As more than a few bumper stickers and rock lyrics have proved over the years, virtuous politics don't guarantee good poetics. But at Susanne Vielmetter, artist Andrea Bowers manages to pull off an impressive blend of clear political urgency, agency and poignancy with a pair of ambitious works. The first, which envelops you as soon as you enter the gallery, is "No Olvidado (Not Forgotten)," a room-wrapping graphite drawing comprising 23 large sheets and roughly 10 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Spanning the drawings is an incomplete — and sadly, it would seem, inexhaustive — list of names memorializing would-be immigrants who died crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S. At the center of the room sits a stack of posters picturing the soil of Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, California, not far from Mexicali. The placement of the neat stack suggests a formality that runs contrary to indignity of unmarked graves in the cemetery, where anonymous dead immigrants are routinely buried. The work is immersive, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that it clearly references, but while Maya Lin's design takes one down into a cut in the earth, leaving the ground plane of the National Mall uninterrupted, Bowers' imagery confronts you with the obstruction of a razor-wire-topped chain-link fence that forms the backdrop for all those names. Whereas Lin's design for the VVM faced, among many criticisms, the allegation that it suggested a huge scar upon the land, Bowers' design unabashedly embraces an ugly mark to talk about another kind of ugliness; an affront to the beauty of wide-open space doubles as an affront... More >>>