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)...
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...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...
In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain...
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...