Welcome to the second installment of IvyGate Galleries, an irregular showcase of student artwork that, hopefully/debateably, doesn't suck.

Our last gallery -- an unorthodox take on the Catholic saints -- nearly wrought a Church-wide schism, so we decided to go with a theme everyone would like: politicians doing aerobics.

The following animation, titled "ShapeUp" and created by Harvard sophomore Rebecca Rojer, is what you might see if you dropped acid, blasted Oakenfold on your noise-cancelling headphones, and turned the TV to C-Span. How else could anyone imagine Dick Cheney's head affixed to a woman's body as he/she rhythmically stretches the hamstrings, all while rocketing through the galaxy at Warp 9? It's possible the video is making some sort of political statement -- but we kind of hope not.

(See more of Rebecca's art -- and her cool animation blog -- here.)

We kind of launch a new series around here every other day, some with more success than others. But we were pretty excited about IvyGate Galleries -- basically, ivyTunes for art -- when we announced it last month. There is some ludicrous slash good student art out there, and we were looking forward to dropping it bloodily into your commenting maw.

Alas, the submissions haven't exactly poured in. Why the lack of interest? Maybe all the campus artists are too busy mainlining peyote and hurling their paint-lathered genitals against Chinese takeout menus -- or whatever gets you an A in studio these days -- to notice our solicitation. Maybe seeking publicity for your oeuvre reeks of commerce, man. Whatever the case, alert your fartsy friends that we're looking, and in the meantime we'll cheat a little with this initial salvo by Cornell's Brad Wilson '07.

Huge disclaimer: Half of us went to high school with Brad, and we actually appear in one of the images in the series (not pictured). It's titled "Young Christian Soldiers," and each frame reenacts a scene from the life of a Catholic saint; that's St. Kevin above, whose caption reads: "Following his ordination as a priest, he lived as a hermit for seven years in his own filth in a cave at Glendalough." More from the series are after the jump, but first we should probably sound a huge !WARNING! that there's some nudity and sacrilegious stuff there.

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Most art sucks. That's what L.A.'s late great art zine Coagula thought, and, after many hours squinting at art history slides and snickering through student-run exhibitions, we have to agree. If you've kept one eye on the campus art scene, chances are you've seen works ranging from distasteful to poorly executed to crimes against humanity. We feel your pain.

But we also know it doesn't have to be that way. Not every student photo has to depict a girl sitting by a window, or someone putting on make-up in a mirror (in black and white, of course). Not every painting must depict the Virgin Mary in menstrual blood. Call us crazy, but we think you can do better.

So it's in a spirit of blind optimism that we introduce IvyGate Galleries, a series of collections by artists in the Ivy League that suck a little less than average. (In other words: ivyTunes with pitchers. And yes, we are trying to beat another installment of that out of our critic.) Here's how it works: every so often, we post a bunch of works -- photos, paintings, sketches, animations -- by a different student artist, along with a wee bit of commentary. We're looking for stuff that's somehow surprising, arresting, confrontational -- in other words, stuff that will hold our ADD-infected readership's attention.

Our goal: to help artists reach a wider audience than their cluster of sweetly deceitful boosters, all while living out our wildest curatorial fantasies. It obviously depends on your submissions, so e-mail us your stuff at the usual.

Technical crap: Send sane-sized previews in advance of hi-res. Any medium is fine, as long as it works in our 2-D format. Understand we have a post width of 500 pixels (which can be linked to bigger files). We're pretty flex on who qualifies -- undergrad, grad, recent grad, pre-frosh, etc, I mean, what is art anyway, man?