Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation. The figure looks like some kind of countercultural superman empowered by myriad alternative experiences, as worthy of myth as the heralded Laocoön.
Ben Shaffer’s works are dynamic installations that integrate sculpture, painting, and performance. His complex pieces often require direct interaction from viewers, eschewing simple subject-object relationships in favor of relational negotiations. Through his makeshift neo- psychedelia, Shaffer explores the legacy of counter-cultural imagery, specifically its fragile utopic horizons and ever-receding promises of enlightenment and transcendence. Shaffer lives and works in Los Angeles, and received his MFA from Claremont University in Southern California.
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts Catherine Opie in the RA Collection Gallery Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Read more Become a Friend Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Published 8 September 2023 Catherine Opie discusses her portraits of David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing, Isaac Julien and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, featured in our free display in the Collection Gallery...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
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...
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....
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
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)...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
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...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...