• installation view
• Laura Shill — A Small Room
• Laura Shill — A Small Room
• Adam Milner — Variations
• Conor King — Nicolai
• Conor King — title unknown
• Amber_Cobb — title unknown
• Devon Dikeou — Open Art Fax Line
• Tobias Fike — title unknown
• Carlos Fresquez — title unknown
• Gretchen Marie Schafer — Second Attempt
• artist unknown — title unknown

The opening felt like a big deal. A big name — The Biennial of the Americas — a big, beautiful space, and a packed house full of hip- and/or important-seeming people.

The work is big too. Multiples are everywhere.

A lot about Mexico, and a lot of criticism of US capitalism, industry, and marketing — giant systems overwhelming people.¹

There are crisp, monumental portraits which seem to say that the only honest face is a disquieted one. There are immigrants’ longings for identity and community written in the lights of roadside America or in ink on their faces. There are traditional crafts juxtaposed with heavy industry or made into gross sausage-flesh… there are tremendously fun-looking beach-ball catapults being operated with such robotic ritual that they become sad metaphors for dehumanization and conflict. There are plastic-y, perfect, mass-produced products made insidious or banal.

Teresa Anderson encases herself in a very uncomfortable suit.

Then there’s this whole other strand, one of beauty and an awareness of nature, light, and the (gorgeous, raw) architecture of the space itself. Clouds, wind, windows, and light fixed in vinyl and oils. Puffy albino amoeba floating out of the windows. Nine thousand shimmering threads.

The show is supposed to be about drafts but whatever the work, it was certainly not rough. Clean, clever, minimal and sometimes obtuse… political… serious about its joy and dry with its barbs. There’s a mold I have in my head for what a giant, museum-caliber contemporary art show looks and feels like and this giant, important thing fit snugly within it.