The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it. The work consists of a mirrored structure with a hidden motor that vibrates every so often. In this play of mirrors, the viewer first encounters their reflection, but in time the vibration distorts the image, making self-recognition impossible and suggesting the fragility of identity. Flutter ’s reflective surfaces also evoke the architecture of office buildings that shake just so in an earthquake. The sidewalk is a built environment and a social space rife with extreme fragility and it exposes economic inequity and systemic racism writ large. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the compounding forces of COVID-19 and the climate crisis have spurred a seismic shift in social life. Storefront windows, as across the country, have become a contentious space further driving apart the public and the private. During protests and social uprisings, boarded up windows of the former shells of buildings are transformed into political and collective murals and communal vision boards, reclaiming the sidewalk. Abdalian reflects in 2023 the conditions surrounding Flutter: Flutter was conceived as a context-responsive installation at a gallery in downtown Oakland, CA, during the summer of 2010 as residents braced for the verdict in the case of Johannes Mehserle, the cop who murdered Oscar Grant. In windows that face a pedestrian walkway, mirrored mylar quivers, ripples, and shakes in response to subaudio sine sweeps transmitted through tactile transducers. The actuated surface of the mirror visibly destabilizes the environment in which the work is situated, reflecting a status quo open to rupture. Installed in 2023 in San Francisco’s Mission District, the unstable image reflected in Flutter belies the relative calm pictured at KADIST’s 20th Street location. Banks are liquidated, layoffs are announced, and ever wider wars for capitalist profit loom. Rupture is the unavoidable expression of an unstable system. Here, viewers encounter their reflection within this process of inevitable change.
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
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With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...
With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The West Hollywood Artist Who Immortalised LA’s Golden Boys | AnOther A new exhibition in New York showcases the work of Kenneth Kendall, an artist who sculpted James Dean, Marlon Brando and more in the bohemian atmosphere of late 20th-century Los Angeles February 06, 2024 Text Miss Rosen Back in the 1950s, Hollywood’s fabled Melrose Avenue was still a sleepy street home to cabinetmakers and print shops catering to the local community...
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Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
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The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...
Ranging from Baudelaire to the Koran, each of Hassan Massoudy’s drawings are titled with a quotation from a text...
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In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...