0:55 minutes
From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down. Pregnant with her first child at the time of the shooting of this video, the car featured in Hydroforce is an aging East German Trabant that the artist transformed into an American El Camino lowrider over the course of a decade, and which features in several of her works. Challenging the politics of the idealized and sexualized female body and the stylized car, Hydroforce establishes a metaphorical connection with her own identity: as a woman, a mother, laborer, and a migrant.
Liz Cohen is a photographer and performance artist best known for her project Bodywork , in which she transformed a German car into a lowrider while simultaneously transforming her own body, with the help of a fitness instructor, to become a bikini model at lowrider shows. Critical of a consumer based society and its use of the female body in advertisements and music videos, Bodywork was an avenue for Cohen to explore her own femininity and create dialogue around issues relating to immigration, nonconformity, and resistance. Some of her earlier works, consisting of black-and-white photographs and a series of performances, focused on similar issues, which she explored through documenting sex workers from the Panama Canal, as well as producing various portraits of an ostracised poet.
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 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...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
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Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s...
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The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
“On April 13 a painting was lost at JFK airport while going through the security screening...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen...
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...
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 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...
Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...