Audrey Flack comes to the Johnson Museum to discuss art, history and feminism.

“We live in a terrible century of banalization and trivialization, of repetitious things; all our world is surrounded by…bombastic things. And we the humans like to experience something unique, once in a lifetime, if never again. All our works have this quality that if you miss them, you will never see them.”

This week’s art show in Hartell Gallery is no easy view — there’s a lot to see and dissect, from works on paper to sculpture and even sculptural works on paper. The viewer simply can’t absorb the entire installation in one turn around the room. Elliot Hess grad’s M.F.A. thesis show is challenging but not inaccessible; the conscientious viewer will not walk away empty-handed.

Yes; I’m Serious, and Don’t Call Me Surely, the thesis show of M.F.A. student Allen Camp ’09, is as funny as its title promises. However, it is equally serious. A selection of three-dimensional works in a limited palette, the show investigates the often-paradoxical relationship between objects and their “idiographic symbols.”

The fulcrum is a handshake. It’s an exchange of power, a link between bodies, the passing of traditions and a tight squeeze for love.

“It all rests in the hands,” Noah Robbins ’10 said about the two statues he has constructed for his untitled exhibit that explores these themes and is currently open in Tjaden gallery.

Two heavy, white-plaster casts of individual male torsos perch atop wood crate-like pedestals. The two bodies unite by extended arms — they hold hands out between the two wooden columns on which they rest. One body is from a smaller man, presumably a younger man, and both bodies seem immensely unyielding and weighty. The two arms that extend over the gap between the pedestals seem uncommonly fragile.

Two fifth-year architects have teamed up to display their very different artworks in Sibley’s Hartell gallery. Both artists explore the way their objects interact with the viewer’s body: physically and culturally provoking the viewer to imagine the contours of what one chooses to embrace and what one chooses to give up. Like the image of Rubin’s face/vase (replaced by the artists’ profiles), which they display on their lone curatorial placard, absence always hugs and contains the material as its unacknowledged background.

They’ve had their breasts painted green by architecture students. They’ve been stolen by miscreant frat boys. They’ve been rolled down Libe Slope on Slope Day and they’ve weathered the storms of misuse and assault.