someone has gone through the prose counting sentences. The “Paragraphs” emerge from a dark purple background, the chromatic opposite of the yellow used in the first work. Between these complementary colors there is a fruitful but imperfect translation of the way symbols work to measure things mathematically and linguistically.

In later works, Richison shows us other labels and icons, made up of 1’s and 0’s, which call to mind the language of digital code. But I think my favorite of his pieces is a smaller one that falls inbetween. It’s called “Step One.” On a small piece of wood, fingernails and metal shavings are caught under latex on opposite sides. The fingernails are placed in silver boxes which are connected by a geometric web. The boxes, again, are numbered, but the fingernails are not.

On the right side of the work, metal shavings mimic the fingernails, but they are held in connection only by proximity and tiny silver labels that number each shaving. The loss of affinity between organic and synthetic is what strikes me as most beautiful, but perhaps either case is only a different kind of association.

Brett Budde’s art is also threaded with repeating figures. His body of work, titled “Productions,” is a narrative of star-labelled packages, men and women, word bubbles and thought clouds, a window and a TV screen with the same color glass and casing. Budde’s work possesses a strange mechanical fantasy that manages to give the viewer a sense that gaps are opening up in the narrative. And I’m not sure whether this is true or not, but these paintings seem to me to convey a complex life with steady, deliberate simplicity. Perhaps it is this intentional disconnect between the artist’s approach and his subject matter that creates the gaps in the frames of thought. To me that seems fitting, because Budde pictures the part of life that either used to be or should have been simpler.

Within this grouping, however, the artist offers us a few instances of reciprocity. For example, in one group of four paintings, we see industrial or mechanical images lead up to a scene of a man and a woman standing on the far edges of the same room. The man has a telephone in hand, and a red cord stretches across the floor to another telephone, which the woman lunges toward, implying a human inability to talk without technological mediation, even over the smallest of distances.

But further in the sequence, we see an outdoor scene of a man and woman walking away from each other. Between them hangs a thought bubble emerging from smaller clouds above their minds. I like the way this piece questions the other one, insisting there are still connections that not only need no technology, but also need no words.

Dave Prinsen’s ingenuity is different. On the gallery’s right side, Prinsen has set up two tables on which battery-powered things roll or waddle their way across a piece of taped-down paper, leaving charcoal or pencil marks as they go. At the first table, two different kinds of weasel balls are let go in a walled-in area, leaving strange marks. On the resulting work, most of the lines assume the linear shape of dropped thread, but there are also areas where the drawing is too dense to distinguish lines, places that look like a dense, illegible cursive.

The other table fences in Buckey, who is apparently a beaver, but looks more like a fat plastic dog. At any rate, a plastic circle attaches both to Buckley’s nose and tail. He waddles around frantically, making marks that look like a spirograph that forgets it limits and branches off from the center of the design with staticky fronds. I think the most interesting thing about Prinsen’s work is that kind of phenomenon: the emphasis on both randomness and limitation.

Finally, Reuben Van Til’s work shares the importance of the linear, but expands it into a spatial concern. What I appreciate most about Van Til is the way he looses materials we consider heavy and stable of those qualities.

Along the left wall of the gallery hang two sculptures, each of which is constructed around a central shape: in one case, something like a top, and in the other a rectangle. Surrounding these forms in a ravelling or unwinding is a sort of rollercoaster track of what remind me of organ pedals. But with both of these works, there is a sense of unbelievable poise in the angle in which they hang and in the feeling that they disregard gravity just by their motion.

I was also drawn to Van Til’s four compositions, which faced inward from the gallery’s center pillars. Three of these are backed with mirrors -- two are opaque, and the other is cut into such slices that it turns your reflection into a cubist face. “Composition Two” has a pattern of metal squares attached to the wiring which are reminiscent of mirrors, but give back no reflection.

Finally, this show evades generalization. But I will say that its artists have each articulated the way confusion can come to fruition instead of despondency.