8 min 43
A minute Ago starts with a hailstorm pelting down unexpectedly on a quiet beach in Siberia. People, half naked, run for cover under towels and parasols, to the music of the Pink Floyd. The next scene is an interview of Philip Johnson, filmed 10 years before in the Glass House he constructed. Johnson was 90 years old then. At this point in the video there is a kind of digital sound that interrupts the high definition image, moving to the rhythm of a wood percussion musical composition by Steve Reich. The house, surrounded by an extraordinary landscape, is then bombarded by hail, the soundtrack becomes a live concert interrupted by the yelling and cheering of the public. The painting Landscape with the funeral of Phocion by Poussin is the only image in the house. It shows a hearse going through fields to the burial place. The image duplicates itself with the deconstruction of the video image, the rain which pixelates the screen, the soundtrack which chops up this time space.
Rachel Rose is a visual artist known for her video installations that merge moving images and sound within nuanced environments connecting them to broader subjects. Her work investigates subjects as diverse as cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, and the sensory experience of walking in outer space. For Rose, the current moment is one of shifting terrain: as technology advances, the world changes beneath and around us, leaving us struggling to keep up. Rose is interested in the rapidly changing conditions we live in, and the ways that language, technology, and images mediate the out-of-sync realities of organic life. Originally trained as a painter, Rose now works in several media, with film being her primary outlet. Her film works are remarkable for their fusion of images and sound, her dense filmic tapestries reflecting the deep, multivalent explorations that drive her.
Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two...
Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression...
This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur...
In the video The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), Reid Kelley transported her heroine to the French demimonde...
Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years...
The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...