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...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
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...
Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
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...
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...
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....
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...