The seemingly disparate mediums that comprise f. marquespenteado’s current exhibition, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”—collage, textile, and painting—seem to commune without hierarchy. In the press release, the artist describes a fictional scenario: Lupe, the protagonist, hosts a dinner in which she asks her friends to evaluate a new crush. While this framework may seem to unify all the other elements of the exhibition, the extreme detail in the physical works and the comparatively broad strokes of the story confuse such a reading. Take the collage salsa 01, 2017, for example—the repeated square embroidery that connects the orange-and-pink dyed curtain to the dark indigo of its denim support offers much more material specificity than its appetizer title can explain.

The policing of media hierarchies has a long history, from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 polemic, “Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” in which the Enlightenment-era critic suggests that the intermingling of visual and literary media is aesthetic ruination, to Sol LeWitt’s 1969 “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” which subsumes differences among media to elevate the procession of ideas. Marquespenteado’s work rejects both of these extremes. The closest analogue might be the myriad effects that come together to create an opera, but unlike that expressive mode’s grand claims to totality, the open-ended, handmade show here proves that incompleteness can be a part of harmony.

— David Muenzer