In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry. When his rubber trees died from disease and his primarily indigenous workforce revolted, his enterprise went busts within a few short years. Ford never faulted his own planning, but instead blamed the “inhospitable” Brazilian landscape. These topographical maps present different locations related to Fordlândia’s history: a current Fordlândia satellite image of the abandoned rubber plantation built by Ford in 1928, juxtaposed with postindustrial landscapes from Detroit, Dallas, and Los Angeles, is printed on the back side of the folded mapsculpture.
Clarissa Tossin’s photographs, videos, and installations are active investigations into the workings of urban planning and labor politics. The artist draws poignant parallels among historical events, creating engaging narratives that are also often subversive. Many of her works are concerned with what could be called a topography of place. Focusing on the promises, legacies, and failings of modernity, globalism, and utopian idealism, much of her work concentrates on cultural and economic connections between the United States and Latin American countries. Tossin’s most recent artwork, Archaeology of the Present, investigates the link between Indigenous civilizations and current Los Angeles via the lenses of gender and appropriation.
On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages...
Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ...
Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past...
Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) ...