The brutally systematic, though still empathetic works of Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty are undisguised elucidations of specific active systems. Often hinging on frameworks of social or commercial labor, such as the day-to-day activity of gallery staff, X-ray machines, or FedEx shipping operations, his photographic and sculptural works are each indexical products of transactions—whether initiated by, or exposed by the artist.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial traces an immeasurable circumference around our contemporary moment, looking for the “edge of an irregularly shaped idea,” according to co-curator Mia Locks—who, together with Whitney Associate Curator Christopher Y. Lew, assertively orchestrated a perpetually shifting fugue of sixty-three artists and collectives for its seventy-eighth edition.

There’s an ineffable freight to the irresistible mastery of Roe Ethridge, whose twenty years in the public eye have afforded constellations of the most seemingly unrelated and pensively lush orchestrations, delivered with irony, buoyancy, sentiment, and transparency.