In an ideal world, the five venues of the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial would exist within walking distance of one another and visitors would take in all components of this grand effort in the same day. That would be the most effective way to experience the rolling rhythm of institutional variance within a larger united vision. But the venues are separated by location and by run dates, although there was one overlap weekend last month that gave opportunity for a marathon visit.

Still rewarding are separate show visits, which have the benefit of being less visually/intellectually overwhelming, and affording more time to engage with artworks.

Seen as part of the Biennial, or as an exhibition of its own, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts component reverberates with the commitment of large, complex, space-owning works, most of them gallery-size installations.

Adam Welch, curator of the exhibition as well as of the center and of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, states in the exhibition introduction label that he selected artists "who principally create with a direct relation to the space that their work occupies." That space may be in concert with or opposition to the venue the work appears in, Pittsburgh or globally influenced, externally or internally generated. At the center they comfortably co-exist, a diversity of form and content with unanticipated "threads of commonality" as Mr. Welch calls them.

Dennis Maher's "Planisphere" is a bombastic architectural deconstruction (re)built of lumber and other materials found in demolition sites within the city. A component of the artist's ongoing "Undone-Redone City" project, the work calls to mind recycling but also devolution into chaos. The artist has said, more positively, that these "assembled city fragments" suggest a world "always on the brink of indefinite becoming."

Possibility is also a part of Joshua Space's "Transilience," a sound-based installation in which small points of light move about on the far side of a dark room, transmitting contemplation or anxiety dependent upon a visitor's comfort zone. The work was inspired by particle physics: particle and anti-particle may annihilate one another, according to the artist, unless an outside force separates the two. "What we might at first consider as a perilous void may be teetering on the edge of being." Is the undefined blackness half-empty or half-full?

In Jesse McLean's video installation "Relations," a small dot on the far screen in another darkened room spins outward to reveal a newspaper page that gets larger until some of the type is revealed. But the viewer never gets to read it as it vanishes as quickly as it appears. Ms. McLean is commenting on the media -- in all forms -- the 24-hour news cycle, the rapidity of delivery, the way stories are spun and, ultimately, the failure to provide substantive information.

That 24-hour news cycle, especially the way it populates the Internet, is inspiration for Paul LeRoy Gehres' fiber installation "I'm a Lover not a Fighter," which comprises floor-to-ceiling strips of cloth upon which the artist has attached images and symbols drawn from popular culture. These range from The Royal Wedding to Fair Use products, from Madalyn O'Hair to Occupy Wall Street, and have grown throughout the exhibition. But he also inserts his own personality. In a way, it's a huge authorized Facebook page, Mr. Welch noted. Mr. Gehres invites visitors to put on garments from a stack in the center of the installation, converse about some of the subjects, photograph the process, and post the photos on Facebook.

Sharing a gallery with Mr. Gehres is Elizabeth Mooney's handsome, painstakingly constructed, abstract diptych "Above Valleys Below Cairns," a tumbling landscape for the 21st century that in its precision, containment and palette seems the opposite of "I'm a Lover." But both comment on the way we perceive our times and world and raise questions about what becomes an acceptable norm and how. "What is nature and is it different from landscape?"

Adam Shreckhise challenges the nature of art, and the definition of human, with "PAM (Portrait of the Artist as a Machine)," an entrancing room-sized machine that makes drawings. PAM's switches and motors click and whir as a carriage holding vials of pigment moves on a track above a field of velum lain on the floor below. Occasionally color and fluid are released and an abstract painting takes form. PAM decides, via the same low-tech arrangement of switches and contacts, when a drawing is finished, at which point the pigment drop ceases and fans are activated to dry the works, which may be seen at www.portraitoftheartistasamachine.com.

The life-size cast of a suspended diving nude in William Kofmehl III's "Vicarious Suffering: A 21st Century Site" calls to mind the sculpture "Fishman in Excelsis Table" in the Paul Thek exhibition recently at Carnegie Museum of Art, and certainly that's no coincidence as plugged in as Mr. Kofmehl is to art history and theory. This sophisticated piece combines an embroidered panel with images including an American flag and a "quetzal in space"; casts of bone and broccoli bunches; and videos of the artist taking body slams at such sites as the Lincoln Memorial and Delphi, Greece. Stairs invite visitors to a dark passage leading to a peep hole that reveals the contents of a large room otherwise hidden. As with the majority of works in this exhibition, the visitor connects the dots that the artists pull from the cultural zeitgeist.

Within a continuum of forthright to obscure, some of the works are embracingly poetic, their messages settling upon the visitor in gently revealing layers. These include the poetry of Natalie Settles' beautiful, fastidious graphite and white lacquer wall(s) drawing "Ornament and Architecture"; poetry reflected as an emotive surround by Thea Augustina Eck in "April 24," almost existential although it arose from her continuing exploration of the 1916 Antarctica expedition of Sir Ernest Shackleton; and poetry as narrative in the clever nostalgia of Jennifer Gooch's "Come Clean" clotheslines.

Space keeps me from a discussion of the other exhibiting artists, who are Jacob Ciocci, Mark Franchino, Christopher Kardambikis, Luke Loeffler, Erika Osborne and Gregory Witt, but each add to the experience of the exhibition as a whole, which presents works that arose from deep reflection and engagement with the world that invite all of us to see and to think anew.

Also ending this week is the Pittsburgh Filmmakers section of the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial for which one artist was chosen by each of the four curators. Exhibiting are Olivia Ciummo, Ben Hernstrom, Emily Newman and Carrie Schneider, all of whom work in media arts such as film or video. Remaining hours are 2 to 7 p.m. today and Thursday, and through Sunday whenever the Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave., Oakland, is open. Admission is free. For information: 412-681-5449 or www.pghfilmmakers.org.

The Center for the Arts is at 6300 Fifth Ave., Shadyside. Admission is suggested donation of $5, adults; $3, students and children. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. today through Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday, and until 7 p.m. Thursday. Information: 412-361-0873 or www.pittsburgharts.org.

Components of the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial continue at The Andy Warhol Museum through Jan. 8 (412-237-8300) and the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University through Dec. 11 (412-268-3618).