First Born

Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two...

Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression...

Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur...

The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years...

Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...

The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth...

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity...

Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

In the video The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), Reid Kelley transported her heroine to the French demimonde...

In Perpetual Motion (2005) the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly—filmed in its winter habitat of Michoacán, Mexico—is intensified by the artist’s editing in which frames are randomly dropped and the film is sped up...

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing...