The Whitney Biennial 2017 has produced debate and conversation around critical cultural issues ranging from appropriation and racism to land rights and environmental devastation. Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket has been the primary site of debate, inspiring protests and an open letter signed by more than 30 artists that the painting be removed from the Biennial. However many works in the exhibition addressed these issues in disparate ways. Francis Stark’s Censorship Now featured eight large-scale panels, each painted with a page from Censorship Now!!, Ian Svenonius’s scathing (yet borderline satirical) account of how we need new forms of censorship to usurp the current default censorship produced by the free market and the corporations that exert disproportionate control over it. Irena Haiduk’s installation Frauenbank imagined and realized a bank that allows only women to be members and whose assets are used to purchase land in Serbia, the use of which members then vote on. These works imagined utopias that challenge our assumptions about the limits of what we accept as reality.

More impressive than what any of these works achieve on their own is what they produced at the Biennial together, in concert with one another. On my visit to the Whitney, dodging the herds of tours shepherded around each floor, I found myself lingering in a conversation between three works in particular—John Divola’s Abandoned Painting B, Samara Golden’s The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, and John Kessler’s Evolution—that encouraged their shared viewer to consider the particular meanings and messages that emerged from the dialogue among them, expanding, in turn, their potential as individual works.

I started my visit to the Biennial on the fifth floor of the museum and, after some meandering, found myself in a gallery of photos by the artist John Divola. The photos are of painted portraits hung in ramshackle indoor and outdoor environments. The accompanying wall text explains that these are paintings, presumably student paintings, that Divola found in a dumpster near University of California Riverside, where he teaches. The figures in the portraits look out beyond the borders of their respective canvases and into the habitats Divola has restored them to. In Abandoned Painting B the woman in the painting looks out beyond the frame of her canvas and through a window on the adjacent wall.

Abandoned Painting B by John Divola

It has been said that something becomes real to people elsewhere by being photographed. That effect is doubled in Abandoned Painting B. We can assume the painting and its canvas exist in the material world. Yet the woman depicted in it seems no less “real” than the rest of the habitat Divola has placed her in. Looking through that window, she becomes more a subject of the photo than of the canvas she’s painted on. I got the feeling that Divola captured a candid shot of this woman who happened to be looking out the window when the shutter flashed.

The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes by Samara Golden

It’s hard to miss the west-facing window on the fifth floor of the Whitney. During the Biennial it was framed by Samara Golden’s The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes. Golden’s installation was a series of eight miniature scenes ranging from the mundane—a lovingly cluttered family dining room, a modular office set-up—to the dystopic—an austere hospital room with toilets streaked by excrement (or blood?)—but with no people to inhabit these rooms. A cynical post-recession update to Laurie Simmons’ Kaleidescope House. The scenes were in rectangular frames stacked on the left and right side of the window, alternately inverted to face each other, and reflected in large mirrors below and above the windows. It took me some time to figure out how many scenes there were (eight, I think) because some were only visible in their reflections, and barely at that. The reflections were reflected ad infinitum toward earth and sky as viewers peered up and down into this kaleidoscopic stairwell of a fictional mixed-use building.

Framed in the window between the inverted stacks of scenes was a view of a construction site on the other side of the highway, its workers busily walking about, moving materials, and chatting with one another. From my point of view, they were the perfect size to make use of Golden’s miniature furniture, all of which seems to be looking for users. They appeared to be more in the frame of windows, sealed between the glass of the panes and the mat of the Hudson River, than on the other side of it. They were Golden’s adopted subjects, there only to play a role in her imagined world.