Pretty, vacant: High-quality local work gets showcase at Tufts

It's a disappointingly beautiful show: all ribbons and bows and not enough content. Schlegel has an eye for the rapturous and a passion for process. She's put together a collection of 20 artists, and they're all quite good at what they do. The bent of many of them toward the ethereal or toward lush materials and colors sates an appetite for beauty quickly -- like a meal that's all sweetness, with little tang. The tangy works are here, but you have to look for them; it's so easy to get caught in a sugar high, you might miss them.

Hwae Jung's stunning installation "Drawing in the Air" sets the tone. She has suspended a huge, snaking length of delicate paper, ripped and shredded along the way, coiling out from a window right into the center of the gallery. One vast section is mostly white; the loop that dips closest to the ground crinkles with black ink that traces the folds and creases, drawing a remarkable landscape through the air. It's a magical piece, a mystic scroll unfurling and offering up riddles of the spirit.

That same quality of beauty shows up again and again. Beverly Sky's handmade paper-pulp paintings of forests, shimmering with threads of gold and silver, seem suspended at a moment between abstraction and realism, as if they are just now cohering into trees and puddles (having originated in just that source material -- plant fiber and water). M. L. Van Nice's artist's books open out, in image and word, into purposely elusive journeys of image and text -- not unlike the elusive journey through life. "Simple Story, Untold" meanders through some darkly romantic and insinuating possibilities of one woman's history, all a tease to illustrate the power of suggestion.