No rules dictate what an art biennial must be, so anyone can have a go at staging one, as the Soap Factory has. The Soap's venture departs from its more famous cousins in Venice and at the Whitney Museum in New York by being much smaller and, let's face it, a whole lot less glamorous.

International biennials these days are big-business attractions for jet-setting cognoscenti in such exotic locales as Sao Paolo, Istanbul and, recently, Moscow. Minnesota's entries in the field always have been more modest. Walker Art Center staged them in the 1950s as a survey of regional talent, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art took that tack before closing last year. The Soap Factory is considerably less ambitious, having turned over the project to two regional curators, Kris Douglas and Scott Stulen, who invited 16 Minnesotans -- including several art-school instructors and their former students -- to show some recent work under the vague theme: "A Theory of Values."

A preview tour suggested that the show, however appealing, is short on theory and vague about values, a loaded term that seems irrelevant in this context. If biography and interests can be inferred from art, the 16 seem to be curious about assorted media, fascinated by fragments, tentative, self-absorbed and obsessed with arty in-jokes. Their aesthetic is loose, open-ended and anything goes. Ranging in age from early 20s to mid 50s, the show's artists paint, sculpt, take photos, build stuff and do video. As a sample of Minnesota art at the moment, this is dismayingly vacuous and inbred stuff. The "value" conveyed, if any, is a vague, amorphous anomie.

Big net, small catch

"We wanted to provide some organization but not have it conceived as a 'Best of Minnesota' show, so we cast our net wide," said Douglas, 38, chief curator at the Rochester Art Center. Stulen, a former associate curator at the Rochester organization, is now project director for Mnartists.org at Walker Art Center. Both are Minnesota natives who wanted to sample "a slice of this place and this time," as Stulen put it.

With no narrative thread or overarching motifs to track, the show offers a pleasant amble through the Soap's warehouse, whose raw beauty sometimes dwarfs and sometimes augments the art. Two impressively monumental silk-screen prints by Jesikah Orman, each about 9 feet square, amplify the architecture by echoing its rough textures. One bears a ghostly image of an old frame house overprinted with colorful shards of wood, as if the house had been assaulted by a tornado or flood; the other depicts a skeletal garage or half-built hallway amid a scud of clouds and artful blemishes.

By contrast Lester B. Morrison offers three small color photos of a bearded face, perhaps a self-portrait, partly obliterated by collaged bullet holes that seem denatured allusions to Chris Burden's self-mutilation and other "body art" rather than a social or political commentary.

Three huge, shaped paintings by Caroline Kent are the show's most intriguing objects. Inspired by a sojourn in Romania, they are monumental abstractions at least 8 feet tall, with boxy edges and deep slits that invite psychological readings. One is loosely suggestive of a mountain, for example, slathered with graffiti-like designs and pierced by a deep, pink-lined gash that evokes visceral sympathy, as if it sliced through flesh rather than mere canvas. Despite their minimalism, these are curiously powerful paintings with a fierce autonomy and pathos.

Art history in-jokes

St. Paul artist Bruce Tapola took advantage of the Soap's ample spaces to install a gallery with paintings and sculpture filled with jokey allusions to everything from Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe" to Marcel Duchamp, 1950s modernist lamps and the string sculpture of Moholy-Nagy. The installation is an amusing but ultimately stale joke.

Megan McCready also toys with art history, concocting an aqua and white abstract "painting" from frosting and black plinths garnished with black gumdrops and perched on gold-gilded "snowball" treats that inevitably recall the balls of elephant dung on which Chris Ofili infamously propped his paintings. German-born Minneapolis artist Ute Bertog shows kiosk-style paintings in which word fragments peep from beneath peeling layers of over-painting, an all too familiar trope in contemporary art. Meanwhile, Andy Messerschmitt of Ely appears to be channeling the late Sigmar Polke with his blurry abstractions, pop colors and architectural homages.

Other work is equally scattered. St. Louis Park sculptor Joe Smith has set out skeletal metal plinths holding faux science projects apparently designed to test the absorption of paper towels or the strength of plastic wrap. A little photo of a road through a forest may be relevant to these hermetic curios, or not.

University of Minnesota art professor Chris Larson broke with the huge, theatrical sets and tortured narratives for which he is best known to produce nine small and quite elegant spin-paintings on glass in which he obscures an image of Elvis Presley with pigment. Other participants are Jennifer Danos, John Fleischer, Isa Gagarin, Dustin Larson, Kirk McCall, Karl Unnasch and Aaron van Dyke.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431