Elizabeth Warren’s Ear (all works cited, 2022), part of Iva Kinnaird’s solo debut at the house gallery associated with F magazine, initiated viewers into the Houston-based artist’s quirky mode of archaeological inspection. Earlobe-shaped stones scattered atop a plinth served as paperweights for a realistic painting on paper depicting the meaty, severed earlobe—punctured by a dull-gold stud—of the eponymous US senator and former Houstonian. You had to cast your eyes downward to puzzle over the work’s pathetic fragments, whose gathering seemed motivated by an impulse to treat the detritus of