Robert Brady grew up in Reno, Nevada, on the edge of the Great Basin Desert, where it is common for residents to pick up otherwise unremarkable odds and ends—rocks, broken weathered wood, bits and pieces of crumpled tin—and cart them home. The process of collecting and then reassembling these curiosities in a new location—the happenstance of finding, the subsequent juxtaposition of disparate elements—forms, on the one hand, a new repository of information and, on the other, a space where looking and wanting, object and idea, resonate.

Echoes of this habit were evident in “A Full Backyard,” which