Jewelry, in theory.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

`Coming Into View,'' a small exhibit that opened this month at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, advertises that it's a show of contemporary jewelry. It would be more accurate to say it's a show of ``jewelry.''

The ironic quotation marks are necessary because much of the jewelry in this exhibit is unlikely to be worn by even the most adventurous jewelry lover - and some pieces are so utterly postmodern and conceptual that they don't actually exist, outside of photographs.

Jewelry on this particular cutting edge, it turns out, is not really jewelry at all so much as it is a visual essay that examines ``the social, cultural, political and psychological ideas inherent to the function of adornment,'' to steal a phrase from a museum handout. The pieces in the exhibit, though, manage to transcend such a stilted and dreary concept, offering humor, style and surprise in equal measure.

"These are new ways of thinking about jewelry," says Anya Kivarkis, a 31-year-old visiting professor of art at the University of Oregon and one of the 12 artists in the show. "Jewelry can be related to design - or it can be related to conceptual development. This show expands on the ways of thinking about jewelry."

The exhibit originally opened in conjunction with the Society of North American Goldsmiths conference in Chicago this year.

Two contributors to the show - Dutch artist Constanze Shreiber and the art collective Body Politics, which is the name used by German artists Kathleen Taplick and Peter Krause - dance on the edge of creepiness.

Shreiber's necklaces are made of animal fur, with weighted hanging appendages that look a bit like fur balls hanging off a cat, giving them a startling and wonderfully loathsome quality.

And the strange biological forms created by Body Politics look like bits of space alien biology forged into soft plastic.

Among the most beautiful and, at the same time, most disturbing works on display are by Lauren Kalman, who is working on her master of fine arts degree at Ohio State University.

It is Kalman whose work in this show is almost solely virtual. What she does is to paint gold flecks onto a model and photograph the result.

The result varies from inconsequential to stunning and grotesque. In the most beautiful, a woman's mouth is half crusted with gold flecks and what could be emeralds - or, look again, and it might all be Graham cracker crumbs and peas. Either way, images of "Goldfinger" flash into mind, along with a baby's unwiped mouth.

On the stranger end of the spectrum, another of Kalman's works has a gold-encrusted tongue dripping saliva into a vial. The tongue, in the exhibit, is videotaped and shown on a small display screen above an actual vial that contains clear liquid and flecks of gold. (There is no way of knowing whether the vial contains real or virtual saliva.)

I was disappointed to discover none of these was an actual piece of jewelry that you might be able to admire at a cocktail party anytime soon.

But no one, as Kalman herself points out, could ever stand to wear such jewelry.

"The bodily configurations necessary to display the adornment" - that's art-jewelry speak for "wear the jewelry" - "often appear absurd and require physical restraint against twitching, wincing or swallowing," she says on the exhibit's Web site, www.comingintoview .net.

Don't buy Kalman's work for your sweetheart, in other words, unless you're getting tired of him or her.

Kivarkis has three exquisite little brooches in the show that could certainly be worn.

Each of the pieces is made of sterling silver coated with white automotive paint, lending each a clean, ethereal quality.

Each one is finely produced. And each one is, for all intents and purposes, backwards, hiding its finest workmanship behind a plain flat surface that looks like it's waiting for a stone or cameo to be set into it.

Like the other artists in the show, Kivarkis has a somewhat tortured explanation of all this. (``The work hovers in a space that is simultaneously excessive and blank,'' begins one line of her artist statement.)

Some of the work has been shown here before. Ukiko Honda's hybrid rings - each one is composed of two not obviously related halves - were shown in the annual masters of fine arts student show last year, when she was a student at the UO.

More fine work comes from Amelia Toelke, whose enameled "banner brooches" are lovely, crisp and cool looking; they were among the pieces (the fur necklaces being the others) that I most wanted to reach into the display cases and touch.

In all its stuffy pretension, art from young academic artists is way too easy to make fun of. But the jewelry in "Coming Into View," despite all those freshly minted MFAs and incomprehensible artist statements, is engaging and rewarding to see.

ART REVIEW Coming Into View What: Contemporary jewelry from 12 emerging jewelers Where: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 1430 Johnson Lane, on the University of Oregon campus When: Through Feb. 18 Hours: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Admission: $5; $3 students and seniors