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...
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)...
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...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
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...
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...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
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....
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
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...