Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos. It consists of three small paintings: one of a man with a head of multicolored fragments ( I Am a Human ), one of an abstract rainbow-colored geometric form on foil ( Abstract Foil ), and one of what appears to be a brightly burning star or a representation of the Big Bang ( No Humans IV ). In a playful but serious manner, it envisions the evolution of the world and the creative forces at play in nature and humankind.
The prolific Chris Johanson produces paintings, zines, installations, and sculptures that are notable for their earnest, almost childlike abstraction. His work delves unabashedly into the emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, tracking points of commonality and difference using simple shapes and lines as well as an unflagging sense of magnanimous humor.
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...
For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
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 Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are representative of McCarthy’s work...
Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
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...
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...