Dimensions Variable
Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change. Be Oblivion, in Disconnect (2011) is a sculpture and an intervention. Two cardboard boxes house white neon letters that collectively have the potential to spell “Be Oblivion.” The dismembered phrase is rendered powerless in its present state; the potential power lies with the viewer, who could conceivably reconstruct it. The boxes sit on wooden pallets of the kind typically used for shipping; by painting them white and repurposing them as pedestals, Wheat removes them from circulation as carriers of commodities. The simple cardboard boxes are also discarded shipping materials. The words “Be Oblivion” are a seeming command to fade away into obscurity. This simple phrase resonates as a harbinger of defeat. Perhaps the provocative installation is a pointed statement about our collective loss of power: in politics, commerce, war, international relations, social issues, or all of these. Wheat asks us to resurrect her jumbled phrase in our minds, contemplate it, and see if it is time for an insurrection.
Natasha Wheat’s diverse body of work explores social experience as a sensual phenomenon that is riddled with hierarchical complexity. Her objects, installations, and interventions engender and disrupt a full range of interpersonal relations. Wheat was the founder of Project Grow, an art studio and urban farming program based in Portland, Oregon, that employed developmentally disabled adults and investigated the intersection of food, ideology, society, and exchange. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA with an emphasis in social practice from California College of the Arts.
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022)...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth...
Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head....
In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag...
Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...