I’ve had a grudge against big contemporary art shows. I almost never go to the New Museum, and I’ve opted out of the Whitney Biennial since ’05, but this year’s SCOPE made me wonder how much fun I’ve missed out on as a result.

Martin C. Herbst showed a series on Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait that included the application of the image to an actual convex mirror, and fantastically, a large, moveable chrome ball. This allowed the viewer to roll the reflective side around and assume Parmigianino’s pose, literally playing with the complexities of anamorphosis.

Contending with the big names at the show, and doing a fine job, was Brooklyn’s own Amani Olu, who brought out a single piece each by ten excellently differentiated photographers. The standouts included Gerald Edwards III’s Re-commissioned Unmanned Extraordinary Renditions Drone, a heavily photoshopped image of a concord jet set against a darkening sky. Most of the piece comes off as a masterful job in photorealistic painting, but the lie is given away by the cockpit, which looks as if it were done in acrylic by a fifth grader. Looking at the image, the title comes off as comic-book narrative rather than political fist-raising, but the question of why it seems that way might in turn be the fist.

Michael Bühler-Rose’s The Conversation, Alachua, FL made up the show’s centerpiece. Here we find a group of seven women in saris lounging amid vernal opulence in a trailer park. They look for all the world like Laksmi’s retinue awaiting her return, except that none of the women are Indian. Yet something in the piece saves it from overt multiculturalism. Rose seems to take at least as great a pleasure in evoking the potential tranquility of the trailer park as he does in exposing the watering-down of Indian culture.

If evading heavy-handed concept was Olu’s conceit at SCOPE, then Ann Woo carried the day with her triptych. In identical frames we see a vibrant tiger lilly, the wisps of a sunset and a severe portrait of a young woman. The narrative temptation is strong, but unfulfilling. What does it mean that both the sunset and much of the flower are outside the frame, while the girl is utterly penned in? Is that a uniform she is wearing? She looks unhappy? Determined? Deflowered? All that can be truly said is that Woo has matched the colors of the series with elegant precision, and that she has chosen images of protean connotation. The eye, Woo reminds us, takes in beauty but reflects only questions. It’s how looking works.

Image: Ann Woo, Orange Lillies, Sunset, Lisa.