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...
For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread...
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...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
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...
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...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
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...
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) ...
450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site...
In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag...
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...
Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...