24H x 7W inches
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage. The surfboard, an emblem of Southern California, emblazoned with the image of an eight-ball, references numerous tropes and clichés of American popular culture, specifically subcultures related to pool halls, surfing, and beaches. Indeed, this model-scale surfboard may be a future pop-culture relic, referencing a particular surfer or era of board design.
At a moment when Minimalism and Conceptual Art collided, Southern California-based Alexis Smith began working with discarded street signs, matchbooks, movie posters, and other detritus to become one of the pioneers of conceptual assemblage. Her cryptic comments on the cloudy morality of American culture are derived from pop cultural references including political figures like Richard Nixon, Hollywood films, and pop musicians. This borrowing of literally recycled material and recycled cultural tropes is also seen in the work of Smith’s peers Mike Kelley, Chris Burden, and Vija Celmins.
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...