Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other. During World War II, the Walt Disney Company produced series of cartoon shorts that featured Donald Duck’s nightmare of working in an inhumane artillery factory in Nazi Germany and serving in the U. S. Army. By animating and normalizing war and military life, these cartoons not only achieved widespread popularity, but functioned as government propaganda.
Kristen Morgin works with clay to create objects that resemble relics from past eras. Drawing on 1940s and 1950s American pop culture, her themes range from patriotic comic super heroes, childhood toys, cartoon books, to more intimate daily items, such as teaspoons or cups. Although they appear to be highly realistic in terms of scale, shape, and texture, these objects are layered with narrative implicit in their materiality. Seemingly meant to preserve and memorialize the past, these recreations of unfired clay are equally tenuous and fragile.
The Striation Scrap Lamps (vertical and horizontal) although functioning as utilitarian objects also represent Jason Meadows’s interest in a certain kind of crafted sculpture...
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...
Jason Meadows’s Do Not Pass Go (2011) depicts Richie Rich, “the poor little rich boy” of the 1950s comic strip...
Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject...
In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines...
Titled afterTruman Capote’s protagonist famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Holly Golightly (2011) captures the essence of the character: seductive and bold, mysterious and capricious...
In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street...
In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop...
This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works...
Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...