Intentionally Left Blanc
2012 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Hank Willis Thomas
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. Using a found photograph depicting a passionate crowd of African Americans—their attitude suggesting the fervor of a civil-rights era audience— Intentionally Left Blanc reverts in its exposed, “positive” format to an image in which select faces are whitened out and erased, the exact inverse of the same view in its “negative” condition. This dialectic of light and dark re-emerges when we view the same faces again, only this time black and featureless, a scattering of disembodied heads amidst a sea of white. The context of the photograph was during protests in the 6os against gerrymandering and redistricting that sought to segregate the black and white populations. Here, Thomas approaches the situation with a revisionist eye, this time erasing and removing the white audience members, and thereby ironically reclaiming the same action they took against the black community.
Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. Working across installation, photography, video, and media work, Thomas maintains his photo conceptualist roots, primarily taking source material from found photographs and archives. These images form the basis from which the artist seeks to uncover the fallacies that history claims as truth. His work illustrates how the way history is represented and consumed reinforces generalizations surrounding identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and that as an artist he has an opportunity to expose or to revise those histories from the points of view of the oppressed.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » born 1976, » california college of the arts alumni, » contemporary artist, » conceptual artist, » african-american photographers
» see more
© » KADIST
Laure Prouvost
2010In Stong Sory Vegetables , Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling...
Related works featuring themes of: » Advertising and Brands, » Cultural Commentary, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Cultural Identity, » Mass Media, » Appropriation Art, » Racial Identity, » Collective History, » Color Photography, » American
» see more
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » KADIST
Mungo Thomson
2008The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
1996In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » KADIST
Walead Beshty
2018Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Peter Robinson
2012Defunct Mnemonics (2012) plays off woodworking traditions found in indigenous art in order to create a body of formally minimal objects that are both beautiful in their restraint and profoundly moving in their associations with the totemic...
Related works from the » 2010's created around » New York, New York
» see more
© » KADIST
Chris Wiley
2012Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
© » KADIST
Oded Hirsch
2012Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
© » KADIST
Stephen G. Rhodes
2010For 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...
© » KADIST
Valeska Soares
2012Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
Other works by: » Hank Willis Thomas
» see more
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2013The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Related artist(s) to: Hank Willis Thomas » Abraham Cruzvillegas, » Claire Fontaine, » William E Jones, » Catherine Opie, » Collier Schorr, » Glenn Ligon, » Harun Farocki, » Jens Hoffmann, » Kirsten Pieroth
» see more
© » KADIST
Claire Fontaine
2006Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » ROYAL ACADEMY
Catherine Opie
Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts Catherine Opie in the RA Collection Gallery Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Read more Become a Friend Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Published 8 September 2023 Catherine Opie discusses her portraits of David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing, Isaac Julien and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, featured in our free display in the Collection Gallery...
© » KADIST
Abraham Cruzvillegas
2004Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Toyin Ojih Odutola
2015As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous...
© » KADIST
Cyprien Tokoudagba
In a style that is unique of Tokoudagba, he evokes the kings, gods and their symbols related to the earth, water, air and fire, usually on a white background...
© » KADIST
Felipe Arturo
2012Defined as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is more easily dispersed than it is concentrated...
