On April 6, The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2022 exhibition, “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept,” was opened to the public. With its first emergence in the 1970s, the Whitney Biennial is a once-every-two-years survey of notable and emerging artists. The exhibition is a hallmark of the contemporary art scene, as the curatorial themes, pieces selected and techniques used have a consistent ripple effect, influencing trends in the art market.

This year’s biennial exhibition, “Quiet As It’s Kept,” is a year late, as the research and installation of the exhibition, was halted by widespread stay-at-home orders enacted during 2020 when it was initially planned. In the curatorial statement for the exhibition, curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards describe how “Quiet As It’s Kept” attempts to mirror the ethos of resistance that was not invented, but instead grew more pertinent, in public consciousness within the last three years.

“Rather than offering a unified theme, we pursue a series of hunches throughout the exhibition: that abstraction demonstrates a tremendous capacity to create, share and sometimes withhold meaning; that research-driven conceptual art can combine the lushness of ideas and materiality; that personal narratives sifted through political, literary and pop cultures can address larger social frameworks; that artworks can complicate the meaning of “American” by addressing the country’s physical and psychological boundaries; and that our present moment can be reimagined by engaging with under-recognized artistic models and artists we have lost,” Breslin and Edwards wrote.

Among this year’s 63-artist roster is Emily Barker, a 28-year-old artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Barker has two pieces in “Quiet as It’s Kept,” titled “Kitchen” and “Death by 7865 Paper Cuts.” “Kitchen” is a sculpture resembling kitchen cabinets made almost entirely out of translucent plastic. The piece is life-size in scale but rejects conventional countertop height, and instead hits chest-high for most men in the United States, according to Barker. “Kitchen” is an interrogation of the exclusionary nature of standardized design elements. The exaggerated height of the cabinets puts the countertops in Barker’s “Kitchen” just out of comfortable reach for the able-bodied population. The piece forces able-bodied individuals to adopt a mindset of accommodation, asking, what if the world was not built with you in mind? How would you navigate daily tasks? And most eerily of all, who would help you? The focus on architectural limitations in “Kitchen” acts as a microcosm of a larger issue of ableism in design and society at large.

Barker’s other piece in the exhibition, “Death by 7865 Paper Cuts,” is a sculpture of a tall stack of papers, listing the hundreds of thousands of dollars of hospital bills Barker incurred while receiving life-saving treatment after a spinal cord injury. The piece is a physical indication of the financial burden disabled individuals face under the American health care system. The private reality “Death by 7865 Paper Cuts” documents is brought into the public sphere in this exhibition and serves to challenge the ethics of for-profit medical care. Barker’s pieces highlight an underrepresented perspective by showing the very reasons for that underrepresentation.

Barker’s pieces highlighting the realities of moving through the world as a disabled person feel especially pertinent in the age of COVID-19, as the pandemic has been a mass disabling event for sufferers of long COVID-19. Barker’s pieces masterfully manipulate abstraction, silence and perspective to tell a story of ability that does not scare viewers but instead invites them to position themselves within a new viewpoint. “Quiet As It’s Kept” is not a serialized sequence of events but a collection of stories of living, and Barker’s pieces are no exception to this theme.