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.
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance...
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...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...