There's a 13-foot inflated sitting man with a hamburger for a head at the Albuquerque Museum.
"That one's titled 'The Mayor Rests,'" said Ramona Zamir-Gonzalez, senior assistant at the Albuquerque Museum. "It's attached to this pump that puts air into it, but it kind of sighs and breathes and groans. I was talking to a coworker, and they mentioned something about how the artist recorded gastrointestinal sounds from his dog and incorporated that into his piece."
It's one of 83 art pieces at the second annual Biennial Southwest, which accepted works from artists living in Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. It opened Sept. 28 and runs through Nov. 30.
Exhibition juror Stephanie Hanor, senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, chose the final pieces from 1,394 entries. Some were awarded cash prizes.
Judging this year's exhibition may not have been easy, but Hanor managed to select a full variety of eclectic works in just a few weeks.
"It's a quick process," said Patty Gonzalez of the Albuquerque Museum. "Every piece that is judged goes by fast so the mind can be fresh to see new things."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Hanor included large installations, paintings, sculpture, works on paper and photography.
"It's all very abstract," she said. "They're all southwest artists, but there's no southwest art."
Artist Julia Barello's "Swoop" features hundreds of transparent birds flying together, each cut from recycled MRI transparencies.
"It's somehow attached to the wall, and it looks like you're just seeing these birds swooping in a flock," Zamir-Gonzalez said.
Barello won a Best in Alternative Media award for her other piece, "Swale," in which she cut butterflies from dyed X-ray film and displayed them in a similar manner to the swooping birds.
Zamir-Gonzalez said the biennial was successful in casting light on contemporary techniques.
"The expression of the artist just seems to be growing as people are finding more and more uses for everyday objects," she said. "Well, X-ray film isn't really an everyday object.. It's just different and beautiful and weird - some of them are just weird and bizarre. I think most people expect that with contemporary (art), and some people don't like it for that (same) reason. But it gets your attention."
